Best Of

Conference season ends and I believe the unexpected happened

Kemi Badenoch delivered the best speech, rolled out an array of policies, and stamp duty the 'rabbit out of the hat'

She energised her supporters and have given them something to sell on the doorstep

And she did what I prayed she would, sent out a positive [conservative] message and barely mentioned Starmer or Farage

Labour and Farage fell into the trap of hurling insults at each other to the detriment of both

The added bonus is Jenrick is the biggest loser

I do not know how the polls will react, but today was a start on the long road to relevance

Rabbit out of a hat, or bollocks out of her arse?

Pound shop Liz Truss.

No Kemi identified welfare and spending cuts to fund her tax cut

It wasn't just welfare but cuts in climate change subsidies and increasing north sea production with associated tax income, as well as welcoming back millionaires, entrepreneurs, and wealth creators

She also will scrap IHT on farmers and abolish vat on private school fees

Add in banning doctor strikes

This is conservative policies and is a direct challenge to Labour and Reform

This is pennies BigG. No spending cuts plan is credible without some sort of control on pensioner benefits and health spending. They are are growing so quickly - from a very high base - that any other cut or even steady economic growth is completely overwhelmed by them. Literally by design in the case of the triple lock.

Labour haven't set out a plan either but let's not pretend the Conservative plan is fiscally prudent. DavidL's take on this is correct.

Google tells me that the number of UK civil servants has increased since 2016 by 132,000 and that the median salary is £34k.

That would imply a saving of £4.5bn under the Tory plan.

Not commenting on whether it is feasible or not but it’s not “pennies”

True - but I think the fact the median salary is so low suggests what kinds of roles those civil servants are doing - particularly when you consider how London dominated the civil service is.

If you could cut 130,000 people out of Whitehall or it's equivalent in Scotland, Wales then fair enough. But I think the stats show that increase is primarily agencies like HMRC and DWP. Basically call centres, which would mean a reduced service. AI might be the answer to that but it's not a magic button you can press.

It said that the range was £24 - 84k (from memory - haven’t checked).

The only way to plausibly cuts costs is to stop doing stuff. Governments need to cut verticals rather than horizontally. (Equally I am sure that there are the sort of grinding efficiencies - 1, 2, 3 percent a year - that the private sector makes which government agencies never seem to be able to find)

And that's why, at the moment, this is Potemkin Policy. Tell us which Civil Servants are going to be axed, and what's going to happen to the work they were doing, and it gets interesting. "It won't be done by the state" is a legitimate answer.

Otherwise, Kemi is doing the fun bit without doing the hard work first. Maggie wouldn't have approved.

PB Tories are normally pragmatic people, questioning the symmetry of a Labour or Lib Dem tax cut or spending pledge. "The books don't balance" they will cry.

Yet a welcome Tory £12b tax cut paid by fantasy wastage savings get a free ride.

Fortunately the Tories are not in Government. I am sure if they were the gilt markets might baulk.

They are not “fantasy wastage savings”.

They have said that they will reduce civil service numbers back to 2016 levels. That’s pretty specific - of course they haven’t identified “Me Mexican” or “Ms Pete” as being at risk of being made redundant - but it’s not just a number made up by some spreadsheet jockey.

You had fourteen years in Government. Fourteen years to identify and implement swingeing service cuts to pay for massive tax cuts. You failed. During that 14 years, service provision levels crashed at the same time the tax burden increased.

Posters have quoted Reform fantasy savings in Kent, savings so magnificent that Council tax increases could be suspended, until they found out there were few savings to be made and Council taxes were raised by 5%.

A nice speech offering the Moon on a stick is one thing, shoehorning the contents of that speech into reality is quite another.

Your party and the cheerleaders on here are profoundly unserious.

Re stamp duty, perhaps I'm being thick but if the supply of houses doesn't increase and buyers now have more money with which to buy, won't this just lead to an increase in house prices which will make things even harder for those trying to get on the property ladder?

