Exclusive: work or face benefits ban, Tories tell under-25s |
Kemi Badenoch, like many in the Labour party, is not sorry to see the back of Keir Starmer. ‘I did not find Starmer an interesting person,’ she says. ‘He never said anything interesting.’ Andy Burnham is a different proposition. ‘Quite interesting,’ she thinks. ‘He has more of a clear sense of who he is politically, which makes him more confident in terms of what he wants to do. But who he is politically is so far removed from who I am politically that I think that there’s a sharper contrast between us.’
We speak in her office in Portcullis House with the Labour conference in full cry in Liverpool. ‘It feels very much like student union people who’ve got older, but they still want to do the stuff that they did in the student union,’ Badenoch says. Her verdict on Burnham’s big speech on Tuesday is that the Prime Minister is offering ‘Corbynism with better packaging’, with socialist solutions from the 1970s that ‘will fail again’. But that sharper contrast has energised her. ‘Hearing his speech, it’s clear we are now about to have a battle of ideas. It’s given me more confidence that, even in this messy political era, the Conservatives are going to win.’
‘Even families on benefits know that the system is out of control. But no one wants to get off the treadmill first’
‘Even families on benefits know that the system is out of control. But no one wants to get off the treadmill first’
Burnham, she says, ‘likes to say yes to everyone – and that is something which I learned a long time ago is a recipe for disaster’. Nowhere, she believes, is this more obvious than in Labour’s approach to the ballooning benefits budget. ‘They are the welfare party. It’s in their DNA. They’re not the party of the working classes at all.’ If Burnham is a ‘people pleaser’, Badenoch wants to make a virtue of her abrasive reputation – the people displeaser the country needs. ‘No one wants to be the person to say “No”. And I want Spectator readers to know that the person who’s saying “No” has arrived and is leading the Conservative party.’
At Tory conference, which begins in Birmingham this weekend, she will announce plans to ‘put the fair back in welfare’ – both for taxpayers and those condemned to a life on handouts. The Tories will advance two principles: that those who have paid in are entitled to more than those who have not. ‘If you have worked for a very long time, you can be on benefits for much longer because those people are less likely just to sit back and not look for a job,’ she explains. ‘After six months, if you haven’t found a job and you’re just not taking that seriously, you will lose money.’
Second, those who can work should do so. ‘It’s unfair to the people who get up and go to work, having others earn more than them for not working. Even families on benefits know that the system is out of control. But no one wants to be the one to get off the treadmill first. We need to force that. Government has to do........