Quote of the day 1st December 2025

"Labour’s Budget this week was not about fixing Britain. It was about getting Labour MPs to feel good about themselves and keeping Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves in Downing Street.

After the debacle over their removal of the winter fuel payment, they wanted something they could parade around as proof of their compassion. A chance to pose as the only decent people in the room.

Labour think they are kinder than you, more moral than you, and therefore entitled to spend your money as they please.

The problem is they do not understand where that money comes from. The tax system is not a magic cash machine. It’s the hard-earned wages of people who get up early, go to work, and keep this country going.

On Wednesday, Starmer and Reeves increased taxes even higher on beleaguered workers to pay for more benefits, then congratulated themselves for being caring.

Since the budget, I’ve done dozens of local radio and TV interviews and been asked the same question over and over again: “why are you against removing the two child benefit cap? Don’t you care about child poverty?”.

Of course I care about child poverty, but I’m against removing the cap because you cannot tax your way to prosperity. You cannot build a strong, confident country by making work less rewarding and dependency more comfortable - and it is not fair.

Labour’s decision to lift the two child benefit cap means more than half a million families will now receive an additional £5,000 a year from taxpayers, with some large families in line for more than £14,000 extra.

To put that in perspective, someone working full time on the minimum wage would have to almost double their salary to take home an extra £14,000 after tax.

Labour calls this compassion. In reality, it creates a system where people who work hard and do the right thing struggle to get by, while those who do not work can end up with greater security funded by other taxpayers who are getting crushed by the burden.

And the problem is getting worse. Since Labour came into office last year, 1 million more people have gone on Universal Credit alone.

2,000 new people each day were claiming health and sickness benefits when the Conservatives left office in July 2024. That number is now 5,000 new people each day. The rider is getting heavier than the horse.

Not only is the tax burden to pay for this increase in benefits destroying jobs and making the UK less competitive, it also sets up a completely warped set of incentives.

We all know people who would have liked to have more children, but chose not to because they could not afford it. Working families make difficult decisions about family size because their employer does not pay them extra for each child. Their money has to stretch further.

If you create a system where that rule no longer applies for people on benefits, it is no surprise that people on benefits make different choices.

You are rewarding decisions that working families simply cannot afford to make. That is not fairness, it is a quiet betrayal of those who play by the rules.

This is why, despite what Labour MPs like to claim, handing out ever more benefits is not a long-term solution to poverty. It may ease guilt on the Labour front bench, but it does not lift people into independence.

The best way to get children out of poverty is to make sure their parents are in work, and in a growing economy where wages rise and businesses can invest.

The Conservatives made mistakes in government, but we are right to be proud of our record on jobs. More than 800 jobs were created for every day that we were in office.

Millions of people moved off benefits and into work. Even after a global pandemic, unemployment was at a near historic low. 

That is what real compassion looks like. More children in working families. And we also gave those children the best chance of staying out of poverty by improving schools so they could succeed in the jobs we helped create."

Kemi Badenoch.