UK Politics Live: Badenock admits Tories made Brexit mistake, says party 'has no plan for growth outside EU' Politics

Good morning. Keir Starmer He is in Ukraine to sign a 100-year cooperation agreement with President Volodymyr Zelensky, Pippa Krellar and Luke Harding report.

We’ll cover the trip in detail in our live blog here .

Returning to the UK, this is also an important day Kemi Badnock, He was delivering an important speech titled "Rebuilding Trust." She has been leader of the Conservative Party for just over three months and so far has not had much success. Her performance in the House of Commons was mediocre, her statements on policy and values ​​were either predictable, reductive and sometimes bizarre, and she was outperformed by Nigel Farage, who Farage's Reform Party is siphoning off her vote and is now on equal footing with the Conservatives at the polls.

One problem for Badenock is that her party suffered its worst election result in 200 years because of its widely perceived poor record in office. Badenock has often said the party made mistakes while in power, but she has done little to break ties with the former leader and has not succeeded in convincing voters that she represents a clean break with the past.

Today's speech seems aimed at changing that. It contains her strongest criticism of the mistakes made by the previous government (in which she was involved, but only at cabinet level from September 2022), according to the rather lengthy excerpt released overnight.

Here is the key paragraph.

I admit the Conservatives made mistakes…

We announced our exit from the EU before we had plans for growth outside the EU.

We have laws in place to achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2050. Only then did we start thinking about how to do this.

We announced that we were going to reduce immigration, but the number of immigrants keeps increasing.

We make these mistakes because we tell people what they want to hear first and then try to fix it.

Under my leadership, this will stop. If we are going to turn our country around, we have to say things that are not easy to hear.

Admitting that the Conservatives have failed on immigration sounds a lot like a carbon copy of the speech Badenock gave in November. She has frequently criticized the net zero target in the past. But her claims about Brexit do appear to be new.

Last year, she criticized the previous Conservative government for organizing a referendum on leaving the EU without setting out plans to hold one if people voted to leave. This was a bold statement because it was an obvious rebuke to David Cameron, who by then had returned to cabinet as foreign secretary. But such comments were popular among mainstream pro-Brexit Conservatives, who were suspicious of Cameron at the time.

Today, Badenock seems to be saying something slightly different - that Brexit went wrong not just because there was no plan in 2016, but because there was no plan in 2020. This means she also blames Theresa May and possibly Boris Johnson for the failure of Brexit. We will find out this afternoon how far she is willing to go in condemning Johnson, who remains popular with Tory members, but this appears to be a new approach.

This is the agenda for the day.

morning: Keir Starmer met Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Kiev and signed a 100-year cooperation agreement.

9.30am: Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy takes questions in the House of Commons.

morning: Former health secretary Matt Hancock gave evidence to the coronavirus inquiry as part of a vaccine module.

10.30am: Lib Dem leader Ed Davey gave a speech on British leadership and links with Europe.

noon: Scotland's First Minister John Swinney takes questions at Holyrood.

1.30pm: Kemi Badnock delivers a speech on restoring trust.

afternoon: Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves held a meeting with regulators to urge them to do more to boost economic growth.

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