The Conservative party wants to go back to the future under Kemi Badenoch. In her foundational text, The Right Way, released at the weekend, the Tory party leader makes its intellectual lineage explicit, repeatedly invoking Margaret Thatcher’s 1976 policy statement The Right Approach. The 2026 economic framework is familiar: only private enterprise creates wealth; taxes, regulation and spending can obstruct growth and competition; markets make the country stronger. The speech by her shadow chancellor, Andrew Griffith, made it clear that Conservative failures over its 14-year spell in charge were the result of the party straying from Thatcherite principles.
One might argue that, on the contrary, errors were because the party slavishly followed such a creed. When Rough, a depleted North Sea gasfield that once provided around 70% of the UK’s gas-storage capacity, was judged uneconomic by its private owner, a Conservative government in 2017 accepted that international markets could provide the UK with adequate energy security. That proved to be a big mistake when Russia invaded Ukraine, sending fossil fuel prices upwards. Britain was particularly exposed as a net energy importer and highly dependent on gas. Tory ministers had to bring back Rough into operation in 2022. Mrs Badenoch puts its closure down to “false economies”. But what was wrong was putting private profitability ahead of the country’s needs.
In his speech to conference, Mr Griffith attempted to distance himself and his party from the chaotic Liz Truss administration, although he was a member of its disastrous Treasury team. But his diagnosis today appears similar. Britain, in his telling, is supposedly more of a command economy than a market‑based one. To kickstart it, he argued, will require lower taxes, welfare reform and deregulation.
The difference, Mr Griffith was keen to stress, is that tax cuts will now come through spending cuts rather than additional borrowing. Why shrinking the state would strengthen growth enough to offset its effect on demand and productive capacity is unanswered. Just how big those cuts might be was revealed by the Guardian. Mr Griffiths admitted when he was the shadow business secretary that the Tories were planning to make sweeping cuts beyond the £47bn that the party had announced if it won the next election.
This might be seen as the kind of clear blue water that the Tories need to put between themselves and Labour. But the real enemy is further right. As the pollster John Curtice told a Demos fringe event, the voters most dissatisfied with high rates of immigration, the performance of the economy and the NHS are disproportionately moving to Reform UK. The perceived failures of Labour are not automatically benefiting the Conservatives. Prof Curtice said that either the party was “still getting the blame” for its record in government, or Reform was “simply speaking a language” that appeals more to those voters. It is hard to see how restoring Thatcherite principles will help the party here.
Mrs Badenoch recognises that the world has changed. She acknowledges that insecure supply chains and economic coercion may require the state to step in. But public investment must remain a special case, and, she says, “help to an individual firm should be exceptional and, where possible, temporary”. The real problem with her prospectus is Britain’s future requiring permission from 1976.
