Kemi Badenoch’s ‘small state’ vision does not stack up

Good morning. Kemi Badenoch gave a big speech yesterday setting out where she thinks the UK is going wrong, how the government is failing and how she will change the Conservative party to win again.

Well, after a fashion: Badenoch’s ability to set that definition is hamstrung by her self-denying ordinance not to set out policies.

Badenoch is half-right that almost all policy proposals that she or the Conservative party make now will be redundant by the time of the next election.

That date could be almost as far in the future from today as the first reported case “of a pneumonia of an unknown type” in Wuhan is from the present. By the time of the next general election, Donald Trump’s second term as US president will either be over or nearing its end. No fewer than eight member states will have shuffled in and out of the rotating presidency of the EU in that time. An awful lot could happen between now and then.

But what she is missing is that well-chosen policies are part of how you signal your underlying principles. Let’s take the three shadow cabinet ministers who are, I think, doing the best job of signalling what they are about. They aren’t announcing policies but they are setting out a clear position: Laura Trott at shadow education is showing us that she thinks accountability and freedom are big drivers of how you improve public services. Robert Jenrick at shadow justice is showing that he favours authoritarian measures on law and order. And Claire Coutinho at shadow energy and net zero is showing that she will describe any measures to reach net zero, including ones she herself signed off, as pandering to “the climate change lobby”.

These are clear signals about where these shadow ministers would differ from the politicians they are opposing, where they want to fight the next election, and what about the last Conservative government they want to defend and what they want to disavow.

Badenoch has been less clear: and one reason for that, I think, is she is simply not across the detail and sufficiently prepared to do the necessary legwork to be an effective leader of the opposition. Some thoughts on one example of that below.

A different kind of fix

Kemi Badenoch has a repeated argument about the British state and by extension about the Conservative record these past 14 years: that the UK state needs to focus on doing a little well, as opposed to a lot badly. (Or as she put it yesterday: “the government is already doing too much — and it’s doing it badly”.)

She also has an interesting argument about means-testing the winter fuel allowance, an idea that Whitehall officials presented to the Conservatives “time and again”. She criticised Rachel Reeves, saying the chancellor opted to do it because “she has no ideas of her own”. Means-testing the winter fuel allowance was a Conservative manifesto commitment in the 2017 election, it is the programme that Badenoch was first elected to parliament on. There is much that you can reasonably say both to criticise or to defend Theresa May and Nick Timothy, the authors of that manifesto, but I just don’t think “no ideas of their own” is a credible or serious one.

Maybe — and I’m just spitballing here — maybe the reason why officials kept suggesting that the government means-test the winter fuel allowance and the reason why May wanted to do it in 2017 is also the reason why our new Labour government did it, which is that it is a reasonable suggestion.

When Gordon Brown introduced the winter fuel allowance in 1997, pensioners were the poorest cohort in the UK. They are now the richest. It is also a benefit that has stayed the same in cash terms as it was in 2000, rather like the “Christmas bonus” that is paid to some benefit recipients and pensioners. This bonus was £10 when Edward Heath introduced it, was £10 when it was made permanent in 1979 and is £10 today. This is a really silly way to spend money! We are handing a benefit of diminishing value to an ever-wealthier group for no particular reason.

If you think that the British government does “too much”, you have to seriously engage with what it actually does, and much of what it does is provide services to older people. Now, I think that’s perfectly fine. As regular readers will know I don’t have much time for arguments about intergenerational unfairness when it comes to the provision of government services. Most of us cost a great deal from when we are born to when we leave compulsory education aged 18, and most of us will be net contributors to the public purse until the final decades of our life. This isn’t “intergenerational unfairness”: this is just fairness. Most of us over the age of 18 do not need more state provision and won’t until we are considerably older. If you want a lean and efficient state, it is hard to argue that a universal benefit introduced in 1997 is a non-negotiable part of it.

(There is a different argument to be made about the housing market which I will return to in a later email.)

Now here’s the Badenoch argument: the way that Reeves has done this, by pegging the point at which you receive the winter fuel allowance, means pensioners “on the breadline” are losing out. But that’s an argument for increasing the threshold for pension credit, not for a cash benefit of ever diminishing value to be paid out to more pensioners than receive pension credit.

When Badenoch talks of means-testing, she seems to envisage some kind of perfect model with no edge cases, telling LBC’s Iain Dale that “means-testing is something we don’t do properly here”, that we “don’t have a system that knows who should get what”. That is to say, she thinks that the British state needs to spend more money in order to work out who it should give money to. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with this argument but if you claim that you want government to do less and you can’t even support this very simple reduction in a universal benefit, and if you want a yet more complex benefit system, you are not a serious small-state politician.

Badenoch then went further, telling Dale that the Conservatives are also “looking at” means testing the “triple lock” pension, the same day that she had insisted that only a government with “no ideas” would means-test the winter fuel allowance.

The “triple lock pension” is a mechanism not a benefit. It is the solution that successive British governments since the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition have chosen to the problem that the UK state pension is not generous compared with its peers. As a mechanism it has downsides, not least that people start to see it as something that should go on forever and ever rather than a phased solution to a particular public policy problem.

But it’s not clear what it would even mean to “means-test” the process whereby we increase the size of the state pension by whichever is the highest out of 2.5 per cent, inflation, or earnings growth. The question of whether you means-test the state pension is not the same as how you ensure that the state pension provides a decent income for the people who need it.

Means-testing it does in theory allow you to be more generous to those who get it, but the reason why the Tories did not opt to do this is that doing so dissuades people from saving for their own retirement. I am not saying they were necessarily right to do so, but I’m struck that once again Badenoch’s grasp on what her government did and why it did it is not what one would hope.

If she wants to lead a government that is smaller and more efficient than either the last Conservative government or the present Labour one, she needs to engage much more deeply with what both those governments did and why.

Now try this

(Georgina writes:) I first read Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners during my first months living away from home. The 1956 novel’s rhythms, prickly sensations and tragicomic shifts perfectly captured the feeling of being an “outsider” — showing the Windrush-era newcomers adjust to the city as individual Londoners, and not bundling them up into a narrowly defined immigrant group. “They only laughing because they fraid to cry” is one of my favourite lines. 

I didn’t know what to expect of the stage adaptation — and how it would respond to the book’s musicality and creolised English — but I was blown away. It’s on at the Kiln theatre until February 22. 

I also heartily recommend this BBC Free Thinking episode with some terrific guests reflecting on Selvon’s legacy in Caribbean and modernist literature.

However you spend it, have a lovely weekend!

Top stories today

• Streamline | Hospital bosses in England will be judged against far fewer targets than before under plans by health secretary Wes Streeting to reform the NHS. Separately, the FT’s Laura Hughes visited Queen’s hospital in Romford to grasp the alarming reality that “corridor care” has become the norm. According to a new survey for the Royal College of Nursing, 67 per cent of nursing staff in the UK are delivering care on a daily basis in “inappropriate” settings.

• Into reverse | England’s roads are a “national embarrassment”, MPs have warned. The road network is blighted by potholes, while councils do not have the data to fix them, leading to disrupted journeys that ultimately harm the economy and inconvenience motorists, the Public Accounts Committee said.

• Off and on | UK government officials have discussed funding a supercomputer at the University of Edinburgh, just six months after axing a similar major computing project at the institution.

• Amesbury pleads guilty | MP Mike Amesbury has pleaded guilty at Chester Magistrates’ Court to assault, raising the possibility of a damaging first by-election for Labour in Runcorn and Helsby.