Speaker 1I can just hear Labour now
Speaker 2saying Liz Trust Budget.
Speaker 3Everything that we have announced this week at conference, everything we've announced before that, we have set out forensically exactly the choices that we would make, how we would fund that and more. Because our golden economic rule says for every two pounds that we cut, and we will be cutting government spending and Labour won't like that.
Speaker 1Andrew Griffith, Shadow Chancellor, lovely to see you. Now, some might say that cutting inheritance tax is cutting tax for the wealthy. What's your response to that?
Speaker 3Well, they'd be wrong, really. Of course, it is on people who've got assets, but increasingly those are ordinary people who've done the right thing, who've worked hard, saved that human emotion of trying to pass on a better life to your family. And Labour's significant. significantly expanded through things like fiscal drag, failing to uprate the limits, but also extending it to family farms and family businesses. They've brought many, many more people into the jeopardy of facing inheritance tax, that increase to people's pension pots as well. So the truly wealthy have always used trusts and tax planners to avoid this. This is those for whom have either had bad luck, they've had an early death, or they've been dragged into the net of inheritance tax. Conservatives have long said, "Look, this is a bad tax morally. It's often double or triple tax. Tax on your income, tax again, perhaps on capital gains, and then finally tax on a death." So Conservatives have articulated, I think, for a long time the case. It's not the first time the Conservatives have promised to remove inheritance tax, but we will only be able to do so with what we can afford. That doesn't necessarily mean we can do everything at once, but it's in terms of the priorities. And I think that's what's going to be the key to the future of the Conservative government. It is one of those bad taxes, Camilla, and a government that's truly on the side of working people, who are trying to get on and make better lives.
Speaker 1This is a very strong candidate. But is it well off working people? Because in kind of presenting an unashamedly wide brush appeal to the blue wall, it sort of indicates that the Conservatives might have given up on the red wall, because you appreciate that with reform nipping at your heels there, you've reached the parts other Tories couldn't, that actually that's gone. And so you're absolutely laser focused now on winning back the middle classes, and particularly those voters who might have flirted with the Lib Dems in the past.
Speaker 3Look, I don't accept that. I mean, the tax system that I and Kemi want is one that is lower overall for everybody. It's a simpler tax system. So sometimes that means removing taxes, reducing the rate, eliminating distortions. That's why we did what we did on the childcare tax cliff. Where you pay, you earn one more pound in income and you could face tens of thousands of pounds. That's very distortive. It's a very bad tax system. It's going to take time to clean that up. But we're very clear about the sort of tax system that we want to see. And values matter. No tax system is neutral as to the values. We're sitting in Birmingham. Birmingham is at the heart of industry business. There'll be many businesses, family businesses and others in Birmingham who would be caught in the realm of inheritance tax as they try and pass their business on to another generation. The reason Birmingham is such a prosperous city down the generations is because capital hasn't been taxed prohibitively and destroyed every time there's a change in a generation.
Speaker 2Now, Andrew, I can just hear Labour now saying Liz trusts budget. The point being is an agreement across the country that we're in a financially perilous situation. And what Labour will say is, this is not a time in which you can be making these sorts of promises on tax, which they will allege are unfunded. So how would you respond to the charge that you're repeating Liz Truss' mistake of promising something that the country is just not fiscally in a position to underwrite?
Speaker 3Everything that we have announced this week at conference, everything we've announced before that, we have set out forensically exactly the choices that we would make, how we would fund that and more because our golden economic rule says, for every £2 that we cut and we will be cutting government spending and Labour won't like that. We will be addressing the out of control welfare bill and Labour won't like that. There is a clear divide, again, in British politics about the choices that we would make and the choices that the left would make. But we're setting out that forensically clearly. I spent over a decade as finance director of one of the UK's biggest companies, balancing the books, as it were, showing the source and application of funds, laying out your choices openly, and honestly is in my DNA. It runs through me like a stick of rock. So we're not going to play fast and loose with the nation's finances. And that's a promise I can give to Telegraph listeners and readers that we will always discharge our fiscal duty.
Speaker 2It's just in terms of what you've been trying to get attention for, this has felt like quite a big spending or tax cutting conference. Now, this is because Kemi is trying to lay out these red lines to say that if we get elected, here's what you know we will do. And because we promised it, the last Tory administration, we won't go back on it. But if I think about some of the things that I have heard, an extra spending on an Iron Dome of about 10 billion pounds, you've made a pledge to cut a tax at every budget. Not cut a tax, but abolish a tax at every budget. That's quite big. And in your savings, every pound of saving, 50 pence going towards the deficit. This is all sort of adding up. And I'm wondering, are you talking yourself into a corner where either when you enter government, you have so many cuts to keep up with yourself that you end up crashing the economy? Or you're going to have to U-turn on some of this stuff because you just don't know what the fiscal situation will be in two or three years time?
Speaker 3Look, very fair. Let's unpick that bit by bit. First of all, it is my ambition to cut a tax in every budget. Some of those as the. Is it cut or abolish?
Speaker 2Forgive me. Abolish.