Anyway, in @Leon's spirit of eye-catching policies, here are mine:-

1. Taser people blasting music out of their phones in public. Also anyone doing their toilette in public or eating with their mouth open. And men spreading their legs unnecessarily when sitting down. Also people leaving their filled dog poo bags hanging on trees or fences.
2. Compulsory pedicures for everyone wearing sandals in summer.
3. 50% VAT on all hot drinks with chocolate sprinkled on top (other than hot chocolate).
4. Anyone with a plastic lawn will have their property confiscated unless said grotesquerie is removed and replaced by a lawn and/or plants.
5. Shoe designers and manufacturers to be reminded that it is both possible and desirable to make shoes which are stylish AND comfortable.
6. Women's dresses to have pockets.
7. A 100% tax rate to be applied to people wearing black coats in winter. It's dark enough already. Use some colour, for God's sake! That's what it's there for.
8. Politicians commenting on TV programmes in an attempt to appear "cool", "relevant" or "in touch" to be barred from office. We have Dad dancing if we want a cringe-making spectacle.
9. Fine everyone using the word "inappropriate" when they mean "wrong" but are too scared to say so.

There: policies for a happier Britain. Or a happier Cyclefree at any rate. And I need a bit of cheerful triviality for today is the day I learn whether the cancer has spread to my pancreas. Which is why I've spent the last week buying new clothes and shoes (purple suede boots!) obviously.

If I don't, my 10th policy is : run public appointments past the Cyclefree/Common-Sense-o-Monitor and when cock-ups happen, well, you know who to call.

Morning all

The thing about populism is it always has to be on the right side of opinion - to be popular.

Farage's sole misstep in the 2024 GE was when he advocated a view on the Ukraine which was well out of step with public opinion at the time and he suffered for it.

Simply running to where the focus groups tell you public opinion is on any subject will leave a party completely tied up in an incomprehensible platform of contradictory policies which will make Government either impossible or so riddled with compromises and broken promises as to be entirely discredited.

The other side of this is where a populist leadership tries to offer a more conciliatory or moderate line they are then in danger of losing support because their voter base is often more extreme - immigration being the classic example. Yet the populist leader will, if they have any sense, know that the more they chase their own supporters to the extreme, the more they will repel others.

The art of politics is or should be about arguing a case to the electorate and convincing them it's the right thing to do even when many of the voters will lose out as a result. That's not easy.

There is for example a case to be made for immigration but no one is making it.

Various comments tonight about how 1% annual tax on house values would let you abolish council tax, SDLT, and IHT at a stroke.

At the same time it's a policy where the average home owner will pay the same or less in tax as the current council tax bill, with almost all the incidence falling on rich people in the SE.

Tax simplification. Two fairly unpopular taxes gone, a third one effectively restructured to be considerably more progressive. No loss of tax revenue.

So - why hasn't one of the parties picked it up and run with it? OK it will make a small number of rich voters very angry, but for Reform and these days the Tories, it probably doesn't matter all that much electorally - a policy with 10 winners to every loser and with the losers geographically concentrated in places you don't win anyway, why care? They will all be ABCs in the SE who vote Lib-Dem anyway.

It can (and should) also discourage second ownership of homes, and also wealthy foreigners owning homes in the UK they barely use.

The value of UK residential property is 9 trillion. Only about 3.5% of this changes hands every year, so to replace stamp duty alone would just require a 0.12% annual charge. But if you made it 1% for homes occupied less than 180 days a year, and 2.5% for those occupied less than 90 days, then you could make the annual charge to replace stamp duty just 0.05% per year, which is nothing.

If we wanted to replace Council Tax (which is no bad thing), you would probably need a number more like 0.75% (residents), 1.5% (less than 180 days), 3% (less than 90 days). That would be positive for the majority of voters, would increase labour mobility, increase housing availability (and probably building too), and a large chunk of the receipts would be paid for by people who don't even live in the UK full time.

As you say, it's insane that none of the major parties have proposed it.

