Kemi Badenoch's Conservative Spring Forum Speech

Today [Saturday 7^th March 2026], Leader of the Conservative Party, Kemi Badenoch MP, delivered a speech at the Conservative Spring Forum.

Good morning!

Welcome to our new Spring Conference.

We meet today with the world perhaps in greater peril than at any time since the Cold War. Relentless drone strikes are hitting our allies in the Middle East, countries in which hundreds of thousands of British citizens are in harm's way. British sovereign territory is under attack for the first time in a generation. And yet in the last few days, Britain has been described as weak. Our allies have accused us of deserting them, of going missing in action. Imagine if you were Cyprus. What have you seen? You've seen Britain dithering over sending the Royal Navy to defend our military base in the Mediterranean. The US, Greece, and France have all sent ships. Ours is stuck in Portsmouth Harbour and apparently may set sail sometime this week. We have made America wait to use our airbases while Iran was hurling drones at our allies. We are giving away the Chagos Islands, British sovereign territory home to a crucial UK/US defence base, Diego Garcia. No wonder our allies feel they can't rely on us. And it's not just our allies who are watching this. It's our enemies too. As Labour dither and delay, countries hostile to Britain are working to promote their interests over ours.

It's not just the regime in Tehran. It's Putin, a man prepared to send more than a million Russian soldiers to their death as he tries to march his army across Europe. It's China, leading an axis of authoritarian states. Just this week, the husband of a Labour MP was arrested on suspicion of spying for China. As instability spreads, these states are pushing further and further to see what they can get away with.

At a time when Britain needs strong and decisive leadership, we have a Prime Minister who is too afraid of making the wrong decision, too afraid to make any decision at all. Last week's by-election has spooked the Labour party. They watched the Greens campaigning on sectarian voting lines, a tactic that Labour have used for many years is now being turned against them. And now, Keir Stamer is too scared to make foreign interventions for fear of upsetting a tiny section of the electorate. Everyone remembers the mistakes of the Iraq war. Nobody sensible is suggesting that we should drop bombs without a second thought. But Keir Starmer spent days consulting lawyers, plucking up the courage to say whose side he was on. Canada and Australia had the moral clarity to do so immediately and unequivocally. And even now, our Prime Minister is sitting on the fence. We are in this war whether Keir Starmer likes it or not.

For too long, Britain has been governed as if it's still the 1990s. Back then people thought the era of permanent peace, cheap energy, and expanding global trade would go on for ever. From 1989 to 2022, defence spending reduced under successive UK governments of all colours. But it's now clear that this era of peace is coming to an end. Labour have no answers to Britain's problems because they think the world is how it used to be, not how it actually is. And where has that money we stopped spending on defence gone?

Before the Second World War, 1 in every £7 the government spent went on health and welfare. By last year, it had soared to 1 in every £3. The Peace Dividend we inherited has been spent. Yet Labour are still determined to spend more. What they don't understand is that a welfare state and an NHS are not facts of life, they are products of a strong economy and a strong country. That is the Conservative mantra today.

Public services need growth and economic security. We cannot have economic security without national security. If people in Britain cannot go to bed knowing the country is being defended, then little else matters. Donald Trump has made it very clear that America is not going to continue to fund NATO's defence of Europe. The world has changed and it is not going back. Britain must start spending 3% of GDP on defence. Every serious person in our military says this. Every serious country in the world is moving that way. But instead of prioritising defence spending, Labour have chosen to spend yet more money this country does not have on lifting the two-child benefit cap.

We introduced the cap because we believe that people claiming benefits should face the same choices when it comes to having children as everyone else. That is just basic fairness. Labour say it's going to lift children out of poverty. Do you know what lifts children out of poverty? Their parents being in work, in a growing economy.

Right now, those parents are living in a country where unemployment is surging, where the cost of living is increasing because of soaring energy prices. You bring these people out of poverty by fixing these things, not by giving them handouts.

Last June, we offered Keir Starmer our support in the national interest to pass welfare cuts so that he could spend more on defence. But he declined. He spends all his time strutting the world stage at summits and international conferences. But the fact is he's not even strong enough to win a war with his own backbenchers. He is a political hostage, held at the behest of a load of half-rate left-wing MPs, none of whom grasp the seriousness of the world that Britain is now in. While the rest of the world rearms, they are playing student politics.

Today's Labour Party is nothing like the patriotic Labour Party of yesteryear. In the 1950s, Nye Bevan warned about Britain not having a nuclear deterrent. He described it as the UK being sent naked into the conference chamber. Well today it's happening again. We are not deterring missile strikes against our bases. The man who wrote Labour's Defence Review, Sir Richard Barrons, has said the “UK is trapped in a conspiracy of stupidity because politicians aren't willing to make the case for cutting public spending to fund defence.”  Well, we are willing to make that case. It is Labour trapped in a conspiracy of stupidity. That's why yesterday I announced that the next Conservative government would reinstate the two-child benefit cap and spend that money on defence.