Speaker 3Abolish, yeah. But it's an ambition. So I don't want to be too pedantic. But of course, our fiscal duty. It may not happen. It may not happen. Our fiscal duty, I want to be really clear, it's my ambition, like Nigel Lawson, to abolish a tax in every budget, but that is subordinate to our fiscal duty. We're not going to play fast and loose with the nation's finances. That's not who I am. Not every tax, as you well know, raises a very significant amount of money. Even inheritance tax raises less than 1% of the overall receipts that the Treasury gets. So we're not talking about huge changes to the nation's. There are bigger taxes. Sometimes there are simpler taxes as well that more people pay. So let's put all of this in context. And when we talk about spending cuts, remember, the UK government is now spending 45 pence in every pound. It spends over 1.6 trillion. So now those are huge numbers. I accept that listeners will find it hard to understand that. But when we're talking about the cuts, we really are talking about relatively small amounts of that. So, yes, we can do this. I won't say anything. There's a lot that we can't do. There is a different degree of preparedness in what we're doing. Yes, there's a lot this week because this is a conference. It's about ideas. It's about showing who we are. My favourite announcement, everyone will have their own, I'm a bit biased. My favourite announcement has been reducing the cost of a new home by £50,000. That doesn't cost the taxpayer anything. That's about removing net zero mandates, sustainability, accessibility, gold-plated building regulations.
Speaker 1Some of the stuff the Tories introduced.
Speaker 3Oh, most of it the Conservatives introduced, Camilla. We're under new leadership. We are back to our core principles. And I was very clear in my speech earlier this week that we didn't get it right. In fact, one of the reasons why we've seen so much nonsense coming out of Liverpool is that we didn't even fight the battle of ideas. We didn't make the case for a smaller state for less regulation for lower taxes. But, you know, that's starting to disappear in the rearview mirror. You know, it's been a while. Since we were in government. We're now in our second socialist prime minister and the Conservative Party is united and is starting to talk about full-throated Conservative policies.
Speaker 1How are you going to convince the public that actually austerity is efficiency? Because you mentioned the prime minister there. He's kind of Mr Eyelash's nice guy. By comparison, if you're going to massively cut government spending, you're going to look like the nasty party again. And what we have learned for right or for wrong since Covid is that the public does like Corbynomics, quite likes free money, free stuff.
Speaker 3That's not actually my experience. First of all, like my job as chancellor to be the one with the discipline as finance director, you very quickly realise that every part of any organisation, whether it's the Daily Telegraph, Sky, will always its capacity to think of ideas to spend money will always outstrip its ability to do so. So I've made peace with the fact that you won't be necessarily popular. You might be respected, but you won't be popular. That is something that any chancellor, any prime minister needs to be willing to do. We've seen too many people pleasers try and lead this country. That hasn't worked. It's got us into the mess that we are. But also, if I think about my own experience as a constituency member of parliament, I don't think a lot of these choices are that hard. People talk about welfare. The broad population is well to what people would regard as the right of centre on issues like welfare. It's only in SW1 and maybe the media that people get reticent about reforming welfare, ordinary people who are getting doing two, sometimes three jobs, both parents working to try and make ends meet. They fully understand that there are people out there with their new motability car and who are not putting in the hours and not even trying hard to look for a job.
Speaker 2Go back to Camilla's question, though, about which voters you're targeting. I have felt this is a conference that could win you, say, Chelsea and Fulham. But I just want to check what you stand for for poorer voters. I mean, if I think about some of the things you're emphasising, like inheritance tax or stamp duty, this is a very middle class pitch. Go further outside the country. Go to a depressed seaside town. Tell me what you are offering to a young person in their twenties to help them get ahead in their life.
Speaker 3A job, a prospect, of a house, living in a country where economic growth just happens, where the public realm gets better because we're a country that's growing again, actually building things, the prospect of a better life. I said in my speech, you know, hope isn't something you can just print and hand out like a food stamp. But hope is important for young people. They've got to believe that they're going to have a better life by staying in our country than by leaving, as too many young people are, for overseas. And that's nuts and bolts. That's very practical. If you can take, and not every young person is going to buy a brand new home, I accept. But if you can take £50,000 off the cost of a new build home, that on average is just under £400,000, that's a big difference. That's a couple of years worth of otherwise having to save up another couple of years of living with your parents. If you scrap, and you know, there'll always be a little bit of a media fetish for novelty. So let's be clear. We've said a year ago, we would scrap Labour's job destroying unemployment bill. It's already been. We put 200,000 people out of work in combination with Rachel Reeves' national insurance rises. The thing that young people want more than anything is a job. That's the pathway to independence. It's a pathway to having savings, a home, a family. And perhaps it hasn't been talked about enough at this conference because it's all about the announcements, but that would be a game changer. If we can get young people, the one in six young people that are not in work into a job, that's a pathway for a better life. If we don't fix that as a country, that is what we're going to do. And that's what we're going to do. That's why young people leave, young people end up in despair, young people end up on a life of welfare.
Speaker 2You have more business private experience than I believe the entire cabinet put together, which is admirable and exactly the kind of thing that people want to see from a Chancellor. So it actually understands how the economy and how the private sector works. Have you ever been on benefits? No. You say things like hand out like a food stamp, and it's just a little bit insulting. Because being on benefits, it's not.
Speaker 3I didn't say that about benefits, to be fair, Tim. I said that about hope. I said labour think you can hand out hope. You can't manufacture hope. Hope is something that people find themselves.
Speaker 2Yes. But you want to introduce something a little like the American style food stamps, because your plan on benefits is that you can be put onto a subsistence system where you get a card which you can't pay for with fags and booze. And I get that. But all this language around this conference of kicking people off benefits, forcing them to go out to work, I just want to check that the Tory party hasn't forgotten that it's not easy being on benefits. Most people are not making a choice. It's a horrific bureaucracy that's very difficult to work one's way through. And the spirit of the Cameron era was, we want to help you get off them, not kick you off them, because we think you're just living off the rest of us. I want to make sure, I want to double check that, as Camilla put it, the Tories haven't turned nasty on us.
Speaker 3I don't think. Look, firm but fair, right? I wouldn't accept any other adjectives, firm but fair. But I don't think you were on the panel or came to the panel, yes, I think you were on the panel. But I don't think you were on the panel. But I don't think you were on the panel.
PodcastTranscript AI