Reform is Corbynism with a flag: the Tories stand for economic freedom
I confess I shudder every time I hear that word. Yet politicians from Keir Starmer to Nigel Farage are now gleefully chanting 'nationalisation!' as a solution to every economic challenge in the utterly deluded belief that the answer to our problems is getting civil servants to take control of business.
The Conservative Party knows that the state is already too big, much too slow, and doing far too much and doing it badly. Some of that happened under previous Conservative governments. It's my job to fix this and to ensure that those mistakes are never repeated.
The solution isn't more government, it's smarter government, better government – and that means getting out of the way of private enterprise.
Growth comes from business, from the risk-takers, from the people who devote their time, money and energy to building things.
It doesn't come from the politicians sat in offices dreaming up new ways to spend your taxes. Yet that is now the way Starmer and Farage are talking about economic growth.
Let's start with oil and gas. As many as 10,000 jobs have been lost in this sector recently. According to Offshore Energies UK, capital investment in our domestic industry is set to collapse from £14.1 billion to £2.3 billion in just four years. The business environment is not friendly and not competitive.
But what is Reform's answer? Give the Government a stake in new oil and gas fields.
Labour's? Hike the so-called 'windfall tax' and make it permanent. Both will scare off serious investors.
On Friday I called on the Labour Government to scrap the windfall tax on North Sea producers. The windfall is gone, but the tax is still there, strangling investment and killing jobs and growth.
I am proposing a solution that puts business and workers first. But naturally Labour criticised it.
The same fantasy economics is playing out in steel. British Steel in Scunthorpe is haemorrhaging money – losing nearly £1 million a day. Labour's answer is to nationalise it. Reform's is to do the same, but with even more gusto!
When the Port Talbot steelworks faced a similar crisis, I worked with a private company – Tata Steel – to find a solution that made economic sense and secured a future for the community in South Wales.
Because unlike Starmer and Farage, I know to be successful a business doesn't need politicians telling it how to operate. It needs politicians who will listen to what those who do the job says works.
The Labour government started taking us backwards last year – sneaking through rail nationalisation, hoping voters had forgotten the British Rail disaster.
It's not just farcical that the first nationalised train ended up being a replacement bus service, it's a warning of what's to come.
And after oil, steel and rail, the next on their list is water. The drumbeat to nationalise Thames Water is getting louder. But the answer isn't to send civil servants in. The answer is to create a climate where investment flows in rather than out. That means protecting the profit motive, not punishing it.
Everyone knows we Conservatives have a battle on our hands. Reform pretends to be a Right-wing party, but economically Reform is Corbynism with a flag: more benefits, more subsidies, more central planning, more control. It is socialism that is dressed up as patriotism.
Under Labour, business taxes are at record highs. The Trade unions are running everything from education to business policy – hence the Employment Rights Bill that effectively makes everyone a union member unless they choose to opt out of it.
The public sector is getting inflation-busting pay rises, while the private sector (the source of economic growth) is getting squeezed. It should tell you all you need to know that 10,000 entrepreneurs have already fled the country since Starmer took over last year.
Reform and Labour both want to grow the state. Under my leadership the Conservatives will prioritise growing opportunity and prosperity. Margaret Thatcher once said progress comes from the 'inventiveness, ability, determination and the pioneering spirit' of ordinary people. She was right then and she's right now.
The Conservative Party is not here to run your business, or burden you with endless taxes and pointless regulation.
