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The Conservatives “lost the confidence of business” at the July general election and firms “knew we were going to lose”, Kemi Badenoch has admitted.
Speaking at the Confederation of British Industry (CBI)’s annual conference on Monday, the Tory leader told attendees Labour’s Budget had got the diagnosis wrong, leading to an “unprecedented raid on businesses”.
“There is no point in me just complaining about Labour when it was obvious that we Conservatives lost the confidence of business,” she said.
“I was not surprised at how many people attended Labour’s prawn cocktail or smoked salmon offensive last year.
“I know it is because you thought that we didn’t understand what your needs and concerns were…and you knew we were going to lose.”
She added: “I want to acknowledge the reason why I’m standing here, not as a government minister, but as the leader of the opposition, and it is because we Conservatives got things wrong and unless we explain where we got things wrong, we will repeat those mistakes.”
Restoring business confidence
The Conservative leader, who beat rival Robert Jenrick to the role last month, insisted her selection of shadow cabinet minister was her “first step” to repairing the relationship with wealth creators and restoring business confidence in her party.
“I have made sure that the two people who are in the most business-facing in my shadow cabinet are people who have run companies themselves,” she vowed, in reference to shadow Chancellor, Mel Stride, and shadow business secretary, Andrew Griffith.
Stride, Badenoch said, has “founded a successful business, which he expanded into the US” and Griffith was a “chartered accountant… successful financial analyst and asset manager”.
Badenoch also pledged that under her leadership the party would focus on first principles, which she said were on “free and fair competition”, being “the party of business”, and insisted: “Capitalism is not a dirty word; wealth is not a dirty word; profit is not a dirty word.”
‘Rewire our economy’
She also called for the UK to “rewire our economy into one where the vast majority of jobs are productive” and argued the Whitehall system “is broken”.
The opposition leader argued: “We are trying to fix problems with the wrong tools.
“We are using a mindset and a paradigm that worked well in the late 20th century, but does not work well when we have aggressive competitor economies like China and when there is rapid technological innovation.”
She called for faster innovation, saying: “We can no longer tolerate a situation where building roads takes decades. Where Treasury decision making means railways don’t get built. Where the planning system stops investments being made by you and your colleagues.
“Over the last two decades, you have all had to transform your business models to account for massive societal and technological change. It’s time that the government does the same because what we have now isn’t working.”
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