Kemi Badenoch has delivered a speech in the city responding to Labour's damaging plans for our economy.
Watch here 👇
See the transcript of Kemi's speech below 👇
I bet you’ve seen dozens of politicians standing on stages like this telling you that business matters.
And they talk about working with business, listening to your ideas, and then everyone goes back to work.
And the reality is things are getting tougher, not easier.
More regulations, rising taxes, burden after burden loaded on.
Yesterday, the government talked a good game, more jobs, higher wages, stronger growth.
But its actions tell a completely different story. This morning, the ONS told us that GDP has contracted again.
We have more regulations, higher taxes, all of the things that make it harder, riskier, and more expensive to hire anyone.
But I also know that under Conservatives, you had similar complaints.
It may not have been this bad, but I know you weren’t happy. And I know you weren’t happy because when I was Business Secretary you told me so.
I’m not a career politician. I didn’t start my working life in Westminster. I can assure you, I started it at age 16 actually, working at McDonald’s.
I am sure there are many former McDonald’s employees sitting in the audience, don’t need to be shy, there are so many of us.
And then working as an apprentice actually, to pay my way through university.
Most of my career, however, was in wealth management. I worked at Coutts, mostly as a systems analyst.
And many of you will remember what banking was like after the financial crisis. There were endless meetings about TCF and KYC, the CCA, and MIFID 1 and MIFID 2, and I woke up one day and realised I wasn’t working in banking or tech, I was working in compliance.
And I did not like the compliance culture. Not just because it was boring, and it was.
There was a lot of pointless box-ticking that warped business to serve government instead of serving customers.
So, many, many years later when I became Business Secretary, I put my loathing of compliance culture to good use.
For example, in 2023, I scrapped a whole load of incoming corporate audit regulations that would have punished well-run companies, while the worst offenders would have found ways around them.
And lots of businesses quietly thanked me. Only one complained because they hoped to earn millions advising on these regulations.
Business needs to focus on innovating, not profiting from bureaucracy.
But we have built a system where the good guys are punished with red tape, while the bad guys simply ignore it.
A system where entrepreneurs are punished for taking a chance and capital is leaving the UK for more competitive markets.
How did we get here?
Let’s start with the truth.
Britain is facing two crises. One economic, one political.
Last week, I gave a speech explaining that a morass of regulations, domestic and international, meaning that we struggle to control our borders or build homes.
Today I’m talking about the economic crisis.
Our debt interest is well over £100 billion a year, welfare spending is out of control, the state is bloated, productivity has flatlined, and the economy is stuck in first gear.
We have 28 million private sector workers supporting 28 million others. 13 million retirees, 6 million public sector workers, and 9 million simply not working.
Pay is stagnant, inflation has nearly doubled in the last year, unemployment is at a four year high. People are looking for a way out.
And in the past 12 months, London has suffered the greatest exodus of wealthy people of any city in the world, except for Moscow.
Labour’s interventions like the Employment Bill could cost the UK more than £10 billion a year in lost economic growth.
And that has an impact on you. It’s harder to raise capital, increased costs mean you can’t grow, companies are nervous about going public.
But this also has an impact on your clients, your employees, your supply chains. Many of you invest in SMEs and scale-ups and you can see what is happening, hitting one area of the economy, knocks over another, weakening demand across the board.
So how did we get here? We forgot that business is a good in and of itself and it pays for everything, it is the source of our prosperity.
The challenge all of us in this room have now is that many people don’t believe this anymore. They think business hoards wealth and doesn’t create it. That it is greedy, and it needs to be taxed more and more.
This is a crisis. And the question before us is simple: who has credible solutions?
And I know many of you will be asking, why should we trust the Conservative party?
And I say because no one is making the argument for business anymore, except me and my Party.
We are the natural Party of business.
The Conservative benches are packed with people who’ve actually built things.
Shadow Chancellor Mel Stride founded a business, expanded into the US, and then sold it after creating many jobs.
Shadow Business Secretary, Andrew Griffith has serious boardroom experience. He is one of the youngest ever FTSE 100 finance directors, he also chaired a FTSE 100 company.
Across our party, you’ll find entrepreneurs and business leaders who know how to create growth because we’ve done it before.
And for too long, we've been caught in a loop where politicians want to make tough choices or don't want to make tough choices, I should say. Everybody wants to know how their problem will be solved this week, but no one's securing the 10-year horizon.
And the truth is, we're at a critical moment. People are feeling real pain. Cost of living, high bills, low pay, high taxes. They need a way out.
