The speech made by Andrew Griffith, the Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, at the 2026 Conservative Party conference on 5 October 2026.
Conference, the Britain we love has a debt problem, a tax problem and a growth problem.
But above all, it has a Labour problem.
You cannot have a stronger country without a strong economy.
And it will take us, Conservatives, to make our economy strong again.
I joined our party as a teenager under Mrs Thatcher because I was convinced that the right way was Conservative.
And it is a pleasure to speak to you, seeing so many young people here today, because that is how they feel too.
I came to Parliament after 26 years in business.
Like Kemi, I am not a career politician.
I am here to fix our country.
My experience of business is not unique in our Party, but it is far too rare in Westminster.
Growing up, I remember the industrial unrest of the late seventies, the blackouts and doing my homework by candlelight.
But I also remember what followed.
A country reborn from a new economic vision.
Led by a conviction politician who made the hard choices that turned Britain around.
When it was my turn to find a job, there were plenty around, thanks to the Conservative deregulation of the City known as the Big Bang.
And after a few years into a career, my wife and I could find a home because, back then, London was actually building homes.
I can still remember the excitement of turning the key in the door and the smell of fresh paint.
And it was an era when anything felt possible.
A new terminal at Heathrow Airport, urban regeneration, driverless trains on the Docklands Light Railway, mobile phone calls on networks built by business.
After difficult years, Britain was once again on the rise.
Conference, that feeling is what we need again today.
Watching Andy Burnham last week in Liverpool, I was quite shocked.
Daydreaming about the 2030s while fuel prices and the cost of mortgages soar today.
A Prime Minister who wants to return Britain to an imagined past.
His socialist fever dream of the 1970s.
We have always known that Labour’s understanding of maths was dodgy, but now its history is too.
Conference, it makes our task even more important than ever.
Not simply to fix the economy, but once again to fight a battle of ideas about the very basis of where prosperity comes from.
Too many in society today believe that business is bad, wealth is unworthy and that, despite all the evidence to the contrary, life would be better if we only had greater public control, more regulations and higher taxes.
And that anything might be improved by putting Angela Rayner in charge of it.
Today’s Left does not even understand the basic truth that you can eat the goose, or you can have a supply of eggs, but you cannot do both.
For those of us who believe in free markets, in enterprise and in lowering the burden of regulation, that is partly our failure.
Because for too long we failed to properly make our case.
Despite Ronald Reagan celebrating Britain as the birthplace of economic freedom, in government we allowed restrictions on everything from the type of car you could buy and how you could heat your home, to banning adverts for certain types of yoghurt.
Britain today is close to being a command economy.
Where the state spends 45 pence in every pound and millions of working-age people have their entire lifestyle funded by others.
Meanwhile, other countries chose the other path, the path of free markets and enterprise.
And unsurprisingly, they are winning.
Three decades ago, Britain was the ninth richest country in the world.
Today, we are barely in the top 30.
Britain is competing in a global race with leaner, fitter economies while carrying too much weight on our back.
So, Conference, the stakes could not be higher.
No one else is coming to save our economy.
And it means that never again must our Party squander its duty to serve by being divided or losing touch with our principles.
We will inherit from Labour one of the worst economic situations in history.
We will have to be the ones to make the hard choices and tackle the debt, to help our country live within its means.
As a finance director for more than a decade, I long ago made peace with the idea that you can strive to be respected, but you should not expect to be popular.
So, I am setting out more of those choices today.
We will build on our plans to reduce the size of the Civil Service by extending them across arm’s-length bodies as well.
There is no good reason why their headcount has grown by 40% since 2016.
We will reverse that.
We will make further reductions in overseas aid, Net Zero subsidies and government advertising.
And we will crack down on healthcare tourism in the NHS and stop foreign abuse of the student loan system.
The Left will criticise, but Conference, you know these are common-sense policies that will save the taxpayer money.
Now, fiscal discipline can stop the bleeding, but the only true path back to financial health is growth.
Those countries that have growth do not need to talk about it.
They take it as read that their children, if they work hard, will get a good job.
That station by station, bypass by bypass, the public realm improves each year.
That life expectancy goes up.
And that a better standard of living, perhaps bringing with it the need to work fewer hours, just happens.
So, who will provide this?
Well, not a Labour government that has so lowered the world’s confidence in Britain’s ability to pay its debts that we now pay more to borrow than Greece.
And certainly not the Chancellor, one of Gordon Brown’s longest-serving Treasury ministers.
Yes, the same Gordon Brown who raided Britain’s pension funds and sold the gold.
John Healey resigned in protest at Labour’s failure to fund defence but now refuses to find the funding.
Shameful.
Defending our nation is the first duty of government.
