Too many middle class people are ‘living off the law’ in jobs such as regulation, compliance and human resources, Kemi Badenoch said yesterday.
The Conservative Party leader bemoaned the rise of the ‘bureaucratic’ class and said Britain needed to return to its ‘entrepreneurial’ roots.
Mrs Badenoch said in an interview with the Spectator magazine that a series of Tory policy reviews would be asked to ‘think the unthinkable’ as she tries to rebuild the party and see off the threat on the Right from Reform.
She criticised Sir Keir Starmer’s lack of political convictions. And she promised that the Tories would enter the next election with ‘lots of red meat’ in their manifesto.
Mrs Badenoch, who has previously pledged to unpick the ‘bureaucratic state’, yesterday said it had created a whole class with a vested interest in furthering its expansion, to the detriment of growth.
She said she would monitor closely Elon Musk’s success in slashing government waste when Donald Trump returns to the White House.
She added: ‘My diagnosis of what is wrong with our country is that we have stopped being entrepreneurial and become bureaucratic. The middle class has changed from people who grow things, like farmers, or people who build or make things.
‘It’s skewed towards people who live off the law in one form or another, whether that’s regulation, compliance in banking, HR or government contracts.’
The Tory leader said she was interested in exploring ‘how radical you can be on the Right’ – and cited new Argentine President Javier Milei as an influence.
In a separate interview in the Spectator yesterday, Mr Milei said ‘the state is the problem… the public sector is the illness,’ adding: ‘If a body has something that is harming it – a virus, a germ, a bug, a parasite – you extract the parasite.’
Mrs Badenoch also stepped up her attack on the ‘woke’ culture infecting public life, describing it as ‘really socialism and communism wearing the cute outfits of the civil rights movements’. And she pledged ‘radical’ immigration reforms, saying the asylum system is ‘being exploited because we’re using a system that was built for the 1950s’.
Asked whether she was ready to contemplate leaving international conventions governing refugees, she replied: ‘It’s everything.’
The Tory leader defended her decision to delay making detailed policy commitments, saying she felt like someone ‘opening a restaurant in four years’ times and people are demanding to see the menu right now’.
But she added: ‘There’ll be lots of red meat. This will be a Conservative restaurant.’
Mrs Badenoch also criticised Sir Keir’s failure to shut down recent demands to impose a new blasphemy law – an idea she described as ‘madness’ and ‘authoritarian’.
She added: ‘That is what really worries me about him. I don’t think he has opinions about things.’
In the same interview with the Spectator, she also took aim at Sir Keir for his choice in Christmas films.
The Prime Minister was mocked recently when he struggled to name a favourite Christmas film, before eventually suggesting he might watch ‘Love Actually’.
She also revealed her Christmas movie favourites. Sir Keir Starmer was mocked recently when he struggled to name a favourite Christmas film, before eventually suggesting he might watch ‘Love Actually’.
Mrs Badenoch pointed out that the comedy features a British PM ‘messing around and not doing the foreign policy properly’.
She suggested she would rather watch action film Die Hard, but named Gremlins and Scrooged as her seasonal choice. She said: ‘Die Hard is a good Christmas-adjacent movie,’ a reference to films typically on TV over the festive period.
She told the Spectator that she does not put up decorations until Christmas Day, but then does up her house to ‘look like Santa’s grotto, nothing is too cheesy’.
She added: ‘It’s fine if you want to start early, like on December 1, but before that people should be fined for putting up decorations.’
The Tory leader also said she believes that sandwiches are ‘not real food’ – as she joked ‘lunch is for wimps’.
She revealed she enjoys the occasional steak but rarely has time for lunch.
‘What’s a lunch break?’ she said. ‘Lunch is for wimps. I have food brought in and I work and eat at the same time. There’s no time… sometimes I will get a steak.
‘I’m not a sandwich person, I don’t think sandwiches are a real food, it’s what you have for breakfast. Soggy bread is a no-no: I will not touch bread if it’s moist.’
Previously, Mrs Badenoch has described her children – two girls and a boy – as ‘pretty Right-wing’ because they love meat. She said one of them ‘thinks being vegetarian is a very bad thing’ and another’s favourite foods are ‘ribs, bacon, sausages, black pudding, lamb chops’.