Kemi Badenoch calls on Andy Burnham to rule out tax rises

Today [Thursday 23^rd July 2026], Kemi Badenoch MP, Leader of the Conservative Party, gave a speech calling on Andy Burnham to rule out tax rises.

Please see the full text of the speech below.

"Thank you everyone and good morning.

So, Andy Burnham, seems like a nice guy. I've enjoyed his dodgy dancing and even the shocking revelation that he puts milk first in his tea.

I'm glad he's got a sense of humour. It's needed in his job, but when I look at the plans that he's announced for the country, I find myself asking is that it?

Britain is the fifth largest economy in the world. There are wars in Europe and the Middle East.

Hostile states are attacking our critical infrastructure.

China and America are racing ahead in artificial intelligence, energy and space.

We have a demographic challenge to solve, a borders crisis requiring tough choices.

And our new Prime Minister's big ideas are £2 bus fares and £45 off energy bills when the average bill is nearly £2,000 and that will only last for six months anyway.

Don't get me wrong, cost of living pressures are real, but the problems go way beyond bus fares and VAT on bills.

Families are struggling, young people are worrying about whether they will ever earn enough to buy a home, some are leaving the country in search of a better future.

Businesses are closing. People are working harder but feeling poorer.

I'm sorry, but going by what he's announced so far, Andy Burnham's ambitions for Britain are too small.

Big problems need bigger, long-term solutions.

Bus fares are expensive because fuel is expensive, energy is expensive. employment is expensive, regulation is expensive.

Government has made nearly everything more expensive but Andy Burnham's answer is to cap one price and send the bill somewhere else.

But somewhere else is always someone else.

A taxpayer, a business, a family.

Someone will pay and they will pay in higher taxes.

Andy Burnham needs to tell us who will pay for those taxes and if he won't, we should assume it will be the same people Labour always turn to when the sums don't add up,

Working people, small businesses, the people who get up early, take risks, hire staff and try to build something.

I want us to be more ambitious than Andy Burnham.

Conservatives believe in aspiration.

We are looking to the future, yet Andy Burnham is looking backwards, not forwards.

Instead of picking up a bus fares policy that Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak introduced years ago, how about clean, cheap, abundant energy that makes us all richer? How about that?

British businesses are paying four times as much for electricity as businesses in the US.

We're paying twice as much as businesses in Spain.

I want British manufacturers to compete with the best in the world.

I want our young people to find opportunity here, not feel that they have to leave the country for a better future.

Last night, I spoke to an employer, a Greater Manchester employer who is opening a new factory.

Unfortunately, the new factory is not in Greater Manchester.

He is opening it in America because taxes here are too high and regulations make it too hard to hire staff.

So he is moving jobs where it is easier and worse than that, he is recruiting our young people to go there and they are rushing to take those jobs because they can't get jobs at home.

What is Andy Burnham's plan to fix this? He doesn't have one.

Last year, I announced Conservatives would abolish business rates.

Abolish business rates for most of the high street, not just pubs but shops, restaurants, retail, hospitality, leisure and more importantly, I showed how I would pay for it.

Our new Prime Minister only wants to cut business rates by 20% and only for clubs, pubs and music venues, and he hasn't even found the money to pay for it.

Look, I like to have a good time as much as the next person, but surely he can do better than that.

Four years ago, a Prime Minister announced policies without making savings to pay for them and it didn't end very well.

Everyday Andy Burnham seems to float a new expensive idea.

A national care service that costs £18 billion, building as many council houses in the 1970s, costing £13 billion.

On Monday, he said he was thinking about increasing the personal allowance. On Tuesday he was against it. On Wednesday he was for it again. Does anyone know what he's thinking today? Because I don't.

He doesn't actually know what he wants to do. He is thinking out loud.

All we know is that it is going to cost a lot of money.

So I want to be very clear, Andy Burnham needs to rule out tax rises to pay for his spending spree.

Rachel Reeves raised taxes and we saw what happened after that.

Employers stopped hiring and jobs were lost, Andy Burnham will repeat Rachel Reeves mistakes if he raises taxes again,

And we all know what he will say. He will pretend he is only taxing the rich.

The truth he will punish the engineer whose factory is never built, punish the apprentice whose job never exists, punish the family whose bills rise yet again.

This is what Labour never understands. Money needs to be made before it can be spent.

Businesses are not cash machines for politicians.

Conservatives understand that businesses are where people work.

They are where wealth is created, they are what pays for everything else. Andy Burnham needs to do better.

He is behaving like he is still the mayor of Manchester.

He is now the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, he needs to start acting like it.

When you're the mayor of Manchester, you are handed a big pot of someone else's money and you decide where to spend it.

I'm sure this is great fun, it can make you very popular, but it is not the same as being Prime Minister.

