The first row of Tory conference has, unsurprisingly, involved Kemi Badenoch. The leadership contender was on Times Radio this morning where she was making a point about business regulation and ended up suggesting that maternity pay in this country was ‘excessive’. Here is a transcript of her exchange with Kate McCann:
KM: Do you think we’ve got the right levels of maternity pay at the moment?
KB: So, maternity pay varies depending on who you work for, but it is a function, whereas statutory maternity pay, it is a function of tax, tax comes from people who are working, we are taking from one group of people and giving to another, this in my view is excessive. Businesses are closing, businesses are not starting in the UK, because they say that the burden of regulation is too high…
KM: So maternity pay is excessive?
KB: …I think it’s gone too far the other way in terms of general business regulation, we need to allow businesses especially small businesses to make more of their own decisions. The exact amount of maternity pay in my view is neither here nor there, we need to make sure that we are creating an environment where people can work and people can have more freedom to make their individual decisions.
It wasn’t long before everyone was jumping up and down with excitement about this. The TUC ‘blasted’ Badenoch, before she came out to say she did, in fact, believe in maternity pay.
A source from her campaign has also said:
Infighting and internal conflicts helped take our party to an historic defeat. We need to be better, we need our politics to be better. Kemi obviously supports maternity pay and was making a case for lower regulation – something she always aimed for as business secretary. For other leadership campaigns to be seeking to use selective quotes from an interview to score political hits, shows they’re still wedded to the old politics and simply aren’t serious about getting back to government.
Her tweet contradicting some of the reporting of this interview wasn’t quite as combative as some of her others. But it is part of a pattern where what Badenoch thinks she is saying and what the media hears are often very different. Her allies will argue that this is because she ‘doesn’t speak like a politician’ – and there’s much to be said for that, given politicalese often involves the sort of language that is incomprehensible to the normal person. But because Badenoch didn’t seem to hear that McCann was pressing her specifically on maternity pay and then clarify what she was and wasn’t criticising, she has ended up involved in a row she didn’t need to have.
That can be difficult when you’re in power. It’s even harder when, as a party of opposition, people only listen briefly to you anyway.
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