UK politics live: Starmer dismisses online petition calling for new election

Badenoch called for a rethink in the role of the state.

We are trying to fix problems with the wrong tools. We are using a mindset and a paradigm that worked well in the late 20th century, but does not work well when we have aggressive competitor economies like China.

And when there is rapid technological innovation, when our society is getting older and the birth rate is still too low, more quangos, more interference, more regulations, more laws will not fix that.

We need to ask ourselves, ‘What is the role of the state? What can we do to create a level playing field and allow you to go out and fix those problems?’

Badenoch said she wanted politicians to cut back on regulation.

Politics needs to accept boundaries. Every day in the legislature, someone has a great new idea that sounds nice in principle, but in practice, creates more red tape, more bureaucracy, more burden. The incentive for us as politicians is to keep announcing new nice things.

But the way to fix things is not just about creating new laws. We must not be a bureaucratic state. We need to get a proper diagnosis of what is going wrong. Why is capital investment so low? Why is productivity still so stubbornly stalled?

I have read endless reports and many reviews with all sorts of potential solutions improving skills or getting our pensions working harder for us, and we have brought in regulations and policies to address this. And yet, still, things are not getting better. I think we need to look again.

So I’m not standing here telling you that I have all the answers. I am letting you know that I have seen the system from the inside and it is broken.

Badenoch also said she wanted to take a new approach to growth.

We have got to be more precise when we talk about growth. It is not just about increased GDP. It is not even just about increased GDP per capita. You can increase GDP by increasing immigration, but no one feels richer. In fact, some gets poorer. You can increase GDP per capita by getting more millionaires and billionaires to move to your country, but that won’t necessarily make everyone else better off. In fact, there are many studies that show even when nothing has changed, we are more likely to feel worse when we compare ourselves with those who are a lot wealthier than us.

I am talking about real growth, growth that people can see, growth that people can feel, seeing an improved environment around them, as well as having more money in their pockets to spend, knowing that we have enough money to provide security, to protect our families, but also to protect our country in increasingly dangerous times …

The bottom line is that economic growth is not the end in itself. It is a means to an end. The end is to make people’s lives better.

Badenoch says, as leader of the opposition, she wants to start by setting out principles, not policies.

So what are our principles? I believe that we need to have free and fair competition, not monopolies, not rent seeking, not corporatism, but in genuine competition that allows new entrants in and those who are no longer productive to evolve or leave the economy. That is what free enterprise is about.

We Conservatives must be the party of business, not just big business, not just corporates, but small business, too. Every big business started out as a small business, and that is why I am so concerned that the burden on them is still increasing with taxes, corporation tax, employers’ national insurance and new regulations …

So I am here to show you that I understand businesses values. I am not here to represent business interests. That’s your job. I’m here to let you know the Conservative party shares your values.

I’m often criticised for talking about capitalism. Someone once told me that capitalism is old fashioned. I don’t think so. I think it is important that we explain what capitalism in a free market environment means. Capitalism is not a dirty word, wealth is not a dirty word, profit is not a dirty word.

But we need to start explaining how these things deliver for the people out there people who often think that you are in it for yourselves.

Kemi Badenoch starts by asking how you can tell if a politician will do what they say they will do. She goes on:

If you really want to know what someone is going to be like, look at what they did when they had the chance.

And speaking to all of you today, not just as leader of the Conservative party, but as a former business secretary, many of you would have heard me talk about how we needed to deregulate, and you would have seen examples of how I tried to lift the burden on businesses.

Badenoch says, as a minister, she opposed “well-meaning but burdensome regulation”.

She says people often want the government to solve everything. But often government just needs to get out of the way, she says.

This is a very difficult argument to make. People want the government to fix everything. They want the government to solve everything, and if you ever sound hesitant, then they will make you out to be a cruel, unfeeling person, as I have discovered, to my own personal cost.

And this is partly how we have got ourselves into a state where debt is at record levels, and we are spending more on debt servicing than we are on health or on education or on defence. That needs to change.

Kemi Badenoch will soon be giving her first speech to a CBI conference as Conservative leader.

There is a live feed here.

Downing Street has defended Keir Starmer’s decision this morning to promote plans to make spiking a criminal offence (see 11.16am) – even thought it is already illegal.

Although No 10 said in its news release that spiking will become “a new criminal offence”, not that it will become an offence for the first time, people following the news casually could be lulled into thinking the government is banning something that is currently legal. Starmer himself implied this earlier today when he posted this on social media.

Spiking will be made a criminal offence.

My government was elected to take back our streets, central to this mission is making sure women and girls can feel safe at night.

Perpetrators of spiking will feel the full force of the law.

Asked if this was misleading, the PM’s spokesperson told journalists at the lobby briefing this morning that the government was creating a new offence to “send a very clear signal” that offenders should expect punishment. He went on:

This new legislation will also empower victims to report offences and give them confidence that the justice system will support them.

When it was put to him that Starmer’s tweet implied spiking was not already illegal, the spokesperson said the PM was referring to a new offence being created.

The spiking law is a good example of what the Economist’s Bagehot column described earlier this year as the “ban it harder” trend in British politics. “When it comes to tackling an injustice that is already against the law, the answer can be simple: ban it harder,” Bagehot wrote. On the subject of spiking in particular, the column said:

Spiking, in which a victim’s drink is drugged in order to rob or assault them, is a terrifying crime. It was already prosecutable under seven separate offences before the Home Office proposed legal amendments in December 2023 to show “without any doubt, spiking is illegal”. But the reason why prosecutions are rare, and the true scale of spiking hard to define, is because hospitals do not routinely test for drugs in emergency wards. A new offence is unlikely to change that.

The Foreign Office has announced a fresh wave of sanctions against Russia’s “shadow fleet” of oil tankers which it is using to try to evade international restricitons on its oil importants.

In a news release, the Foreign Office said:

Thirty ships in Russia’s shadow fleet, responsible for transporting billions of pounds worth of oil and oil products in the last year alone, have today been sanctioned by the UK. With half of the ships targeted today transporting more than $4.3bn worth of oil and oil products like gasoline in the last year alone, today is the largest UK package of its kind.

The move will further constrain the Kremlin’s ability to fund their illegal war in Ukraine and their malign activity worldwide, and brings the total number of oil tankers sanctioned by the UK to 73, more than any other nation – demonstrating the UK’s leadership on tackling the shadow fleet.

This is what Keir Starmer told ITV’s Good Morning Britain when asked about the online petition signed by 2 million people calling for an election on the grounds that “the current Labour government have gone back on the promises they laid out in the lead up to the last election”. Starmer said:

Look, I remind myself that very many people didn’t vote Labour at the last election.

I’m not surprised that many of them want a rerun. That isn’t how our system works.

There will be plenty of people who didn’t want us in in the first place.

So, what my focus is on is the decisions that I have to make every day.

Calling for a general election now when we had one less than six months ago and when the government has a working majority of 163 is clearly bonkers. But the petition is attracting signatures because it is being strongly promoted by high-profile rightwinger provocateurs like the X owner Elon Musk and the Reform UK leader Nigel Farage.