The Shadow Chancellor’s speech this morning was a predictable one. Mel Stride is the kind of Conservative who spin doctors love to send out on the media round: smart, well-briefed and able to stick to the party line. He is also the kind of Conservative who was very much not a fan of Liz Truss, in both temperament and in substance. Tory Kremlinologists will recall that he was one of the most ardent internal critics of her mini-Budget of September 2022, as the-then Treasury Select Committee chair. So, it was no surprise then that the top line from his speech was an apologia for Truss.
‘Never again’, promised Stride, ‘will the Conservative party undermine fiscal credibility by making promises that we cannot afford.’ Contrasting the ‘mistakes’ of Truss’s tenure with the Tory record from 2010 to 2022, he said that ‘the mini-Budget of September 2022 undermined those stable foundations we had built, and we will never allow that to happen again.’ Restoring the credibility lost during those seven weeks ‘will take time, and it also requires contrition.’ Though Stride never mentioned Truss by name, it was nothing less than a full-scale repudiation of her premiership.
Stride has been itching to make this speech for months. That he has now been given the green light by Kemi Badenoch’s office suggests the Tories believe now is the opportunity to go for Reform UK and claim to be the sole party claiming the mantle of fiscal responsibility. Stride cited the Tory commitment to the two-child benefit cap as proof of this, declaring that it was ‘only’ the Conservatives who have ‘spoken up for taxpayers’. It comes a day after Badenoch attacked Starmer at PMQs for ‘chaos, chaos, chaos’. As Labour flounders, the thinking goes, the reassuring figure of the Shadow Chancellor offers stability.
Few Tories would disagree with his central thesis on the UK economy: Britain spends, taxes and regulates too much. His speech drew heavily from the think tank world and was peppered with arresting statistics, such as the fact the ratio of regulators to financial services workers has increased from ‘1 to 300 in 2011’ to now ‘1 to 75 today’. Yet it is easy enough to criticise; solutions will much harder. After seven months in post, some Tories would like to see more action being taken here. For them, Stride’s announcement that ‘we are setting up policy commissions on both “taxation” and on “finance and the city” which will look in great depth at precisely these issues’ will be insufficient.
Having spent much of his speak rebuking Truss, Stride was then asked to praise her in the questions. After a pause, the Tory knight acknowledged that it was ‘absolutely right’ to say that ‘the status quo is no longer tenable’ and that in a more unstable world, a ‘much stronger growing economy’ is what is required. Pressed again to praise Truss, he declared: ‘We need to have responsible radicalism’, suggesting that it offered ‘the takeaway phrase of this morning’.
Stride certainly looks to have the adjective covered; now he must focus on the noun.
