Daily Express interview: Burnham's plan for Britain

Am I?

Yes, you are. And I think that uh after people heard Andy Bernham's speech yesterday, they will see that um we've got old school socialist labor back and people are going to want uh authentic conservatism back and that's what I'm bringing.

Uh this conference is about the next step uh on the journey back to delivering for the country. I want delegates to know that the promise I made to renew our party is one that is being kept and I have lots of great updates for them uh to our party members about how we are showing the country that we are different from Labor, different from reform and different from the Conservative Party that the country said no to um in 2024 when I was uh last in Birmingham.

Uh not live. No, I have seen I've seen enough.

I just think that uh Andy Bernham wants to please people and that speech was to please the Labour Party. He basically was giving us a manifesto for an election that is not happening. uh according to him he says he's not calling a snap election but what were his three victor it um I don't I to be honest I'm not sure he ma he knows what's his own mind uh when he wakes up in the morning he's made an announcement to change the voting system I don't know anybody walking around this country with all the problems we have who thinks that once we change the voting system everything is fine it's Westminster bubble stuff and it's all about uh what he's going to do with the next election same thing with his um triple lock announcement he won't do it Now he's talking about at the next election. Why is he talking about the next election if um instead of what he's doing today? I think it's because he's planning one.

And so I'm getting ready.

Well, I lost my dad uh four and a half years ago, so I know what that's like. I mean, even now I get emotional talking about it. So, I think that it's nice to see the human side uh of uh a prime minister. I think it's something which reminds people that, you know, no matter what part of the political spectrum uh we might be on, we all have to deal with the same things. Uh and most of us will uh have to deal with the loss of our our parents.

It's quite a tough thing. So, I'm not and it's still pretty recent for him. It's not something that happened, you know, two years ago. I think it happened two weeks ago. So, um I'm not surprised that he he got emotional.

I would have if I'd been in the same situation.

So, the triple lock uh is our policy. We brought it in uh when we were in office in 2010. He's saying that he wants to scrap it. My view is that he needs to be cutting welfare, that's what he should be doing. The amount of money he's saving uh when it eventually comes in is uh 15 billion a year, the 15.

the amount of extra money we would have had to pay on welfare uh while Labour was uh in office is 50 billion. He doesn't want to deal with that. So he's not dealing with today's problems. He's again promising jam tomorrow. I don't think that's right.

Well, our our draft manifesto is the policies that we've we've announced. That is our intention.

he's not in my shadow cabinet.

The reason why uh the triple lock was brought in was because when Labour left office in 2010, there was a lot of pensioner poverty and what I know is that uh 1112,000 is not a lot for people to live on in a year. What we need is growth. Uh so rather than uh doing what Andy Bernham is doing, which is focusing on a symptom of a lack of growth, I want to deal with the cause, which is the growth itself. If we were getting richer as a country, nobody would even be talking about the triple lock. So when people bring it up with me, you know, I tell them that I understand why they're making the argument, but it's not where it's not where you you start.

If someone's ill, you know, getting them a tissue is not how to it's not how to cure them. It's dealing with the symptom of something more fundamental that's wrong with our economy and Andy Bernham doesn't have any answers.

No, it won't be.

Yes, tax rises are coming. Um I don't think Andy Bernham has done his has done his sums. Um I don't think he's good at doing his sums because saying that you're going to remove the triple lock to pay for social care, the numbers don't add up. Saying you don't want to cut welfare, but the triple lock, which uh you know is is is going to save less money than cutting welfare shows that he's not um doing his sums up. He is wanting to please the Labor Party and they are the welfare party right now.

That's what they are. And so what are they going to do? They will raise taxes to pay for their welfare and they will tax whatever it is that they can get their hands on. If it's not your house, it's your business. It's just going to be tax, tax, tax.

Um even one of their former advisers, um Andy Haldane, said this is a typical tax and spend socialist government. It's just got Tik Tok.

He's Yes. But um that's why I'm the best person to take him on because my policies are rooted very firmly in conservative principles, not just about what's happening now, but about what helped us in the past and which is going to help us in the future. So yes, he is ideological, but we all know Labour's ideology is wrong. It's wrong. That's why Tony Blair abandoned it and he won elections um you know three years in a row by actually no you know stopping the Labour party from doing the very worst that it would it would do.

I mean it it still created problems later uh which we didn't clean up enough of. But um I'm very ready to face down uh Andy Bernham. Uh I'm I'm looking forward to it actually.

It it is amazing that he thinks that re refighting that battle is what he wants to spend his time on. I mean, I I wasn't an MP when we had the EU referendum. I I was just an uh you know, just an everyday person, and I came into parliament amazed at how the plans hadn't been done. People hadn't worked anything out. We went round and round and round in circles.

It took ages to negotiate with the EU and we finally did it. What we didn't do was start actually using the benefits of leaving the EU to make the country richer. That's what I want to do. I'm focused on the future. Uh the idea that Andy Bernham, who can't even negotiate with his backbenches, is going to negotiate with the EU and get a a good deal.

