Kemi Badenoch’s war on fun

If the aim of this policy is to shame people out of poverty, then it will not work. But there is a rather obvious problem with the philosophy.

If the principle is that, having fallen out of work, you can no longer be trusted to make ordinary decisions about your own life and that the government will decide whether you are sufficiently responsible to buy a pint – that is a remarkable position coming from a party which spent years screeching about the “nanny state”. 

What happened to the old Tory instinct that governments should be smaller, citizens more self-reliant, and the state less able to tell people how to live?

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It also sits rather awkwardly alongside Badenoch’s own supposed ambitions to save the British pub: why would you propose that an entire class of citizens could walk through its doors but be unable to spend their benefits there?

For years, the right delighted in portraying the left as a collection of sour finger-wagging moralists who wanted to regulate people’s pleasures. Now the Conservatives appear to have discovered the joys of deciding which pleasures are respectable enough for the unemployed.

And it obviously wouldn’t even work on a practical level. People who are genuinely treating unemployment as a lifestyle choice – if that group is as large and straightforward to identify as the right wing rhetoric suggests – are unlikely to be shamed into repentance, or foiled by a restricted payment card. They will simply barter, borrow, or find another way around it. How do you think so many kids get access to booze and fags?

And where does one draw the line? If this proposal were to become law, then a precedent would have been set. What would come next – would people who had left prison be restricted in what they can buy? What about people classified as obese. Would there be a special card that stops them buying McDonald’s?

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The welfare system is, of course, in dire need of reform, and I think Labour have been too cowardly to make some of the tougher decisions that might make parts of the party uncomfortable. 

But if Badenoch and the Tories really want to look like a credible threat to the incumbent government, they should focus on the issues they have been fairly good at nailing down, where the government perhaps hasn’t quite got its eye on the ball: stamp duty and student loans, for example. They should probably avoid policy announcements that will generate a 15-minute debate on GB News before being promptly forgotten.

This is why the proposal feels like a flippant piece of pre-Budget positioning. And oddly, the Conservatives didn’t need it this week. YouGov’s latest polling puts Conservative support at 21%, and suggests they would win 85 more seats than projected by previous polls. 

They’re quietly regaining support just by appearing more competent and less nasty than the clowns that came before them (deftly helped by an imploding Reform UK). So why grasp at such a mean-spirited stick?

Badenoch hasn’t really been properly tested yet, because so much political attention is currently focused on Reform versus Labour. But if Reform were to crumble before the next election – which isn’t a total impossibility – eyes would be firmly planted back on the Conservatives. And if this is their best and biggest idea, I wouldn’t hold my breath. Maybe the moral of the story is that the current Tories are at their best when they resist the temptation to say anything big at all?