That money will pay for the largest net increase in British troops under any Prime Minister since the Second World War. I have chosen my priority and that is to keep British families safe.

These reinforcements will join thousands of brave service men and women and I want to pay tribute to them for everything they do for our country day in, day out. This is another downpayment on our way to 3%. Along with our Sovereign Defence Fund which says no to Ed Miliband's vanity Net Zero projects and reallocates £17 billion into defence instead.

As Rachel Reeves stood up to speak at the Spring Statement this week, oil and gas prices around the world were spiking. Price rises that have already made it more expensive to fill up your car and will very soon hit your energy bills too. The UK only has enough gas storage to last for eight days. Mark my words, a price shock is coming. And when it does, it won't just hit our pockets. It will have a huge impact on Britain's borrowing costs too! Mortgage rates are already going up, and it will make everything government does more expensive.

Yet in that Statement, Rachel Reeves had nothing to say about this financial risk we now face. Do you know what her excuse was? The OBR documents had already gone to the printers. Does she really think investors are going to say “Ok fair enough”?

Rachel Reeves is astonishingly naïve. While she claims to be providing stability, Britain is paying more to borrow than Greece. More than Morocco! Investors have no faith in her to balance the books. They can see that she is not willing and not able to cut Britain's debt.

Ladies and gentlemen, there are a frightening number of people in our politics on the Labour benches in the Greens, and in the Lib Dems, who genuinely think that His Majesty's government doesn't need to pay its debts. These silly people are either too young to remember the 1970s or too foolish to have learnt the lessons. Well, let me tell them; if we do not cut borrowing, Britain will go bankrupt. There is only one party interested in preventing that and that's the Conservatives.

Last year I introduced my Golden Economic Rule. For every pound we save, 47 billion and counting, we will put at least half to paying down the deficit - cutting the civil service, slashing the welfare bill, reducing overseas aid. The rest of the money we save, we will spend on making this country stronger. These are difficult choices for difficult times. But we must make them because every moment we continue to spend our children's inheritance is a moment of failure.

No one else in British politics is going to take these hard choices. Nigel Farage has said Vladimir Putin is the world leader he most admires. He blames NATO for the invasion of Ukraine. Reform's last leader in Wales is in prison for taking bribes from Russia. These people are not going to keep Britain safe.

The ridiculous hokey-cokey they've done on the two-child benefit cap tells you all you need to know about them. First they were for the cap, then they were against it, now they are for it again. On the 4th February Reform MPs managed to vote for it and against it at the same time. These people are messing around. Treating politics like it's a game. In this era of increasing danger, Reform's priority is to take the savings from keeping the two-child benefit cap money and spend it on pubs, on beer.

Ale over armaments. Tankards over tanks. I love pubs as much as anyone, and we have a real plan to save them. But we should not put our soldiers at risk for a few pennies off a pint. Reform are not serious people and they are not going to solve any of your problems.

And it's the same with the others: The Green Party leader only wants to make two things bigger and neither of them is our army. In fact, the Greens want to scrap our nuclear deterrent. They want to leave NATO. To be honest I have no idea what The Lib Dems think, and I don't think they do either.

This isn't just about defence abroad. We are also very clear what it is we are defending here at home. The Britain we are fighting to conserve. We are defending our values, our democracy, our education system which Labour is currently trashing. We are defending our countryside so that our children get to enjoy it the way we did. Our high streets, the places that hold our towns and villages together, not letting them turn into grotty, crime ridden streets full of nothing but vape shops. We are defending people's ability to go to their local pub, to have a laugh, to have a good time. We are defending our culture of humour, tolerance, and free speech and yes, even queuing. We are defending that. We are defending standards and behaviours. A country where a young girl can walk down the street without someone harassing her.

We are defending a culture where children are treated like children and women have the same rights as men. That is what we are defending.

You have to know what kind of country you want to create. This is why Labour have failed so terribly: they have no idea what they want. They just wanted power; they didn't know what they wanted it for. Having a coherent British identity matters. The left think that culture doesn't matter. It does. This isn't about the food you eat or the clothes you wear. Culture is not about going for a curry. Culture is about standards, values, behaviour. What is acceptable.

Culture is about what is acceptable and what is not. We have allowed too many people to come to this country who do not share our values. We have become too tolerant of people who treat our country as somewhere to live rather than a place to belong. Britain must be built around a common culture and a common identity. Newcomers should join our country, not try to change it.

