LIVE Updated 3m ago
Wed 7 Oct 2026 07.35 EDT First published on Wed 7 Oct 2026 03.00 EDT
Key events
Britain's Conservative Party leader Badenoch gives a speech – watch live
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26m ago
Badenoch criticises Burnham for wanting to have another debate on Brexit.
double quotation mark [Burnham] wants to reopen the Brexit debate. Can you imagine having to go through that again? So much time lost. Arguing with ourselves, arguing with the EU, going round and round in circles, businesses not knowing whether they should invest. He wants to do it all again. I think that is a terrible idea.
The last thing we should do right now is rerun those arguments. Those were Andy Burnham’s exact words when he was campaigning in Makerfield.
(Interestingly, Badenoch does not address Burnham’s main claim, that Brexit has done “more harm than good”.
Key events
And Badenoch confirms the plans announced last week for welfare reform.
double quotation mark Conservatives don’t believe in a something for nothing culture. The best welfare is a well-paying job. Cutting the welfare bill will allow us to fund our defence.
Badenoch confirms that the Tories would cut the interest on student loans.
They would get rid of “job-killing” measures in the Employment Rights Act.
And she confirms the plan to cut employer national insurance for young workers.
Badenoch stresses the need for growth, and she highlights plans already announced to cut regulation, saying these would help.
And she says energy is growth.
double quotation mark Energy is growth. Countries that have expensive energy are poor.
And Britain’s energy is pretty much the most expensive in the world.
Climate change is real, but importing oil and gas from countries that drill it in a dirtier fashion, that actually increases our emissions.
People in Aberdeen told me that their city is dying. The government’s energy policy is killing Aberdeen. No more.
We will drill in the North Sea, increase our tax revenues and drive down energy prices.
Badenoch confirms that the Tories remain committed to their “golden economic rule”, which means spending 50% of any savings on debt reduction.
She claims the party has already identified savings woth more than £70bn.
double quotation mark For every pound we save, 50p will go towards cutting the deficit. We have already identified over £70 billion of savings. That means we will cut the deficit we inherit from Labour by more than £35 billion.
Restoring confidence in public finances is essential to economic growth.
(This is significant. Last year the Tories said they had identified cuts worth £47bn. That means there is an extra £23bn notionally available which means, allowing for the golden rule, Badenoch is in a postion to announce a tax cut worth around £10bn.)
Badenoch says the country is running out of money.
But Labour is just proposing a “tax doom loop that is making us all poorer”, she says.
Badenoch says people think Conservatives are opposed to change. But that is wrong.
double quotation mark The world is constantly changing. New technologies, new challenges, new opportunities. It is only by adapting that we can preserve the very best of this country and hand something better onto the next generation. That is what being a Conservative means.
Andy Burnham says that we all just need to hope. Again. Hope is not a strategy. And since the last thing this country needs is a Paddington Bear prime minister hoping that the problems will just go away while Putin attacks our allies, while our economy flat lines.
Burnham wants to turn the clock back to the 1970s. Nostalgia is not a plan for our country.
Andy Burnham is promising a better yesterday. What I am promising is a better tomorrow.
Badenoch also attacks the Greens, saying the antisemitism at their conference was “disgraceful”. She goes on:
double quotation mark They are seeking to erase Jewish identity. Shame on the Green Party and shame on Zack Polanski.
Exactly three years ago today, we saw the horrific 7 October attacks, the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust.
The Conservative party stands with the Jewish people. We will never stop fighting antisemitism.
Badenoch goes on to attack Reform UK over politicians like Suella Braveman suggesting that black people cannot be English. She says:
double quotation mark I don’t want to live in a country run by people who threaten journalists, who call veterans ‘traitors’ and debate whether my mixed-race children are English.
I don’t want to explain to my son when I’m watching our brilliant England team play football that some people don’t think our black players are English.
I remember back in the day when Ian Wright and John Barnes were playing, nobody was questioning whether they were English. We certainly didn’t have sitting MPs questioning whether they were English.
We must not let these people take us backwards. That is not the country we are. Reform MPs are openly questioning people’s identity.
We are not like us, we are not like them, we are different, we are the Conservative party.
This gets one of the loudest rounds of applause of the speech so far.
Badenoch moves on to attack Reform UK. She says many Reform supporters are “our people”. But she attacks the party’s leadership.
double quotation mark We deserve better than Reform politicians. A year ago, those politicians were measuring up the curtains for No 10. Now, some of them are measuring up the curtains for their prison cells.
Let’s go through their greatest hits. Their leader in Wales was sent to prison for taking bribes from Russia. His successor then had to stand down after he was arrested last month. The police are investigating not just Robert Jenrick’s donations, but Richard Tice’s company as well.
Farage’s fishy £5m personal gift … The brown envelopes they boasted about on camera. Just when you think Reform couldn’t get any easier, there’s a convicted fraudster who calls himself ‘Posh George’ and calls Nigel Farage ‘daddy’.