We are the last line of defence for economic freedom, and we will stop the other parties from taking away what belongs to you.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Herald Scotland
28 minutes ago
- The Herald Scotland
Scottish Tories struggle to be heard after election skelping
'We stopped Nicola Sturgeon converting her gender bill into law. And we have watched Labour try government — but Sir Keir Starmer keeps dropping the ball.' But for all the jibes, the problem facing Mr Findlay's party is that they are struggling to even get on the pitch. READ MORE Findlay: Tories can win seats at Holyrood election despite polls pointing to drubbing Tories unveil plans for 'Scottish first' medical student training policy For Women Scotland threaten SNP with fresh legal action over Supreme Court ruling The party suffered its worst-ever defeat at last year's general election, slumping to just 121 seats UK-wide — a loss of 244. In Scotland, the scale of the collapse was slightly masked. Despite a chaotic campaign that saw Douglas Ross alienate members and then quit before polling day, the party managed to hold on to five of its six seats. Although the Tory vote halved, support for the SNP — the main challengers in each Conservative-held seat — declined even more sharply. The ghosts of Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak continue to haunt the party, while the spectre of Nigel Farage looms ever larger. The latest projections from Professor Sir John Curtice, based on last month's Survation poll, paint a bleak picture for next year's Holyrood vote. His modelling has the Tories slumping to fourth place with just 13 MSPs — less than half their current tally of 30. The SNP would return 58 seats, while Reform UK would leapfrog the Conservatives to become the main opposition on 21. Labour would win 18 seats, with the LibDems and Greens on 10 and 8 respectively. Mr Findlay did not shy away from the scale of the challenge, admitting that a huge effort would be needed to even earn the right to be heard. Yet despite the grim outlook, the party is hopeful. 'You would think we had no right to be as upbeat as we are, but it is the phenomena of the Conservative Party,' said Stephen Kerr, MSP for Central Scotland. 'Against all of the odds, we are feeling genuinely optimistic and positive.'I think we knew that 2024 was going to be terrible. Having taken that skelping, I think people are back to renew the party — and that is the strong statement of both Russell and Kemi's remarks.' 'We are sitting in a much diminished form at Westminster, our worst ever election result in over 250 years of the Conservative Party really being in existence. And really beginning the fightback,' shadow Scottish secretary Andrew Bowie told Unspun Live, The Herald's politics podcast. 'And that is where we are right now — beginning that long, hard slog of regaining the trust of the British people, hopefully with a view to getting back into power in short order in four years' time.' Mr Findlay has settled into the role of party leader. He is much more relaxed and less like the deer trapped in the headlights he resembled when he took over from Douglas Ross last September. He is putting the effort in. One Tory staffer said the boss had rehearsed his 42-minute address at least eight times before delivering it to party members on Saturday lunchtime. It was an unashamedly Conservative speech with a raft of policies rooted in the party's traditional values: tax cuts funded by £650 million in savings from slashing quangos and civil service jobs; scrapping the SNP's 2045 net zero target; and a pledge to train more Scottish medical students to reduce NHS reliance on immigration. For years, Scottish Tory speeches at conference have been dominated by saying no to indyref2. That was in Mr Findlay's speech, of course — but it was his programme for government that was to the fore. 'The way we beat Reform is by having good, proper policies in place. We have not seen very much from Reform policy-wise,' North East list MSP Douglas Lumsden told The Herald on Sunday. 'I still think there is enough time [to turn things around]. It is 11 months before the election and this is about building a positive message we can take next year. 'We absolutely need to move on from the past.' The scale of the party's challenge — and the threat from Reform — was made painfully clear earlier this month at the Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse by-election, where the Tories came a distant fourth. In a seat where they had won 17.5% at the last Holyrood election, they only just managed to hold on to their Reform took 26% of the vote. While Labour's surprise win has led to grumblings in the SNP, Mr Lumsden insists the party is united behind Mr Findlay. 'We are 100% behind Russell. There is no briefing at all from anyone. Russell has a brilliant personality and the more people who get to know him the more they like him — so we need to promote Russell.' READ MORE While Mr Findlay's position might be safe, the same cannot be said for Kemi Badenoch. Potential leadership hopefuls are on manoeuvres. The leader of the opposition delivered her speech on Friday. It was only her second trip to Scotland since becoming leader in November. 'There is a lot of work to be done, a lot of messaging, a lot of renewal — and she has got the runway that Russell and the rest of us do not have,' Mr Kerr said. 'I am not worried about threats to her leadership. She is letting her colleagues get on with it. She is not a leader who is lying awake worrying about a challenge to her leadership,' he added. 'Anybody who is going to contest Kemi or Russell for leadership right now is mad — because the challenges will not change.' Mr Kerr compared Ms Badenoch to Margaret Thatcher: 'I am old enough to remember our first female leader and the same stuff was being said about her in terms of her role as Leader of the Opposition and her performance and PMQs — and look what happened to her.' 'You know, we have been written off as a party before,' Mr Findlay told The Herald on Sunday. 'There are many people at this conference who have been around for a very long time, and they have seen some pretty dark days. 'And you know what keeps people going? You know that resilience that we all saw in the hall today — it is because we know that what we stand for is right. 'We stand for personal responsibility, lower taxation, fairer taxes for people, integrity and ensuring the very best public services. We want a Scottish Parliament that is entirely focused on delivering for Scotland — not the fringe obsessions of the SNP and Labour.'So we will be fighting for every single vote.' Murrayfield is used to resilience and fighting talk — it is also, however, no stranger to the wooden spoon, a fate Mr Findlay will be desperae to avoid next May.
