On October 8, 2025, Kemi Badenoch, the leader of the Conservative Party, took center stage at the party’s annual conference in Manchester with a speech that was as bold as it was controversial. While headlines initially focused on her pledge to abolish stamp duty for primary residences—a move that immediately drew comparisons to the ill-fated economic policies of Liz Truss—Badenoch’s address went far beyond tax reform, touching on the very fabric of British society, national identity, and the future of the Conservative Party itself.
Kemi Badenoch’s tax proposal, announced to a room that was far from packed, promised to eliminate stamp duty on people’s main homes. The policy, as reported by The Mirror, would still see stamp duty applied to second homes, properties purchased by businesses, and overseas buyers. Currently, no stamp duty is paid on homes valued up to £125,000, and first-time buyers are exempt if their property costs less than £300,000. The Conservative Party estimates the abolition would cost about £9 billion per year, which they claim would be offset by £47 billion in spending cuts targeting welfare, foreign aid, and the civil service.
But the numbers behind the plan quickly came under intense scrutiny. Pat McFadden, Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, didn’t mince words when he told Times Radio, “Well, we’ve been in this movie before, haven’t we? With the Tories announcing tax changes that they couldn’t fund. It happened three years ago. It happened in their manifesto.” He went on to call the pledge “desperate from a party that couldn’t fund our last round of tax cut promises,” drawing a direct line to Liz Truss’s disastrous 2022 mini-budget—a fiscal experiment that sent shockwaves through the UK economy and left the British public, as McFadden put it, “still paying the price for it.”
Economists, too, voiced their skepticism. According to The Mirror, experts warned that the proposed spending cuts were “vague and difficult to assess.” Stuart Cheetham, chief executive of mortgage lender MPowered, argued, “Scrapping stamp duty entirely would be very popular, and it would deliver a huge caffeine jolt to the sluggish property market. But there’s also a risk that it would drive up prices so fast that any savings for first-time buyers would soon be cancelled out.” Lucian Cook, head of residential research at Savills, echoed this concern, noting that if the policy was simply a tax giveaway, “the likelihood is that the current stamp duty bill simply passes through into prices.”
Yet, for all the debate about the tax policy’s merits and pitfalls, many observers believe the real story of Badenoch’s conference appearance lies elsewhere. As Spiked columnist Joanna Williams noted, “Forget the hype about scrapping stamp duty. Kemi Badenoch’s announcement yesterday that a future Conservative government would scrap the tax on house sales was far from her most noteworthy intervention.”
Badenoch’s speech began on a somber note, paying tribute to the men murdered at a synagogue in Manchester just a week earlier—a moment she described as “an attack on all of us… an attack on our humanity and our values of freedom, compassion and respect. It was an attack on the idea that Britain is a safe place for Jews.” She didn’t shy away from identifying what she sees as the sources of rising antisemitism in Britain, condemning pro-Palestinian protests as “carnivals of hatred directed at the Jewish homeland.” In her words, “We have tolerated the radical Islamist ideology that seeks to threaten not only Jews, but all of us, of all faiths and none, who want to live in peace… We cannot import and tolerate values hostile to our own.”
This forthrightness marked a departure from what Badenoch and her supporters describe as a decades-long reluctance among British politicians to confront the challenges posed by extremism. “It is shocking that something so obvious needs to be said,” Williams wrote in Spiked, “But the fact is that Britain has been importing and tolerating radical Islamists, with values hostile to our own, for decades.”
Badenoch’s critique didn’t stop at extremism. She turned her attention to identity politics, calling it “a trap” that “reduces people to categories and then pits them against each other.” She argued that the politics of identity and grievance have become entrenched across the political spectrum, not just among left-wing activists or on university campuses. In her view, this focus on difference has obscured the need for a unifying sense of national identity. “Nations cannot survive on diversity alone,” she declared. “We need a strong, common culture, rooted in our history, our language, our institutions and our belief in liberty under the law. That is what holds us together. And that is why borders matter. Why numbers matter. But most of all why culture matters.”
For Badenoch, these principles have direct, practical implications. She advocated for the deportation of foreign nationals convicted of serious crimes, such as rape, and condemned anti-Zionist protesters who, in her words, “have no right to turn our streets into theatres of intimidation.” Her stance, while resonating with many who feel the country has drifted from its core values, also risks further polarizing an already divided electorate.
The Labour Party, meanwhile, has sought to project its own version of patriotism, handing out Union flags at its conference in Liverpool. But as Williams observed, “Flags were needed precisely because no one believes that Starmer and his cronies have a patriotic bone in their bodies.” In contrast, Badenoch’s message—however contentious—came across as more authentic to many of her supporters.
Despite the forcefulness of her speech, the mood in Manchester was subdued. The conference’s low attendance, with “half-empty halls,” served as a stark reminder of the Conservative Party’s current struggles for relevance. As Williams put it, “The pity is that her words deserved a hearing—even if, for the Conservative Party itself, the jig is surely up.”
In the end, Kemi Badenoch’s 2025 conference speech offered more than just a promise to cut taxes. She challenged the assumptions underpinning decades of British policy on identity, culture, and national security. Whether her message will resonate beyond the party faithful—or revive the fortunes of a battered Conservative Party—remains to be seen. But for one afternoon in Manchester, at least, the conversation was about more than just stamp duty.