That's why last Monday I launched our new Culture and Integration Commission. It will set out the culture that we want people to assimilate into. What we expect, and what we will enforce. Conference, we are bringing enforcement back to this country. We tried to be nice to everybody, avoided tough decisions and it didn't work. No more.

Every day we are witnessing a failure of enforcement play out in our streets, in our towns, in our cities. Wherever you have travelled from to get to Harrogate today, you know what I am talking about. Graffiti on public buildings and public transport, phone theft essentially decriminalised. The stench of cannabis wafting down a high street of boarded up shops. The places we live in are going backwards and people feel miserable and helpless. Some people will tell you that this is all about the economy. But that's only half of it. Britain's towns and cities are getting worse because the people making them worse are not being punished.

More than 1,000 people a year are convicted of burglary, not for the first time, not for the second time, but for the third time, and still not going to prison! People are brazenly walking out of shops with armfuls of stolen goods. Drugs smoked openly in front of the police. A small number of people are making life a misery for everyone else because they are being allowed to. For too long, we have worried more about the rights of these criminals than stood up for the rights of victims. No more. Britain has values, it has standards. If you break them, you will be punished. That's why one of the first things that we will do in government will be to hire 10,000 more police officers. And I will make it very clear to them that their job is to catch criminals. Right now, crimes are going unreported because people know nothing will happen. Shoplifters, phone thieves, violent thugs, getting away with it. Just 1 in 20 crimes is being solved in Britain today. It's shocking. And it's not just about catching people; it's about preventing crimes in the first place. That's why we are going to triple stop and search and take knives and drugs off the streets – it works, we should be doing it. We WILL do it.

Many of you will have heard about the inquiry in Nottingham this week. 3 people who were brutally murdered by a man with severe mental health problems, who two years earlier had handed himself to Mi5 for sectioning but was sent home, who 9 months before had assaulted a policeman, triggering an arrest warrant that was still outstanding when the attack occurred. This man should not have been on the streets. So today I'm announcing that we will stop putting ideology ahead of public safety. We will overhaul Labour's Mental Health Act. And we are going to detain people who pose a risk to the public. Keeping them safe, keeping the public safe We cannot have dangerous men running around our towns and cities stabbing people.

Ladies and gentlemen, this was not a one-off. There was one in Edinburgh this week. Another one in Birmingham. In November, a man got on a train in Cambridgeshire and started stabbing passengers even though earlier that day, he had already stabbed someone on a train in London. It's the state's job to stop these things but the British public is being left in harm's way.

We need to be smarter too about the way we hunt down serious offenders. So today I can also announce that we will introduce Live Facial Recognition in crime hotspots across the country, including right here in Harrogate town centre.

We believe this will help catch 24,000 wanted criminals. It's not just dangerous crime we're going to stop. Why should we put up with people in balaclavas riding e-bikes and e-scooters on our pavements? What kind of country simply allows this to happen? So today I am announcing that the Conservatives will mandate police intervention and enforce increased penalties. And we will also mandate police enforcement of our drug laws.

We have to do this conference. We have to do this. If the Greens get their way, there will be crack cocaine smoked on park benches. If we get ours, drug use will be driven out of our public spaces.

Quite often, wrongdoers need to be fined. Sometimes they need to go to prison. But at other times it's much quicker and much more useful for lawbreakers to be forced to put right what they've done wrong. That's why my team has also devised a plan for new ‘Immediate Justice' Community Sentences where someone committing a lower-level offence can be made to clean up graffiti, our streets or our parks by police immediately. Not go through a lengthy court process while someone at the council is paid to clear up that mess out of your taxes.

Conference, we cannot have any of this enforcement without a strong economy. If we want to pay to defend ourselves, to look after people when they're sick, to keep Britain's streets safe, we are going to have to get Britain working again. What I heard from Rachel Reeves at the Spring Statement this week was an exercise in self-deception. According to her, the British economy is flying. It's the best it's ever been. I have no idea what planet she is living on or which Unidentified Flying Object she has mistaken for our economy because it is not flying. She says the number of people in work is increasing. What is she talking about? Unemployment is at its highest rate since the pandemic. She uses these sham figures to try to convince us, I think even to convince herself, that everything is rosy. The truth is that youth unemployment is now higher in the UK than the EU for the first. time ever.

When was the last time she spoke to a new graduate looking for a job in the worst recruitment market on record caused by Labour's Jobs Tax? She boasts that the Bank of England has been cutting interest rates. It would have cut them faster if she hadn't spiked inflation with billions of pounds of taxes and spending. She claims the economy is growing. Growth forecasts have been slashed this year. I wonder why that is? According to the OBR, “incentives within the tax system… constrain economic activity”. Let me spell that out for Rachel from customer complaints. What that means is more tax equals less growth.