Daily Record
an hour ago
- Daily Record
Labour's £14bn 'fixation' with new nuclear power 'won't cut bills or help climate'
The UK Government last week announced a new 'golden age' of nuclear but academics and campaigners warn it will be a costly energy fail. Labour's £14billion 'fixation' with new nuclear power will be a costly flop and do nothing to lower Scots' bills or hit climate targets, experts have warned. It comes after Keir Starmer's goverment last week announced a 'golden age' of nuclear energy with a £14.2billion investment to finally build the delayed Sizewell C plant in Suffolk which it claimed will create 10,000 jobs. Ministers say the move is vital to prevent future blackouts and to help the shift to a low carbon economy. Now campaigners and academics warned nuclear energy is too expensive and plants take too long to build to make any dent in net zero efforts or prevent future blackouts. And they said the result of 'inevitable' cost overruns on nuclear projects would lead to a 'nuclear tax' on consumer bills. It follows pressure on the SNP to end its block on nuclear projects, with Labour saying it could open Scotland up to small modular reactors (SMR) if it wins at Holyrood next year. But Pete Roche, an Edinburgh energy consultant and anti-nuclear campaigner, said: "It's too late for nuclear. It takes too long to build. "We're trying to tackle a climate crisis here, we need to be fast - the faster, the better. "You can insulate people's homes and put up wind farms quite quickly in comparison to how long it takes to build a nuclear power station. "And the worry is when you're putting all your eggs in the nuclear basket, the money is getting diverted, civil servants' attention is getting diverted. "We're not focused enough on getting the energy transition based on renewables off the ground. "It's a fixation and the UK is not on its own. There's all sorts of talk in other countries of building nuclear power stations again. "It's almost like a mass psychosis because if they really investigated properly what the best use of public funds would be, nuclear wouldn't get a look-in." Dr Paul Dorfman, of the Bennett Institute at the University of Sussex, said more than £20billion had now been committed to Sizewell C but the final bill could easily be double that and likely more. He told the Sunday Mail: 'The vast majority of that money comes from public subsidy - in other words, the public will have to pay for all the inevitable over-costs and overruns, which is basically a nuclear tax.' Dr Dorfman continued: 'In Scotland, given the country's vast renewable power capacity, one wonders what would be the reason to burden Scotland with new nuclear. 'New nuclear builds, wherever they're built, are always vastly over cost and over time. 'Hinkley Point C [in Somerset] is already 90 per cent over budget and seven years late, with at least seven years of construction remaining. 'And the form of reactor that is doomed to be constructed at Sizewell C is the same reactor being built at Hinkley C.' He added: 'It is possible to sustain a reliable power system by expanding r enewables on all levels, whether that's solar, wind, geothermal, hydrogen, storage and all the rest of it… 'But nuclear risks eating all of the cake. 'The time lost may prove catastrophic, because according to the UK Government, it takes up to 17 years to build just one nuclear power plant. 'Meanwhile all SMRs are in the design phase. 'In terms of the climate, we are running out of time now.' And because of the time it takes to build a nuclear station, he declared: 'Nuclear cannot keep the lights on.' Join the Daily Record WhatsApp community! Get the latest news sent straight to your messages by joining our WhatsApp community today. You'll receive daily updates on breaking news as well as the top headlines across Scotland. No one will be able to see who is signed up and no one can send messages except the Daily Record team. All you have to do is click here if you're on mobile, select 'Join Community' and you're in! If you're on a desktop, simply scan the QR code above with your phone and click 'Join Community'. We also treat our community members to special offers, promotions, and adverts from us and our partners. If you don't like our community, you can check out any time you like. To leave our community click on the name at the top of your screen and choose 'exit group'. If you're curious, you can read our Privacy Notice. Tor Justad, chair of Highlands Against Nuclear Power (HANP), highlighted the continuing issues related to the old Dounreay plant which shut down in 1985 around radioactive waste. He said: 'For me, investing in nuclear makes no sense, whether economically or in terms of safety or benefit to the wider community. 