Mrs Kemi Badenoch

Can I welcome the Prime Minister to his place at the Dispatch Box and take this, my first opportunity to congratulate him on becoming Prime Minister? He has been in office for 43 days, during which I have learned how he puts the milk in his tea and exactly what he thinks about pork scratchings, but I have not had the pleasure of asking him any questions. We are all grateful that he has finally found time to come to Parliament to answer some. It is only fair to be gentle with someone on their first day at work, so I am only going to ask the Prime Minister a few very simple but very serious questions. I hope that he can provide me with some simple and serious answers. I genuinely wish him well as he seeks to live up to the dignity and importance of the role. I was pleased to see him in Ukraine over the summer, continuing the Conservatives’ world-leading support for Ukraine’s fight against Russian aggression. That being said, I am also very relieved to see that he has not brought his guitar with him today. His predecessor stood at that Dispatch Box two years ago sounding very triumphant, having just won a landslide victory. What went wrong? Where is he now? Gone. That job is not as easy as it looks from the outside. Labour MPs have not explained why they got rid of him. [Interruption.] They are laughing, but they have not explained it. We on this side of the House understand that the country’s problems will not be solved by lofty promises alone. In the end, the Prime Minister will be judged on what he actually delivers. This is a very different job from being Mayor of Greater Manchester—a job where he did not have to pick winners and losers, make difficult trade-offs, or have to worry about our national security. He does now. A Government’s first and most important duty is keeping the country safe. The last Prime Minister and his Chancellor left an enormous hole in Britain’s defence budget. We know that because the current Chancellor quit as Defence Secretary over that black hole, saying that it could put British troops at risk. He said that there could be an attack by Russia on NATO as soon as 2030, and that not funding the defence investment plan reduces the readiness of our forces. Let me ask the Prime Minister very clearly: will he provide the funding that his own Chancellor said was necessary to keep British troops safe? That means 3% by the end of this decade. Keeping this country safe also means defending our borders. The Prime Minister mentioned boat crossings, but we must be honest: boat crossings have not gone down because of anything that Labour has done. [Interruption.] They have not. We have to be honest. Boat crossings are down across all of Europe, and have been down for much longer. Let us be honest: the problem is still not solved. The Prime Minister will have seen the extraordinary scenes in Ceuta over the summer, in which more than 70,000 people tried to cross into Europe. Many of those people would like to end up in the UK. This is not just a British problem; it is a growing global problem. Even Denmark is starting to send illegal migrants to other countries as a deterrent. That is exactly like the Rwanda scheme that the Conservatives put in place and Labour scrapped. We now hear that the Home Secretary is thinking about reviving a Rwanda-style scheme, so can the Prime Minister tell me—yes or no—if that is the plan? Next, the Prime Minister must keep British people safe from dangerous criminals. It was interesting to hear the comments in his statement about early release. Before the summer, I sat with women who had experienced some of the most horrific crimes imaginable, and the perpetrators of those crimes were about to be let out of prison early. The Prime Minister told those women that it was too difficult to keep their perpetrators in jail. Then he changed his mind. The family of PC Andrew Harper appealed to the Prime Minister not to release his killers early. Again, the Prime Minister told them that it was a non-starter. Then he changed his mind. The Conservatives told the Government to create new spaces in the existing prison estate, and to get foreign-born criminals out of our jails. The Government said that we were wrong, but now they are doing both. The Prime Minister has had five different positions on early release in six weeks, putting the victims through hell with his indecision. Will he now set out a timeline for his promise to get more foreign national prisoners out of British prisons? As well as keeping the country safe, the Prime Minister’s next big challenge will be making people in this country feel richer. The biggest mistake that Labour has made in office so far, and there have been quite a few to choose from, is that it has crushed our economy under the weight of nearly £70 billion in new taxes. The Prime Minister was not here for that, so I will give him the list: the jobs tax, the family farm tax, the family business tax, taxes on pensioners, taxes on workers and taxes on businesses. That is £3,500 a year for every working family. He says that he cares about the cost of living; Labour’s taxes have made that worse. Those taxes have cost people their jobs—thousands of jobs in oil and gas, and thousands of jobs in industry across our country. The recruitment market for new graduates is the worst it has ever been. There are 50% fewer vacancies than last year, which was already the worst on record. If the Prime Minister does not change course, he too, like every other Labour Prime Minister, will leave office with unemployment higher than it was when he came in. Can he guarantee, here and now, on the Floor of the House, that there will be no more tax rises in the autumn Budget? The year is 2026, yet the Prime Minister said in his statement that everything has gone wrong since the 1980s. He is still complaining about Margaret Thatcher. I am 46 years old, Mr Speaker—I may not look it, but I am. He is talking about a woman who became Prime Minister before I was born. He is living in the past, and he wants to take us back to the 1970s. We Conservatives are for the future, not the past. That is the difference between them and us. His ideas are all about more Government control, more spending, more tax and more politicians. The Conservatives want people to keep more of their own money. We want businesses to grow, invest, expand and create more jobs. That is the difference between the Labour party and the Conservative party. His diagnosis is completely wrong. His theory of growth is completely wrong. He thinks that if the Government spend more money, we will all get richer, but that is not how this works. Companies are not leaving our shores because there is not enough government. Another difference between us is in dealing with the ballooning welfare bill. Up and down this country, hard-working people are fed up of going to work and paying for their neighbours to sit at home with mild health conditions that do not stop them working. They are fed up of hearing, as we did this summer, that working in Boots is not good for your mental health—ridiculous. We are on the side of those hard-working, fed-up people. I ask the Prime Minister: will he stand up to his Back Benchers in a way that his predecessor never could and cut the benefits bill? It is a simple question. The Prime Minister engineered it so that he could have as long a summer holiday as possible, so he should be ready with some answers. I am even hearing rumours that he does not want to do Prime Minister’s questions next week, but it is my job to ask him serious questions, and it is time for him to start answering. [Interruption.] I know Labour Members do not like hearing the questions, but they are going to hear them. It is my job to speak on behalf of all the people out there who want to know what he has planned, and it is time for him to start answering some serious questions. Governing is hard, but the country needs the Prime Minister to succeed. Where it is in the national interest, I will help him. He may find that Conservative votes come in handy when Labour MPs are too scared to do the right thing. Britain faces many serious challenges to our national and economic security. There are difficult decisions to make, and they will show whether the Prime Minister is serious about governing. On defence, his own Chancellor said that 3% spending was needed to keep British troops safe; now, apparently, he does not believe that. On illegal migration, Labour scrapped the Rwanda scheme; now it appears to be considering a Rwanda-style scheme of its own. On prisons, the Prime Minister said that dangerous criminals could not be exempted from early release, and then he changed his mind. This country cannot afford a Government swerving all over the place. Labour has already tried government by U-turn, and it does not work. If he wants to be different from his predecessor, and wants to live up to the optimistic vision that he is painting, he is going to have to start taking this job seriously. That is not what we heard from the Prime Minister today, but that is what the Conservatives are offering.