Badenoch refuses Reform merger as she says UK ‘getting poorer’
Kemi Badenoch has said Britain is “getting poorer” and “living off the inheritance” of past generations, as she refused any suggestion of a merger between the Tories and Reform UK.
The Conservative leader made her first speech of 2025 in central London on Thursday. She focused on the past mistakes of her party in what she framed as a bid to restore voters’ trust.
She told journalists at the Onward think tank: “We are all getting poorer. Politicians across all parties have not told the truth about this and instead keep prescribing solutions that are actually making things worse.”
Badenoch argued politicians had to “say some things that aren’t easy to hear.”
She said: “We think we are rich, but we are living off the inheritance that previous generations left behind, a complacency that Britain will always be wealthy, and a refusal to live within our means.
“We owe it to that next generation to leave an inheritance for them and not mortgage their future to make our lives more comfortable, and that will demand the kind of tough, soul-searching conversations we’re not having right now.”
And she highlighted the UK’s vulnerable energy supply; the declining birth rate, an ageing society and weak productivity levels; the risk of hackers from rogue states; and high levels of immigration as specific issues affecting the nation.
She has declined to set out detailed policy proposals and argued against “policies without a plan” for delivery, which she said were simply “announcements”. Badenoch admitted her party had been guilty of this in the past, saying: “We announced that we would leave the European Union before we had a plan for growth outside the EU.
“We made it the law that we would deliver net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. And only then did we start thinking about how we would do that.
“We announced that we would lower immigration, but immigration kept going up.”
She added: “These mistakes were made because we told people what they wanted to hear first and then tried to work it out later. That is going to stop under my leadership.”
Pressed on the rise of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party, which has recently overtaken the Conservatives in the polls and is within a point of Labour, according to YouGov, Badenoch hit back, insisting: “Nigel Farage says he wants to destroy the Cons Party. Why on earth would we merge with that?”
She said Reform UK were also “just making announcements – we did that and people didn’t like it.
“Nigel Farage has been knocking around for 20 plus years. He’s been leading all sorts of different parties, so he has had a head start.
“I’ve been leading the Conservative Party for 10 weeks. Let’s see where we are in a few months and years.”
And she vowed her future policy platform would reflect her current position, saying: “We want lower taxes, stronger defence, lower immigration. The plans are going to take time.”
When it was put to her that the speech struck a ‘depressing’ note, Badenoch told journalists: “We have just suffered our greatest ever defeat. I don’t think the public will start trusting us if I turn up looking like I’m having a great time and everything’s fantastic.”