And she rules out a pact with them.
double quotation mark The circus goes on and on and will never stop because this is who Reform politicians are. So to those who say ‘unite the right’, we are not uniting with that. People deserve better, they deserve better.
Badenoch criticises Burnham for wanting to have another debate on Brexit.
double quotation mark [Burnham] wants to reopen the Brexit debate. Can you imagine having to go through that again? So much time lost. Arguing with ourselves, arguing with the EU, going round and round in circles, businesses not knowing whether they should invest. He wants to do it all again. I think that is a terrible idea.
The last thing we should do right now is rerun those arguments. Those were Andy Burnham’s exact words when he was campaigning in Makerfield.
(Interestingly, Badenoch does not address Burnham’s main claim, that Brexit has done “more harm than good”.
Badenoch criticises Burnham on policy.
double quotation mark In Liverpool last week, [Burnham] promised a National Care Service at a cost of £18 billion, without a plan to pay for it.
Yet again, we have a Labour prime minister making a promise that he cannot deliver, with sums that do not add up.
This is the wrong way of doing things. Fifty years ago the state was failing to run businesses. It had no business running British Leyland, British Telecom, British Airways, British Steel government – couldn’t manage them properly.
In fact, political interference made their problems worse.
Andy Burnham is wilfully ignorant of those lessons.
He doesn’t want to know because it doesn’t fit his worldview, so he is going to make the same mistakes and we will all pay for those mistakes.
Badenoch launches a sustained attack on Andy Burnham, accusing him of being unprincipled and opportunist.
double quotation mark Labour are putting all their hope in just one man, but they don’t get a clean slate just because they have changed leader.
We are going to hold them to account and expose every single failure.
In fact, Andy Burnham doesn’t have a clean slate. This is a man he was happy to serve in Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet. He wasn’t the junior Defra PPS, he was the shadow home secretary, nodding along to a man who wanted to take the UK out of Nato, give up our nuclear deterrent and even disband our army.
When Andy Burnham was in opposition with Corbyn, he didn’t feel a need to change the leader.
But after Keir Starmer won a landslide, Burnham couldn’t wait to get back and take it off him.
That is who Andy Burnham is. Don’t let this man fool you with his fluttering eyelashes and his pork scratchings.
He said opening No 10 North was the best day of his life. Really? It’s got a fake cabinet room, a cardboard cut-out of Larry the Cat. And the address isn’t even number ten. It’s all make believe.
Badenoch claims the Tories are ready for an election.
double quotation mark I want us to win in three years time.
To be honest. I want us to win next week.
We are ready for an election whenever it’s called, because we are the only party that understands what has gone wrong in Britain and knows how to put it right.
Badenoch says the Tories have changed – like M&S.
double quotation mark We have changed our party.
There is still a lot of work to do. People are looking through the shop window. They like what they see. But let’s be honest, not enough of them are buying it. We need to fix that.
A few weeks ago I was at London Fashion Week attending Marks and Spencer’s first ever catwalk show.
M&S is a brand that has been around for a hundred years. Not so long ago, critics said they were a bit stuffy and stuck in the past. Some were even questioning whether the brand would survive. Do you see where I’m going with this conference?
M&S is back in fashion. Great looks at affordable prices. They have adapted their style for today’s market and people are flooding back, including me.
Badenoch says Tory MPs like each other.
And she urges people to stand for parliament as Conservatives.
double quotation mark If you’ve never thought about a career in politics, now’s your time.
We want talent from all walks of life.
Every single Conservative MP and candidate must bring Conservative values and principles to the table and stick to them.
So conference, all our candidates will sign a commitment to these high standards – integrity, duty, discipline. Common sense is non-negotiable.
The country needs to know that when you vote Conservative, you get Conservative.
Badenoch pays tribute to her shadow ministers.
double quotation mark No other party in Britain has got a team with talent like mine.
Repeating a joke Chris Philp made himself, she says this summer he was the first British politician to be fired on by the French navy since Trafalgar.
(Except they did not fire at him, and may not have known he was.)
Badenoch says the Tories have learned from their mistakes.
double quotation mark Unlike Andy Burnham, I believe we need to learn from the past, not live in the past.
We have acknowledged our mistakes. We have set out what this party believes.
We are making it clear that those beliefs are expected of everyone who stands for us.
In the past, we had people who used our party to get elected and then betrayed our values.
I am building a united team of people, a team motivated by public service, not self-service.
And she says she has got rid of the trouble makers.
double quotation mark The plots and the infighting. Remember all that drama that’s gone?
The Conservatives have had an export boom. We have had an export boom of drama queens going to reform.
Badenoch accuses Andy Burnham of opening the door to a second independence referendum in Scotland.
(That is a reference to this Burnham answer at PMQs. Burnham later said he would not allow a second referendum.)
Badenoch says only the Conservatives will fight for the union.