I mean, we're not going to get in on the same terms that we were in before. Margaret Thatcher's rebate is gone. They're going to charge more money for things. You can't have the things he's talking about without freedom of movement. and it was freedom of movement and immigration that actually started getting um people's backs up and caused us to leave in the first place.

So, I don't think he's serious at all.

It's the stupidest thing. France is in the EU, Italy is in the EU, and they're still getting way more boats than than than we are. So if being in the EU stopped votes from uh arriving, why would you then then why is it still happening to those countries? It's just lazy talk. Um he is one of those people, you know, and there were some people um on the opposite side of the argument who believed everything that was going wrong in the country was because we were in the EU and once we left everything would be fine.

That was not the case. But now we have the opposite. People who think everything that's going wrong is because we left the EU and we've got to go back in. We need to start talking about the problems. Business is struggling.

Energy costs are too high. There too many taxes. Young people can't get a job. We don't need our young people to be competing with lots more people from the EU. I mean, we need to start creating jobs for them.

Well, well, we we're still scrapping stamp duty. I want your readers to know this is uh this is a policy and um I want people to know that this is going to be an aspirational conference and I would leave it aspirational.

I'm not saying anything about any new policy. I'm not neither saying yes nor no. You're going to have to wait for the aspirational policies.

Yes, I do. No, I think it's I think it's the right thing. Um and as you would have seen with my um announcement last week, was it last week or the week before? I've lost track of time on um uh letting tourists come and shop VA that free. It's all about removing those taxes which are stopping us from getting money.

There's no point wanting people to pay VATS if they're not coming here. We want them to be here and when they buy the goods then it helps the shop, it helps the retailer, it helps the craftsmanship, you know, that's all over the country. Those are the sorts of things we want to see. And uh inheritance taxes in my view are taxes which um people end up paying twice. They're not fair and they are also um uh deterring people from growing their businesses.

I've spoken to farmers who've chosen not to invest because they don't, you know, a parent is dying and they don't want to have to pay more for buying a new um uh you know for putting a new building on the farm. The same with family businesses. So I want your readers to know that uh this is something and I gave a speech on it. This is something that I want to do. We have to find the money for these things first.

simply announcing tax cuts without finding the money to pay for it. He's not responsible. Andy Bernham is announcing spending. He hasn't announced any savings at all, which is why I think he's coming for more taxes. I'm not like him.

Fiscal responsibility is important. I want Express readers to know that this is their money. Government money is their money, and we want responsible people in charge looking after it.

Yes. Because they don't have any ideas on the economy. They didn't say anything on defense um either, even though we know the security situation around the world is getting more dangerous. They want to talk about the things that they are comfortable with. changing the voting system, you know, giving out more bungs to the unions.

And that's that's basically what um his his speech was about. It was a Labour Party loving and as I said, they're not the Labor Party anymore. They're not the party of work, they're the party of welfare.

Always. Always. Um uh I I want people to always know that um my intention is to channel their their feelings and if that requires me being badass then yeah that will be okay.

Uh it's it's lots of different things. Um, one is that people can see that the Conservative Party has changed and continues to change. Uh, I was told that nobody would even want to hear from us for for the first two years. That's that's not the case. And they've seen us hold uh Karma's administration to account.

And they're going to see us do that again with Andy Burnham. Uh, the second thing is that the more people see of reform, the less they they like. When reform was just a party that wasn't conservatives, it was a great protest vote. But now people are asking, what are we actually going to get uh with uh a reform party in power? They don't have a defense spokesman.

Uh they don't, you know, they're not they're not really providing the depth uh that you would want to see from from a government. The behaviors have been problematic. You know, the leader in Wales this month was arrested, had to step down. The last leader in Wales is in prison for taking bribes from Russia. So, I think there's a there's a thing there about standards, but I still have a long way uh uh to go to get where I want to be, which is um a majority u in in um in in parliament.

That is the ambition. I'm confident we can do it, but we're not out of the woods yet. So, we've come a long way in terms of shedding uh baggage from the past. I want people to know that this is a new administration and uh we'll see about Andy Bernham's honeymoon. We'll see.

One thing in the poll actually it showed that both Robert Generick and Sella Braverman would lose their seats to a Conservative Bit of Shard and Freud there. Yeah. Um I've always said that uh many of the people who caused the problems uh in the Conservative party and helped to ruin our reputation have now run to reform and it's no surprise that uh as they went there that's when reform's problem started. Uh I think the voters in those constituencies want serious people who are actually going to deliver for their communities and uh uh both Newark and um farm will be having great new conservative candidates standing there.

Well, we've got

His plan is not comprehensive. What he has are announcements. I have got a plan. I have looked at every single thing that went wrong when we were uh in government and also what went wrong under Labor because if we remember the immigration spike started um under the previous Labor government. We brought it down a bit early in the coalition.

It went back up. So, I know exactly what's gone wrong. And I have got a borders plan, a borders plan which is quite detailed on what we're going to do. reform have announced that they won't be able to do anything for five years which I was quite astonished by. Our plan uh is going to start sorting things out a lot earlier than that.

Getting out of the convention on human rights is the number one thing and as soon as we've done that we'll be able to start actually just removing people who should not be in this country.