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.
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