Ladies and gentlemen, the fact is the British economy is being held back because for too many it no longer makes sense to work hard, to take a risk. Sickness benefits pay more than the minimum wage. Politicians have taken the easier decision to put up taxes rather than cut public spending. Like Labour's Jobs Tax, which is killing investment into this country and costing people their jobs. And Labour have bowed to political pressure from lobby groups to regulate business in stupid ways. Enough. It's time to unleash our animal spirits and our offer will make your life better tomorrow. Abolish business rates for most pubs, shops, and high streets, cut national insurance for young people by £5,000 so they can make a strong start in life. Abolish stamp duty so that people can afford to move house. These are the things my government will do because we are doing the hard work to find savings.

If we want Britain to grow, we need to be an aspirational society where young people feel they can get on in life. A huge part of this is about skills. Every year, hundreds of thousands of young people make the decision to go to university because they think it's going to give them a leg up in life. But the reality, for many, is that all they leave with, is debt. Debt they will never pay off. The LEO study has been tracking graduate earnings for more than two decades and we can see, in black and white, which degrees are worth it, and which are not. We can see it in our welfare system. 700,000 graduates are on out of work benefits. It's astonishing. And it's happened because universities get paid whether their graduates do well or not. No one in politics has been prepared to say “no”, the government will not continue to fund these rip-off courses.” I say enough.

We are going to cut thousands of the courses that provide no economic benefit whatsoever. And because we have the backbone to do that, we can then cut the interest rate on student loans and double the number of apprentices. We want to see apprentices in the careers of tomorrow, defence, tech, sectors in which there will be opportunities. No one else in politics is talking about opportunities for young people. No one else is bothered about sorting out unfair student loans. We are.

We are the only ones who are going to do this. Who else do you think is going to do this? Reform? Nu-uh They think that if you bring back smoking in pubs and nationalised industry it will bring back the good old days. No, it won't. Reform have absolutely no idea what they want Britain to look like in the 2030s. I do.

Conference, war in Iran means more problems are coming down the line. An oil price shock that will play havoc with the economy. I honestly don't know what more it will take for other parties in Britain to realise that we cannot continue with the Net Zero plans that don't work and rely on imported oil and gas with a higher carbon cost. Yet Labour press on with their net zero nonsense. I've talked about hard choices today. But this one is an absolute no brainer. We have to drill our own oil and gas now.

British businesses are paying more for electricity than in any other developed nation. It's destroying our economy and we will put an end to it.

This degradation of our economy and our society is making Britain weaker at a time when the world demands strength. This is real. And it is serious. Britain is full of people who can tell you what needs fixing. The Conservative Party is the only party talking about how to fix it. Do not listen to the people who want to get your vote by telling you that everything is irretrievably broken. It's not. Britain is a great country.

We are a great country full of talent, creativity, and the resilience to meet any test. What we face today are problems - real, difficult problems - but ones we can fix. This is a different age than the one that came before. And when the world gets tougher, a great country needs serious leadership. It needs a serious team. And it needs a plan for a stronger economy and a stronger country. Britain is in this situation because for too long politicians have failed to take hard choices, telling people what they want to hear instead of what they need to hear. And we must acknowledge that this includes previous Conservative governments.

This party is different now from the one that lost the general election. We have learnt lessons, we have got rid of people who don't share our values. Despite spring barely starting, for once I got my spring cleaning done early this year! Ladies and gentlemen, there is only one Conservative Party, and that Conservative Party is back.

Conference. This is my plan. Defend our country. Defend our values. Take back our streets. Get Britain working again and restore pride in the places we love. No other party is thinking about the problems in this much detail. No other party will take the tough but necessary decisions Britain needs. As Conservatives we know that the Government doesn't make Britain. People do. Just like it's not the government that creates growth. It's business. Government exists to create and maintain the conditions for success. Safety. Security. Lower taxes. And enforcement of the law.

The question I want us to be asking people at every election is who do you think is going to be strong enough, who is going to be competent enough, to build something that will make people in this country feel better off?

It doesn't matter who you are, I can guarantee you that if people feel they can get on in life, start a family, buy a house, build a business. If they live in a country that feels safe and familiar in villages, towns and cities where the law is upheld, they will live happier lives.

Conference. It was Margaret Thatcher who said that the facts of life are Conservative. It's now up to Conservatives to make people realise that she was right and we are on their side. So conference, thank you. Our wonderful activists and volunteers. Thank you for all that you are doing because we are the party of common sense and the common ground. Building this requires a team. Not just a team in my shadow cabinet. We need Conservatives at every level of government from parish councils all the way to Number Ten.

Conservatives who know what we believe in, who share the principles on which all our policies are built. The time for drama queens and weak leaders is over. We are living in serious times.  Serious times call for serious people. That is the party I am building. This is how we are going to fix our country. Join me and let's fix it together.