CONSERVATIVE leader Kemi Badenoch has refused to apologise for a social media post by party chairman Kevin Hollinrake which compared the Reform UK logo to a Nazi badge.
She told GB News: “He didn’t actually say anything at all. He just put a link to a Wikipedia page of who else had had golden historical badges. And let’s be clear, Reform has got much bigger problems.
“On Friday, they had the leader of the party in Wales sentenced to prison for 10 years for spying on our country for Russia, I think that’s a much bigger deal than a tweet.”
Asked if she would condemn the post, she said: “I think given that when Sarah Pochin said she didn’t like seeing black and brown faces on TV, Nigel Farage used to refused to apologise, I’m not going to apologise for a tweet that was made in jest.
“There’s far too much time spent on silly things like tweets at a time when we’ve got a budget on Wednesday, your viewers are out there really worried about what’s going to be coming, more tax rises. As leader of the opposition, my job is to focus on Labour. People can make jokes on Twitter. That’s fine, right now I’ve got to focus on what’s going on out there.”
Kemi Badenoch GB News 24:11.jpeg
On the Employment Rights Bill, she said: “I do think that we have a lot of rights in our country, much higher standards than pretty much any other country in the world. What we don’t have enough of right now is jobs and growth.
“What we have seen since Labour came into office is unemployment rising every single month, and this bill is going to kill more jobs. A lot of businesses are saying this is just too much. It’s going to cost businesses £5 billion a year, and that’s the government’s own estimates.
“They should just scrap it. It’s got lots of terrible measures in it, banter bans – someone called it a right to woke, which was hilarious…you know, the right to roam for unions into companies that have sort of 20 people. That’s ridiculous. They should scrap it.”
Asked if she supported the rise in the minimum wage, she said: “As Business Secretary, I was one of the people who increased the minimum wage, but what businesses are telling me right now is that it’s too high and they’re not hiring. You can put the minimum wage to £100 an hour. If businesses can’t afford it, then no one gets jobs.
“We need to focus right now on creating jobs. Young people out there are really suffering, the lowest graduate recruitment we’ve ever had. Let’s get people into jobs as quickly as we can.
“I don’t know what they’re raising it to, yes, the minimum wage has been too low. I personally, as Business Secretary, have raised it. But if businesses are saying we’re actually closing down because we can’t afford it, then I think we need to listen to them.
“It’s not government that creates jobs, it’s business. Government can raise it to whatever it is, but if business can’t afford it, who’s going to pay ? No one, and young people don’t get jobs.”
On benefits, Badenoch said: “We need to get people back to work. There are a lot of people who can work, who don’t work. Some of them choose not to, others think that they can’t for low level health conditions like anxiety, mild depression, actually work. It would be good for them.
“We found about £9 billion of savings for that alone. But the welfare bill right now is ballooning. A lot of people are exploiting the system. We’ve seen sickfluencers on Instagram telling people how to game the system. No more in face assessments. Let’s bring that back. Let’s cut the welfare bill down to something more manageable.”
Badenoch said the triple lock on pensions is a good use of taxpayer money: “Yes, it is. The triple lock is Conservative policy right now. We have people who have paid into their pensions, and actually making changes to this triple lock doesn’t do anything for growth. It’s just cutting and slicing the pie in a different way.
“Let’s actually focus on growth measures. We get growth by getting people into work. Let’s get Britain working again.”
Asked about a poll that suggested thenTories might win just 14 seats at the next election, she said: “Well, if you’re referring to the poll on Saturday, I was actually astonished that it was published. It was from ages ago. It’s not a recent poll and what we need to do is make sure people actually understand what’s going on.
“It is quite clear that a lot of the public out there are very frustrated. We lost the election last year. We have to acknowledge that we made mistakes. What we’re also seeing is Labour making a lot of mistakes, and people are looking at protest parties like Reform, like the Greens, it’s going to take some time for them to start looking at Conservatives again.
“I have said that again and again, but what we’re doing in the meantime is making sure that we have a plan that will work in government, because what Labour is doing is leaving a huge mess to clean up. No one else is going to even know where to start, except us.”
