Badenoch's excuses are no substitute for policy

Writing for ConHome today, Giles Dilnot makes excuses for Badenoch's lack of policy. There’ll be no new detailed policies announced this far out from an election, he says, rattling off the usual tropes. Firstly, he asks "why give your opponent’s time to either steal your ideas or take four years slowly attacking them?" That tells us a lot about the timidity of their thinking.

When Jenrick threw his hat in the ring, he put out his basic definition of principles, which were loosely based on national conservatism. That provided a philosophical anchor, and a direction that Badenoch simply doesn't have. She has no diagnosis, and no intellectual underpinnings. That's the first problem. We don't need to know the precise details, but we do need to know whether or not we're on the same page.

Conservatives who've given the issues any serious thought understand what is going wrong and why. Nothing gets built because of the NIMBY veto. Nothing gets done because judges get the final say. Nobody is deported thanks to our slavish devotion to the HRA and ECHR, and Refugee Convention. Our national grid is teetering on the brink because of renewable energy. Our economy is flatlining because taxes are too high.

As much as anything, it all comes down to a lack of political will. What's required is pretty much a rollback of Blair's constitutional meddling and to reassert the primacy Parliament over binding targets and "international law". Further to this, we need our own version of DOGE. The apparatus of state must be torn down and rebuilt from the ground up.

Nobody is expecting or demanding detailed policy to the nth degree, but we do need to see some sign that Badenoch "gets it", and recognises the enormity and urgency of what must be done. We do not want more wonkish technocratic tinkering. We want a full system reboot. Nothing else will do.

To say that Labour will steal policies is risible. Labour isn't going to repeal Net Zero Targets. Labour is not going to withdraw from the Refugee Convention. Labour is not going to repeal the HRA or dismantle the DEI empire. Labour is not going to abandon renewable energy. They might abandon heat pumps and the EV mandate but those are policies we WANT them to steal ASAP, for the good of the country.

And yes, if you set out policy, the opposition will attack it. That's called politics. You set out your philosophy and your ideas and you go out and argue the case, otherwise you're spending four years on the defensive, treading water, and losing ground as everyone can see you have no answers and no direction.

Dilnot talks about the value of think tanks who do the grunt work of policy, but here's the thing. None of them are start-ups. They didn't start work yesterday on the command of Kemi Badenoch. They're already sitting on mountains of policy. There are volumes already written on immigration, not least by the CPS. There are immediate principles and actions the party must be campaigning for now, not least the abolition of ILR. A policy foundation would give direction to Badenoch's leadership. Instead we're being told to sit tight with nothing to go on, for years, while the party haemorrhages local support.

Dilnot further remarks that "The challenges of 2025, will be subtly different in 2029". Perhaps, yes. The fundamentals will be the same though, because the core problems we've been wrestling with have been the same for at least two decades. They all lead back to the same basic underlying causes which are not going to be fixed with managerial tinkering.

You'll get no argument from me that Refrom's collection of populist tropes fall far short of actual policy, and their lack of attention to detail marks them out as rank amateurs who would rapidly hit the wall of reality, but they at least have the vaguest outline of where they want to be. Reform has a fuzzy vision but no policy but the Tory cupboard is completely bare. That, fundamentally, is why the Tories are sliding in the polls.

Badenoch isn't going to build a reputation for competence and credibility by dropping policy six months out from an election. She should already have a functioning diagnosis and a policy agenda, and should already be prosecuting her campaign. She can add details as she goes, but she should have recognised that the 2029 election campaign has already started.

If she's in a position where her 2029 policies will be as much a surprise to her as anyone else, then she is simply not leading. She is not an intellectual director, she is merely a spokesman for a detatched policy unit, and one who will have to explain why policy contradicts so much of what she's improvised to fill airtime in the interim.

Dilnot's excuses would be thin at the best of times, but this is no ordinary election cycle. A political sea change is sweeping through the west. We are at the fag end of the post-war liberal era. The Labour party is flailing and failing because it exists only to prop up a dying order. A major political realignment is coming, which is essentially Brexit's unfinished business. There is a space-race to define what follows and the public is not in the mood for more of the same half-baked excuses as to why things cannot be done. The Tories are not owed the benefit of the doubt that in four years time they might have half a clue.

I've lambasted both the Tories and Reform for their lack of policy, but it's not just the lack of policy. It's the lack of an intellectual underpinning. It's the lack of ambition, the lack of credibility, the lack of seriousness, and the lack of urgency. If the Tories think we're going to stick around and wait years for them to give us a hint of what they're about, they are very deeply mistaken.