Kemi's speech - bloody brilliant.

I just watched it. Was certainly well-delivered and she seemed entirely at ease: a good sign as temperament is incredibly important in a role like that.

I keep going backwards and forwards with Kemi. She has become leader too early, perhaps fatally so, like Hague. And yet, the talent is there, and maybe a sprinkling of stardust. But the ogre of May 2026 lies in wait. I wish her luck as she could well be a good thing.

I thought the speech utterly incoherent. Actually worse than Liz Truss. The difference of course was that Truss was Prime Minister and important, while Badenoch fortunately is irrelevant.

You OK hun?

Not really politically speaking but Badenoch's dismal Conference speech has nothing to do with that. Half her speech was platitudes and insults against the other parties - mainly Labour even though Labour isn't at all the driver for the Conservatives' 16% standing in the polls. But fair enough, if a party leader can't serve platitudes and insult the other parties in a conference speech, when can they?

The other half is the problem. So she says:

[Young people] feel they are living somewhere where things never get any better. Britain is stagnating, while the world around us moves on. We are competing with restless and ambitious countries around the world. We are competing with a billion people in India striving to become middle class. We are competing with economic success stories like Poland. 15 years ago, Polish workers came here to find opportunity. Now, Poland is growing twice as fast as we are. While Britain was redefining what a woman is, China was building five nuclear reactors.

On whose watch did this happen and why? Does she think that happened entirely in the last 14 months? Actually from the rest of the speech it appears she does. But not the slightest hint of the "bold ideas", "positive vision for this country" and "plan to deliver it" in her speech.

A public sector which already every year, demands more and more and more of our money, yet services don’t get better, they get worse.

Why does she think this is? (I have a good idea and interestingly I don't think it's mainly the previous government's fault). Her solution for collapsing public services is to spend less money on them.

Her "fully costed savings" that offset mostly uncosted tax cuts

Starmer and Reeves have done far more damage to our economy with their job destroying budgets and enormous new black hole entirely made in nos 10 and 11

No they haven't.
Give them time and they may.
But it's a colossal leap of magical thinking to imagine they've undone 14 years in 14 months.

Kemi's speech - bloody brilliant.

I just watched it. Was certainly well-delivered and she seemed entirely at ease: a good sign as temperament is incredibly important in a role like that.

I keep going backwards and forwards with Kemi. She has become leader too early, perhaps fatally so, like Hague. And yet, the talent is there, and maybe a sprinkling of stardust. But the ogre of May 2026 lies in wait. I wish her luck as she could well be a good thing.

I thought the speech utterly incoherent. Actually worse than Liz Truss. The difference of course was that Truss was Prime Minister and important, while Badenoch fortunately is irrelevant.

You OK hun?

Not really politically speaking but Badenoch's dismal Conference speech has nothing to do with that. Half her speech was platitudes and insults against the other parties - mainly Labour even though Labour isn't at all the driver for the Conservatives' 16% standing in the polls. But fair enough, if a party leader can't serve platitudes and insult the other parties in a conference speech, when can they?

The other half is the problem. So she says:

[Young people] feel they are living somewhere where things never get any better. Britain is stagnating, while the world around us moves on. We are competing with restless and ambitious countries around the world. We are competing with a billion people in India striving to become middle class. We are competing with economic success stories like Poland. 15 years ago, Polish workers came here to find opportunity. Now, Poland is growing twice as fast as we are. While Britain was redefining what a woman is, China was building five nuclear reactors.

On whose watch did this happen and why? Does she think that happened entirely in the last 14 months? Actually from the rest of the speech it appears she does. But not the slightest hint of the "bold ideas", "positive vision for this country" and "plan to deliver it" in her speech.

A public sector which already every year, demands more and more and more of our money, yet services don’t get better, they get worse.

Why does she think this is? (I have a good idea and interestingly I don't think it's mainly the previous government's fault). Her solution for collapsing public services is to spend less money on them.

Her "fully costed savings" that offset uncosted tax cuts