But crisis isn’t just in the numbers. It’s in the mindset. Just look at yesterday’s spending review.
Gone is the political imagination to even consider a future where the public don’t hand a greater and greater share of their hard-earned money to the state for little improvement to the country.
And too many in politics think growth comes from government. From regulators, and central planners. I don’t. I never have.
Government debt is unsustainable, and the bond markets have already noticed.
The bond vigilantes are circling. If Labour think they can pile on more borrowing, more spending, and more tax without consequences, they’re deluded.
There is a significant risk of a debt spiral. And no one can say we weren’t warned. There’s a gap in the market for a serious, centre-right plan. One that understands the power of the private sector to transform lives. One that raises aspiration and delivers higher living standards.
That’s the space I fill.
But you don’t need someone just diagnosing problems, you need solutions.
So, the first step will be to reverse some of the mistakes Labour has made.
In particular, increasing taxes that don’t raise revenue but do real serious harm.
You and your customers will know just how damaging tax increases on family farms and businesses have been. You may not know, so I will say it here, say it now, and say it again and again, Conservatives will reverse Labour’s changes to APR and BPR.
We will also remove the VAT Labour put on private schools.
A counterproductive measure to spite the rich, which has instead hurt hard-working families.
Private school pupil numbers have fallen by more than 11,000 in England. Four times more than government forecasts. Now the state sector has to provide extra places it never planned for.
The expected revenue will be less and at the same time, teacher numbers in state schools are falling because the schools can’t afford National Insurance increases. Anyone who has ever heard of the Laffer curve could have predicted this. Labour have not.
This is the politics of pessimism. The politics that has exhausted the possibility that things can improve. With Labour it’s the politics of envy focused on redistribution, with Reform it’s trying to recreate the past by nationalising utilities.
So, what are we doing instead?
We’re rethinking business taxes in our policy renewal programme, and we want the business community to help us shape a better alternative.
We’re launching lawfare commissions to dismantle the legal and regulatory barriers that stop people from building, investing, and growing.
Take, for example, the planning documentation for the Lower Thames Crossing runs to 360,000 pages, and the application process alone has cost £297 million. That is more than twice as much as it cost in Norway to actually build the longest road tunnel in the world. This is crazy.
So, what is the Conservative Party under my leadership about?
That people should be judged on what they do, not their background or how much money they make.
Benefits should be earned, not given.
We want a state that does fewer things but does them well, that enforces the rules, protects our borders, defends property rights, and creates a climate where business can thrive.
So, we will reduce spending.
And talking about reducing spending is not about austerity. Those of you who have heard the Today programme this morning, would have heard, me going in a loop with an interviewer who didn’t understand that there are other ways to reduce the size of the state and that not everything the state does is public services.
It’s about a smarter state.
So, we will slash pointless regulation that drives up costs, we’ll end the constant reporting burdens that waste your time. And I know you have heard this before, but I did it when I was in government, I’ll do it again.
Just this week alone has brought news of more UK listed companies seeking listings elsewhere. And yet the FCA, was obsessing about diversity reporting. This is not serious.
When I was in government, I resisted them strongly and under my leadership, we will put an end to regulatory overreach.
We will reform a welfare system that pays too many people not to work while employers can’t find staff.
And yes, we will cut taxes, but we’ll do it responsibly.
So, my message to business is this: I’m on your side. But I need you on mine too.
You can’t sit back and hope someone else is coming along to fix this. You need to speak up. You need to support policies that back enterprise and you need to challenge those who want more state control. Don’t just wait for other politicians to do it. You need to get on the pitch too.
And this isn’t just about tax rates and red tape.
It’s about the country we want to be. Not a Britain of committees and consultations. But one where people have the freedom to build, to create, to grow.
So, bring us your ideas, we're in Opposition, now is the time for us get them. Let’s hear your policies, your real-world solutions. Not just the things that are going to be great for your business, but bad for everybody else. But the things that are going to be good for the whole economy.
This time, we’re not shutting business out — we’re bringing you in.
And you can trust me because of my personal record. That when it came down to it, I stood up for business in government, not just in opposition.
And you know my principles. You know I’ll do it again.
So, back us.
Tell your customers. Speak out. Put your name to the cause.
Because we’re not going to turn the country around with quiet applause. We need action. To be quite frank, we need an army.
An army of people who know the truth that it’s not government or politicians who creates growth.
It’s business. It’s you.