'We don't need these massive white elephants which always end up costing twice what they started with and take twice the length of time to build than they predicted. 'And this argument about base load doesn't take into account the storage possibilities for renewables that we're developing at a rapid pace, including here in the Highlands. 'We can store electricity now in ways that we never could do ten years ago, and that will continue to improve.' He added Labour's pro-nuclear stance is 'a real danger' in Scotland. The UK Government's Department for Energy Security and Net Zero said: 'We reject these views." Noting the £14.2billion investment and jobs boost, it added: 'We are ending the no-nuclear status quo as part of our Plan for Change and are entering a golden age of nuclear with the biggest building programme in a generation... "This is the government's clean energy mission in action – investing in lower bills and good jobs for energy security.'
The Independent
2 hours ago
- The Independent
Starmer accused of U-turn after ordering inquiry into grooming gangs
Sir Keir Starmer has been accused of a U-turn after committing to a statutory inquiry into the grooming gangs scandal. After resisting pressure for months to implement a full probe, the Prime Minister said he had read 'every single word' of an independent report into child sexual exploitation by Baroness Louise Casey and would accept her recommendation for the investigation. Earlier this year, the Government dismissed calls for a public inquiry, saying its focus was on putting in place the outstanding recommendations already made in a seven-year national inquiry by Professor Alexis Jay. Reform UK leader Nigel Farage described the move as a 'welcome U-turn', while Kemi Badenoch called on him to apologise for 'six wasted months'. 'Just like he dismissed concerns about the winter fuel payment and then had to U-turn, just like he needed the Supreme Court to tell him what a woman is, he had to be led by the nose to make the correct decision here,' she said. 'I've been repeatedly calling for a full national inquiry since January. It's about time he recognised he made a mistake and apologised for six wasted months.' Speaking to reporters travelling with him on his visit to Canada, the Prime Minister said: 'I have never said we should not look again at any issue. I have wanted to be assured that on the question of any inquiry. That's why I asked Louise Casey who I hugely respect to do an audit. 'Her position when she started the audit was that there was not a real need for a national inquiry over and above what was going on. 'She has looked at the material she has looked at and she has come to the view that there should be a national inquiry on the basis of what she has seen. 'I have read every single word of her report and I am going to accept her recommendation. That is the right thing to do on the basis of what she has put in her audit.' The Times newspaper reported that the findings of Baroness Casey's review will be set out in Parliament on Monday. The inquiry will be able to compel witnesses to give evidence, and it is understood that it will be national in scope, co-ordinating a series of targeted local investigations. Prof Jay's 2022 report concluded there had been institutional failings across the country and tens of thousands of victims in England and Wales. A national row over grooming gangs was ignited in January after tech billionaire Elon Musk used his X social media platform to launch a barrage of attacks on Sir Keir and safeguarding minister Jess Phillips. It followed the Government's decision to decline a request from Oldham Council for a Whitehall-led inquiry into child sexual abuse in the town. The Government later commissioned a 'rapid' audit by Lady Casey into the nature and scale of group-based child sexual abuse, which had been due to take three months but was delayed.
