A happy new year to you all. Parliament returned last week from the Christmas recess, into an icy chill. The economy is in bad shape, with the financial markets concluding the recent Budget will not boost growth. The consequence is higher borrowing costs, and the consequence of that is one of three options for Rachel Reeves: even more borrowing (unlikely, given the higher costs and her own ‘fiscal rules’), spending cuts (unlikely, given Labour MPs), or higher taxes (likely, given they will fall on the small businesses, property owners and wealth creators who don’t vote Labour anyway - or don’t usually, and I hope won’t again).
The real mission for the Government should be to reduce demand for high taxes, high borrowing and high spending by boosting growth and supporting people off welfare and into work. At Department for Work and Pensions questions before Christmas I asked the Secretary of State why she is doing so little to reform the swollen welfare system, following the positive reforms introduced by the last Government - answer came there none (see here).
My job in 2025, as shadow Welfare Minister, is to support reforms to the benefits system if the Government brings them forward, and to challenge them if not; and to help my Party develop our own plans for reform. We have a great opportunity, and a great imperative, to reduce the benefits bill, saving money for tax cuts and for investment in defence, policing, and the other priorities that people want their government to focus on.
The appalling scandal of the grooming gangs in English towns - well known already, but brought to attention once again thanks to Elon Musk - demands not just a proper national enquiry, which Kemi Badenoch is calling for but the Government is resisting. We also need a transformation in the way we think about integration, and the work of social services in respect of girls in the care system. We see in this scandal the colliding of two bad things: a barbaric culture, imported from the subcontinent, that sees vulnerable British girls as unclaimed property to be acquired and used for the gratification of men; and a perverted liberalism among social workers and council leaders which caused them to tolerate sexual relations between ‘consenting’ children and adults from an ethnic minority.
For too long we have believed that these issues - sex and race - are outside politics. That’s a good conservative instinct: these things are properly nothing to do with the government. But the liberal model only works when the public broadly conforms to expectations of conduct that allow for liberalism - when men are expected to respect women and girls whatever their ethnicity, and when adults are expected not to have sex with children. These basic lessons, it appears, now have to be imparted deliberately to certain immigrant groups and to the public sector.
