To the Think Tent, home of the IEA and Taxpayers’ Alliance. Who would the free market thinkers be cheering this year, now that their heroine is running the country? To no one’s surprise, Kemi Badenoch was the star speaker, following her impressive leadership bid earlier this summer. Some wags suggest that Kemi’s campaign never actually ended, with the Tory rising star keen to boost her credentials as a right-wing tonic to the soggy centrist ails of recent years.
And the newly appointed Trade Secretary did little to dispel such talk, with a crowd-pleasing speech that contained a pointed critique on the idea of using increasing immigration numbers to boost GDP. Declaring that ‘I love preaching to the choir,’ Badenoch set out to her audience her diagnosis of Britain’s condition:
What is the problem that we’re trying to solve? And that problem is an economic and a cultural malaise that has set into this country over the last few decades. It didn’t just happen over the last few decades but the last few decades. It’s a combination of low economic growth, weak culture and values and also a state that is becoming ineffective.We are a country with a high GDP but where GDP per capita is not high. It is 29 per cent lower than the US, it is 17 per cent lower than Germany. We are not producing enough, we’ve become a lower productivity society and when we try and raise productivity, we try and do so through superficial means.
And one such “superficial” measure, according to Badenoch, is mass immigration. She praised the UK for being a country that is ‘welcome to immigrants’ but followed it up thus:
We also need to make sure that the immigration that comes into our country is the right sort of immigration. Simply taking in numbers to boost GDP while not undertaking reform is not the right way to do that. We need to look again at resolving our productivity issues and that means using capital better and not just getting cheaper and cheaper labour. It’s not good for the people that come and it’s also not good for the people who are here already.
A warning perhaps to those cabinet colleagues privately pushing for more arrivals into the UK. But Badenoch wasn’t done yet, launching another attack on the ‘overstretched’ Treasury which she suggested was culpable for failing to spot last week’s pensions crisis following market turmoil:
One of the things I find most frustrating is that people think when we talk about a smaller state, it means cutting public services. It doesn’t. Actually the state is doing many things that it has no business doing and perhaps if we stopped some of those things in the first place then we’d be able to focus on the things that matter. You look at what happened last week with the pension funds for example. We have a Treasury that is completely overstretched, looking at lots of things that it doesn’t necessarily need to look at and that’s why we miss big things that cause big problems. A small and efficient state focuses on what really matters.
Given that Badenoch is listed as doing six events this conference – more than any other minister – Mr S looks forward to seeing what Kemi does next….
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