In her speech to Policy Exchange yesterday, Kemi Badenoch described her foreign policy position as that of a ‘conservative realist’. Yet while she gestured towards plenty of welcome and overdue policy shifts on things such as the European Convention on Human Rights, it remains to be seen just how realistic the Conservative Party is yet prepared to be.
The crucial tell was in the section where the Tory leader focused on military spending. Badenoch is correct that Britain has coasted in the US’s wake for too long, and needs serious and sustained investment to deliver a capable and independent military which can stand up for our national interest.
But on the question of paying for it, things immediately got hazier. If increasing defence spending is presented as a zero-sum choice that requires cutting public services, declared Badenoch, politicians will struggle to get the public to back it.
That second part is true, so full realism points for acknowledging it. The problem is that the first part is also true: in the British state’s fiscal position, there simply is no way to deliver a structural increase in defence spending on anything like the scale required without severe cuts to public spending elsewhere.
True, it need not technically come at the expense of public services. The other obvious big-ticket spending target would be entitlements, such as the pensions triple lock. Yet Badenoch has committed to retaining it, and opposed Labour’s relatively trivial efforts to curb entitlement spending via means-testing the Winter Fuel Allowance.
We have seen this head-in-the-sand behaviour before, on the question of tax cuts. Once again, the Tory leader is happy to say taxes got too high – as defence spending too low – without facing up to the spending implications. On her first appearance on the show as leader she told Laura Kuenssberg:
I think the tax burden was too high under the Conservatives. That doesn’t mean that we have to cut public services. It means that we have to look at how we are delivering public services…
But it does mean you have to make cuts. Even if it were theoretically possible to deliver significant savings through a major restructure, that sort of thing requires lots of up-front capital investment (ie, even more spending pressure) and takes years to pull off. Otherwise, saying the solution lies in ‘how we are delivering public services’ sounds a lot like that perennial favourite, ‘efficiency savings’.
Yesterday, Badenoch suggested that the solution lay in ‘cutting red tape’ and ‘reducing disincentives to work’ – in other words, restored economic growth. It would, of course, be much easier to do lots of things with a growing economy. But is it really a ‘realist’ answer to the question of how we deliver a huge defence uplift in the near-term future?
To be fair to her, the position of the current Tory leader would be extremely difficult whoever held the brief. Internally, there is no consensus among MPs about what went wrong over the past 14 years or what changes are required; externally, there has not yet been a ‘Winter of Discontent’ moment that might reconcile the voters to hard choices on public spending.
Unless and until that happens, both parties are more or less trapped in a prison of magical thinking, trying to keep the show on the road for five more minutes and hoping something – that cure-all, growth – comes back.
This is a shame, because ultimately there was much truth in what Badenoch said yesterday. A nation that spends more on debt interest than defence (or education, or any number of other things) is destined for weakness. It’s just the obvious implications of that statement for spending that our politicians remain unwilling, or unable, to confront.
Click here to subscribe to our daily briefing – the best pieces from CapX and across the web.
CapX depends on the generosity of its readers. If you value what we do, please consider making a donation.
