Kemi Badenoch is due to address the Scottish Tory conference in Edinburgh (Image: PA)
KEMI Badenoch’s call for an end to the windfall tax for fossil fuel firms and a ban on new oil and gas licences has been branded “out of touch”.
The Conservative leader is set to address her first Scottish branch office conference in Edinburgh on Friday and will speak about the oil and gas industry.
Scottish Tory leader Russell Findlay is set to address the party conference for the first time since taking over the role from Douglas Ross.
The energy profits levy, also known as the windfall tax, was brought in by the previous Tory government, and extended by Labour when they took power.
Badenoch is expected to tout the oil and gas sector during her conference speech, accusing the UK Government of “killing” it, claiming “renewing our party and our country means standing up for our oil and gas industry”.
UK Conservative Party leader Kemi ‘not a genocide’ Badenoch explains her reality that the Earth is flat, the Moon is made of cheese and that she was born from
Unicorn horn dust
Ukip leader with his ‘goons’ intimidating aid workers and migrants in Calais. Photo: Lachlan Macrae
This is what happens ‘when you’ve got a prime minister echoing Enoch Powell’.
British far-right thugs harassing migrants in northern France are being encouraged by mainstream politicians’ increasingly dehumanising rhetoric, aid workers have told Novara Media.
Faced with daily police violence and no safe route to the UK, migrants living in refugee camps in northern France have more than enough to worry about. But just to make things even worse, last week far-right troublemaker Nick Tenconi turned up with a mob of activists who filmed themselves intimidating migrants and aid workers for a self-promotional video.
Wearing black leather gloves, a stab vest and wielding a megaphone, Tenconi is seen goading aid workers by calling them “communists”, “Nazis” and “terrorists”, and tells viewers that leftists are “architects in the subversion of British culture and Christianity”.
Tenconi, who is 41 years old, gets exasperated when aid workers won’t “rationalise” with his arguments before telling them to “go win a war”. This was then packaged as a promotional video for Ukip, ending with a plea for money for this “vital work”.
Ukip’s national chairman Ben Walker has set up a crowdfunding page asking the public to donate £50,000 to support “a crucial initiative” to “secure our borders”. Making a sinister – and almost certainly fabricated – claim that the party had just “conducted its first operation… collaborating with French police to locate and stop small boats from crossing the channel”, the fundraiser asked for donations in order to “maintain designated teams on rotas in the North of France, working tirelessly to prevent the dangerous and illegal crossing of our borders.”
Tenconi is leader of Ukip and far-right group Turning Point UK (TPUK). TPUK was behind a series of protests against drag performances in south London pubs in 2023. Last year, Novara Media reported how TPUK was a key force organising far-right action against leftwingers and Palestine protests, sometimes descending into disorder, while attempting to maintain links with leading figures in the Conservative party. Its honorary president, Marco Longhi, has since defected from the Tories to Reform.
The Conservatives received a hefty sum from oil and gas investors and those with roles at anti-climate campaign groups during the period when the party rolled back a key climate commitment.
In March, Badenoch announced that the Conservatives would no longer be advocating for the UK to achieve net zero emissions by 2050 – the goal currently pursued by the government. In a speech hosted by an advertising group that works for the oil giant Shell, Badenoch suggested that we are “bankrupting ourselves” in the pursuit of the 2050 target.
While the UK’s oil and gas reserves are dwindling, the country’s green economy grew by 10 percent in 2024.
Badenoch said that the country should still seek to reduce its climate impact, but shouldn’t set a date for achieving net zero.
Record – who is also lifetime president of the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), a pressure group that received funding from BP every year from 1967 to at least 2018 – has claimed that achieving net zero emissions by 2050 “will restrict our freedom, and is likely to be eye-wateringly expensive”. Record has donated to both the IEA and GWPF.
The GWPF regularly contradicts basic climate science, suggesting that CO2 emissions are “not pollution”.
A month before her net zero announcement, Record paid for Badenoch, her family, and members of her shadow cabinet to have a week-long retreat in Gloucestershire. The Net Zero Watch chair is close to the Tory leader, having provided funding and office space to her 2024 leadership campaign.
Over the past two decades, the Conservative Party has accepted £7.2 million from senior figures at the GWPF, while Badenoch’s campaign also received funding from a director at the fossil fuel major Chevron.
The party accepted a further £117,600 in the first quarter of this year from Alasdair Locke, a longstanding Tory donor who made his fortune in the oil industry. Locke is currently the chair of the UK’s largest independent petrol station operator Motor Fuel Group, and the non-executive chair of Well-Safe solutions, a firm that decommissions oil and gas wells. He is the founder of Abbot Group, a major oil and gas services company in the North Sea.
Badenoch’s party also received £75,000 in March from IPGL, a family investment firm belonging to Tory peer Lord Michael Spencer. A billionaire financier and former Tory treasurer, Spencer has investments worth at least £100,000 in each of the oil and gas companies Deltic Energy and Pantheon Resources.
“Is it any wonder that Kemi Badenoch’s Tories are so vehemently against net zero? No sooner do they get a quarter of a million from fossil fuel companies, do they decide to ditch the net zero commitments that they were so evangelical about just a few years ago,” said Harmit Kambo, campaigns manager at Good Law Project. “Given the existential climate threats we face, the Tories’ capitulation to climate change deniers perhaps sets a new low for their policy-making integrity.”
The Conservatives, Neil Record, Alasdair Locke, and Michael Spencer were approached for comment.
UK chancellor Rachel Reeves faces her biggest test with the government’s departmental spending plans for the three years from next April until the general election. With nearly £600 billion a year to spend, her decisions will impact on every aspect of public life and shape the political weather for years to come.
She believes the key to reviving Labour’s fortunes as its poll ratings tumble lies in boosting economic growth.