A mayor doesn't have to fund the army, a Prime Minister does.

Right now, even his Chancellor has said the Defence investment plan is £8 billion short. We don't know where that money is coming from.

Three months away from the next budget, there is already a growing hole in public finances for the new Chancellor to fill.

Andy Burnham seems to have no interest in cutting spending, no interest in cutting the welfare bill.

I made an offer to him to help get welfare cuts down in Parliament,

He replied to my tweets about his t-shirt, but he didn't reply to my letter about defence.

We have seen this movie before. Tax rises are coming.

I have bigger ambitions for our country.

I have an optimistic vision for Britain.

If we want to be a richer country, a country where the cost of living doesn't bite so hard when tough times hit.

We need to create wealth, not destroy it.

My vision is grounded in reality.

It is honest about the trade-offs we will have to make to deliver this richer, more prosperous country.

A country that has clean, abundant energy, where young people are able to buy a house, not come out of university with loans they will never repay.

Where people feel safe on the streets because we have built enough prisons to house dangerous criminals, not release them early even when they have committed horrendous crimes.

Where we are world leading in tech and in AI and space and our universities stay the best in the world.

Britain needs a bit more optimism, but you can't buy optimism with other people's money, you can't.

If you try to tackle the cost of living without fixing the economy, you will fail.

I think it's weird that Andy Burnham talks about the 1970s as if they were wonderful, when everyone else thinks they were terrible.

Endless strikes, rubbish not being collected, bodies not being buried, inflation at 25% and a Chancellor going cap in hand to the IMF.

A chancellor called Healey by the way, let's not forget that.

Britain in the 1980s and 1990s was an optimistic place, not because people were told to be optimistic, but because they were living in a growing economy, full of jobs and opportunity.

It seemed a given that people's lives would be better than their parents, and their children's lives would be better than their own.

That is what we need to create, and it is the country that the Conservative Party has a plan to build.

Our optimism is grounded in reality, his is wishful thinking.

Take AI, artificial intelligence will require vast amounts of energy and water.

Data centres will go where power is reliable, where infrastructure is ready and where government understands what industry needs.

This is what we should be doing now.

Instead, Labour is refighting arguments from 50 years ago.

They've just nationalised British Steel. Andy Burnham is now talking about nationalising Thames Water. Nationalisation is not a solution, it's just a process.

The problems remain.

Changing the ownership structure does not build a single reservoir. It does not lay a pipe. It does not create the water infrastructure we will all need in the future.

But make no mistake, we will all be carrying the cost.

While America and China compete over artificial intelligence, advanced manufacturing and space, Andy Burnham is offering another layer of regional government and a cheaper bus ticket.

He needs to lift his sights, because the world will not wait for him to get his act together.

Cyber attacks crippling our businesses will not stop while he floats his ideas with the public.

China will not slow down because Whitehall has launched another consultation, and Russia will not be deterred by more devolution.

The threats are real, they are growing and Britain must be ready.

Andy Burnham should have been ready before he manoeuvred himself into number ten.

The first duty of government is to protect the country.

A serious Prime Minister should be talking about national resilience, about defence, about energy security, about sovereign capability.

If we want Britain to lead in artificial intelligence, we need more young people studying maths and languages, if we want to compete in space, we need the ambition and know how to do it, not leave it to China and the US to carve up.

If we want manufacturing to return, we need energy that industry can afford.

These are the choices that will determine whether Britain succeeds or fails.

And before you say, why didn't you do this before? Well, I wasn't in charge before.

Yes, Conservatives made mistakes in the past. I've never shied away from that.

We didn't always deal with the causes of Britain's problems, too often we managed decline instead of reversing it.

But I am the new leader of the Conservative Party and under my leadership we are doing things differently.

We have spent time working out what went wrong, we have listened, we have developed better plans and proposed them in Parliament;

How to make energy cheaper, how to make it easier to hire staff, how to strengthen our defence, how to restore control of our borders, we have laid out a plan to get Britain working again.

But we are not promising the government can solve every problem, government cannot create prosperity by announcement.

It is not government that creates growth. It is business that creates growth.

What government can do is create the conditions for people to succeed.

It can get taxes down. It can remove needless regulation. It can secure affordable energy. It can defend the country. It can restore order, and then it can trust the people to build, to generate jobs, to create growth.

That is our ambition,

That is our plan.

We are the party of common sense and we have a plan to get Britain working and unite the country.

Andy Burnham may be a nice guy, he may dance well enough, but Britain does not need a Prime Minister with small answers to big problems.

It needs a government that looks forwards, not backwards.

A government that understands the scale of the challenge.

That is the future Conservatives are preparing for, and that is the future we will deliver.

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen."