Kemi Badenoch has declared the Conservatives are “up for the fight” as she opened the party’s annual conference in Manchester. Breaking with tradition, the Tory leader delivered a welcome speech on Sunday, acknowledging the party faces “a mountain to climb” while polling third behind Reform UK and Labour.
Setting out her plan to leave the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and deport 150,000 people a year, Badenoch insisted the party could win the next election by “combining secure borders with a shared culture”. She said: “Nations cannot survive on diversity alone. We need a strong common culture rooted in our history, our language, our institutions and our belief in liberty under the law.”
The Conservatives published a plan on Sunday including the creation of a “Removals Force” inspired by the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency, a radical tightening of asylum eligibility, and abolition of courts handling immigration cases. Shadow home secretary Chris Philp said he would deport any foreign national expressing “racial hatred, including antisemitism” or supporting “extremism or terrorism”.
However, Badenoch declined to say where people would be deported to if they could not be sent to their own country, describing this as an “irrelevant” question. Shadow foreign secretary Dame Priti Patel told a fringe event that the proposed Removals Force would be “very different” from ICE, saying: “The two are not comparable. Our system and our structures and our laws are different.”
In her speech, Badenoch also stressed the party’s commitment to economic responsibility, saying it had “learnt” from Liz Truss’s mini-budget. She hit out at Labour and Reform, calling them “two sides of the same coin” that both practise “identity politics” and “division”. She said: “I am black, I am a woman, I am a conservative, and I know that identity politics is a trap.”