So the government has promised that its policies will increase the UK’s anaemic growth rate and enhance productivity. Reeves is looking to capital spending on big projects that will boost the economy, such as the £14.2 billion government investment in a new nuclear power plant at Sizewell in Suffolk.
Last year she revised the government’s fiscal rules to give herself the space to borrow an extra £113 billion over three years to transform Britain’s ageing infrastructure. She has already made it clear that she wants to boost transport investment outside of London, as well as invest in research and development, including green energy.
But there are challenges ahead. In the first place, the effect of infrastructure investment takes a long time to feed through. This is partly because of the lag between planning the projects and when they come on-stream.
It will take time before the full effect will be felt on productivity, which has been growing more slowly than expected. The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) suggested in March that the latest government plans for planning reform might increase productivity by just 0.2% in the longer term.
There are also some real trade-offs as to where the increased capital investment will go – and which sectors will benefit most. The chancellor has emphasised her commitment to putting more money into projects outside London and south-east England that have had less public investment in the past.
But London and the south-east is where productivity is highest and where further investment might have a bigger effect on economic growth.
It appears that there may be less funding for social housing, which may threaten the government’s ambitious target of building 1.5 million homes over the parliament. There may also be less available to repair schools and hospitals.
And the plans to boost defence spending on expensive military equipment – such as frigates and fighter planes – will also count as capital spending. As such, it could further reduce the amount available for infrastructure investment.
The departmental trade-offs
Despite the relative abundance of cash for infrastructure, the tighter fiscal rules on day-to-day spending mean that many departments are facing a squeeze on their budgets. The government plans to allow total day-to-day departmental spending on average to rise by just 1.2% per year in real terms during the next three years. This probably spells a real-terms cut for some “unprotected” departments.
This is because the money will not be distributed equally. The Department of Health and Social Care gets 40% of all departmental spending and is likely to be the big winner.
It has already received a big increase in the last spending round, with an 11% increase in capital spending is likely to get even more to realise an ambitious ten-year plan for improving services in the NHS in England.
If health spending were to go up by 2.5% (well under its historic average), this could mean very little increase for many other government departments. And if it is increased by 3.5% this will imply real-terms cuts for other areas.
The situation is made more difficult by the government’s decision to prioritise two other areas: defence and schools. For defence, it is committed to raising spending to 2.5% by 2027 and to 3% in the next parliament.
And for education, Reeves has pledged an extra £4.5 billion per year for more teachers, childcare places and free school meals. The decisions have a strong political dimension, as health and education tend to be the most popular spending priorities among the public.
The spending review, however, only covers half of total government spending. The more unpredictable part is annually managed expenditure, mainly on benefits and interest payments on government debt.
The Treasury sets an overall target (known as the spending envelope) on how much will be spent in these areas. But it now faces a crunch point over the unpopular decisions to cut disability benefits and keep the two-child benefit cap.
Reeves’ partial U-turn on the winter fuel payment, which will now be paid to 9 million pensioners, will cost an additional £1.25 billion a year but may have been a political necessity.
But a full U-turn on the two other issues will be much more expensive. Taken together, such a change might breach the fiscal rules, which give only £10 billion of “headroom” in a total government budget of more than £1.2 trillion. So while there will be some rowing back, the finances suggest any more major U-turns are unlikely.
To make matters worse, these spending plans are based on an economic forecast made by the OBR in March. This did not include the effect of US president Donald Trump’s tariff plans. Since then, both the IMF and the OECD downgraded their UK growth forecasts for both 2025 and 2026, and despite a recent small upgrade by the IMF, growth is still significantly lower than previously expected.
Even though Britain seems to have secured a deal with the US, the effect of tariffs on global growth will still damage the UK’s prospects as a trading nation.
This will make it harder for the government to meet its fiscal targets in the autumn budget while sticking to the departmental spending plans. The chancellor will then have three options. She can look for more cuts in benefits spending.
She could try to find other sources of tax revenue, for example by tweaking the rules on taxing pensions or extending the freeze on upgrading tax bands. Or, more radically, she could modify the fiscal rules to give herself more flexibility – for example by having only one economic forecast a year, as the IMF has suggested.
Ultimately Labour’s electoral prospects will depend on whether it has succeeded in boosting living standards. While the productivity drive could work, the UK economy remains at the mercy of wider global economic forces.
A volunteer at a food bank packaging supplies. Credit: IFAN Mary Turner The Welcome Centre
Food banks are already overwhelmed by demand for help. Disability benefit cuts will make it worse, the government has been warned
Hundreds of thousands of people living in disabled households will be at risk of needing to use a food bank if the government goes ahead with its plans for benefit cuts, new research has found.
Experts at Trussell and WPI economics have estimated that 440,000 people who are disabled or living with a disabled person would have to use a food bank by the end of the decade. he decade.
As MPs prepare to vote on legislation to introduce the cuts, charities and disability campaigners are urging the government to rethink its plans.
Labour’s proposals include tightening the eligibility criteria for the personal independence payment (PIP), with the government estimating that around 800,000 people would see their support reduced by 2028/2029.
It also plans to freeze the health element of universal credit for current claimants, slash it in half for new claimants and cut it entirely for people under the age of 22.
Helen Barnard, director of policy at Trussell, said: “This UK government was elected on a promise of change, and with a commitment to end the need for food banks. If the government goes ahead with these ill-considered and cruel cuts to social security, this promise will not be kept – and instead, they will risk leaving behind a legacy of rising poverty and hunger.
“Tackling fiscal challenges should not be done at the expense of people already facing hunger and hardship. These cuts will force 440,000 people in disabled households into severe hardship and leave them at risk of needing a food bank. We urge the government not to continue down this damaging path.”
