Kemi Badenoch has published a document titled The Right Way, setting out how the Conservative Party would govern if it wins the next election. The statement was released on the first day of the Tory conference, 50 years after Margaret Thatcher published The Right Approach.
Principles for a future Conservative government
The document establishes a series of principles that would guide the next Conservative government, including wealth creation, personal responsibility and a strong but restrained state.
Writing in the foreword, Mrs Badenoch said the document is "modelled, deliberately, on The Right Approach, published by the Conservative Party in October 1976".
Why the document was published now
She said that those documents "came before the 1979 manifesto, because the argument had to come before the programme".
She added: "They set out a diagnosis of what had gone wrong and an approach to governing from which policy could follow. We need to do the same again."
Honest about past mistakes
Mrs Badenoch went on: "I want to clarify not just what Conservatives propose to do now, but how or why we would decide differently when circumstances change. If someone picks The Right Way up in fifty years' time, I want them to understand what we believed had gone wrong with Britain, and how we thought government could put it right.
"That means being honest about how we got here. If the tone is harsher on Conservative governments it is not because I believe Labour knows any better - quite the opposite. Labour goes wrong when it follows its principles; we go wrong when we fail to follow ours.
"The Right Way is not about Labour. In any case, Britain's problems did not begin with the 2024 Labour Government. Some began under earlier Labour governments and became worse under Conservative ones. Others arose because assumptions shared across the political spectrum went unchallenged for too long.
"We promised lower immigration without a strategy for delivering it. Net Zero was legislated for before we had an economically feasible route to get there. We left the European Union without the economic plan that should have gone with it. The path to failure was paved with announcements, targets and good intentions."
Reclaiming intellectual foundations
Mrs Badenoch said that the purpose of the document is to reclaim the intellectual foundations of the Conservative Party and develop an approach to government before returning to office.
