Badenoch’s Tories have rediscovered Adam Smith

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Just as there is a battle on the Right in Britain, so too is there a battle inside the Conservative Party for what the party should focus on. There are those who are concerned about the threat of political Islam, the damage to the social fabric of the Boriswave and other elements of mass immigration, and ‘woke’. They argue that the party must get robust on these issues in order to win back support from Reform UK (and perhaps now Restore, too).

There are others, however, who say that talking about immigration at all reminds the nation about the Tories’ failures under Boris Johnson, and any increased salience only helps Reform. They should, instead, focus exclusively on the economy. Even during the recent polling nadirs, the Conservatives are still seen as the most trusted party on economic issues, and the cost of living and jobs will be their route back to electability.

Wherever you stand on this, this is at least a welcome development from some truly frightful deviations from conservative orthodoxy in recent years. The embrace of some ultra-liberal social causes, the championing of economically illiterate Net Zero energy and a total surrender to regulatory gold-plating has served neither of the two camps that now exists.

It is to Kemi Badenoch’s credit that this shift has happened. She has sworn the party off Net Zero and committed to leaving the ECHR, as well as shunning other modish progressive artefacts from previous Tory administrations.

But at her party conference speech, we also saw her locus of focus with the economic camp outlined above. It seems clear that she sees the reheated 1970s socialism of Andy Burnham as the perfect bête noire for a Tory party to be able to speak about business, tax cuts, spending restraint and the rest of the classical liberal canon.

As all good CapX readers will know, Adam Smith gave the state just three jobs: defend the realm, administer justice and build the things nobody else will. Everything else he left to the rest of us.

And in her speech, Badenoch cleaved pretty close to this list. She promised to build a missile and drone defence system called Britannia Shield, telling the hall that if Russia fires a missile at Manchester, Andy Burnham’s £2 bus fares will not save anybody. Again, as Smith said, defence is ‘of much more importance’ than opulence.

And she also promised to build 50,000 new prison places. Prisoners have been let out early because the cells were full, and if the Tories do abolish the sentencing council, they will be able to keep violent criminals away from the rest of us.

These policies, and several others, all seem to emanate from properly thought through principles, many of them adumbrated in a 100 page booklet called ‘The Right Way’, released in the leader’s name at the start of the conference. As a robust right-winger, it really does read to me as a perfectly agreeable document, balancing ideas about nationhood, economy and governance in a sensible way.

There is certainly no more ‘good that government can do’ rhetoric as in the Theresa May years, no everythingism of the Boris years, less unfunded pledging than the Truss days.

All this is perhaps why the insistence on continuing to defend the triple lock sticks in the craw quite so crudely as it does. It is a rare moment of electoral necessity standing obdurately in the face of the vaunting principles now being drawn on, especially given Burnham’s fake cancellation of it.

And questions will remain, about whether this focus on the economy will be enough to draw supporters away from Reform, without the promise of red meat on cultural issues and immigration given as much prominence. Robert Jenrick, a key feature of last year’s conference and now the Reform Treasury spokesman, has already moved his new party onto similar right-wing economic orthodoxy in a welcome move for fiscal sanity.

That rather fittingly sounds like a competitive market for voters wanting sound economics, which should further improve the quality of policy. Unless they cancel each other out and hand the next election to the clueless socialist in No 10.

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