He has been Chancellor for nearly three months.
In my first three days as Shadow Chancellor, I showed how we would find the money.
And my promise to you, Conference, is this.
Whenever I am asked by Kemi and our Defence Secretary to do so, I will always find the money to defend Britain.
We have the plan to make our country prosperous again.
What does that look like?
Well, five things.
Lower, simpler and fairer taxes.
Cheaper energy.
Getting people into work.
Cutting red tape.
And backing business.
We have heard from Claire Coutinho and Andrew Bowie about their plans for cheaper energy.
How we will get Britain drilling again and make it easier to build new nuclear.
And from Helen Whately and Laura Trott, their plans to get people off welfare and into work.
So let me pick up the other elements.
First, lower, simpler and fairer taxes.
Conference, this will be my personal North Star as your Chancellor.
I did not come here to raise taxes.
I came here to lower them.
No country in history has ever taxed its way to prosperity.
So, we will cut taxes, but only when we can afford to do so, and always saying clearly how we will fund that within our Golden Economic Rule.
We have already set out some of our plans.
Scrapping the Family Farm and Family Business Death Tax.
Removing the spiteful VAT on independent schools.
And cutting business rates for a quarter of a million pubs, shops and high street businesses.
And Conference, on the doorsteps, let us remind everyone of one of our biggest and best policies.
Scrapping stamp duty entirely on primary homes.
It is a bad tax, thwarting the ambitions of so many young people hoping to buy a first home, the couple trying to move before the baby arrives, or grandparents trying to downsize to be nearer their grandchildren.
Like Nigel Lawson, it is my ambition to scrap at least one tax every Budget.
What would we prioritise?
There is a lot.
Tax cuts that help growth.
Tax cuts that improve incentives to work.
Tax cuts that make life simpler and fairer.
I am announcing one today.
An administrative nightmare for business that puts up the price of every supermarket shop.
So, Conference, we will scrap Labour’s packaging tax.
You are all pretty well-informed.
Because it is a tax that most will have heard of, but I include it to make a much bigger point.
It is the sort of thing the old Conservative Party went along with.
They would have said, do not make a fuss, or it is only a couple of billion.
Well, Conference, no more.
Now, we are unafraid to tell the truth.
And when we see Labour inflicting economic self-harm, doing damage to businesses or adding extra costs on families, we will never hesitate to call them out.
Another Labour tax is their plan for a vindictive raid on family homes.
They pretend it is a mansion tax, but it will hit people here in Birmingham, in Manchester and those living in ordinary homes making long commutes to our capital city.
For many, it will be simply unaffordable.
They may have bought their home decades ago, be retired and on a fixed income.
£75,000 over ten years.
Where is a widow supposed to get that sort of money?
They do not care.
And right now, Andy Burnham is recruiting an army of snoopers.
That is right.
In Labour’s Britain, they do not use satellites and drones to defend our country, but to spy on citizens to see if you have a particularly well-kept garden.
It is an anti-growth tax that will distort the housing market and remove the incentive to make home improvements.
So, Conference, today I can announce that we will scrap Labour’s Family Homes Tax.
Labour wants to make home ownership more expensive.
We want to make it more affordable.
There are too many examples in our tax system where taxes penalise values we should instead celebrate.
We believe it is unfair for anyone to face a situation where more than half of any extra income they earn goes to the government.
Some face paying 60% on every additional pound they earn.
Eliminating these rates will take time and the capacity to do so, but that, Conference, is our ambition.
That is what we mean by lower, simpler and fairer taxes.
And it is why, yesterday, we announced the end of the childcare cliff edge, which can leave working parents thousands of pounds worse off.
Conference, while Labour attacks families, we Conservatives will support them.
It is not just families.
For many, time spent filling in a tax return or hanging on an HMRC helpline steals time away from their business, their family and the very reason they work so hard.
Our tax code is a cat’s cradle of complexity, one of the worst in the world.
So, as well as cutting taxes, tax simplification will be a mission for every Treasury minister.
And it is why, in my very first speech as Shadow Chancellor, I set out our aim to simplify taxes for small businesses and the self-employed and review Making Tax Digital and IR35.
Because in this party, in our party, it is the people who take a risk, start a business and create jobs whom we will always champion.
Conference, to grow, we need to seriously cut red tape.
Now, even as I say those words, I wince slightly.
Let us be honest.
We have all heard politicians promise to cut red tape, only to preside over an ever-growing mountain of it.
So why will it be different this time?
For one, we will be more prepared than ever before.
We will set out our plans line by line, every Bill, every regulation, every chapter.
We will tackle upstream sources such as the public sector equality duty and the ECHR.
And our new approach to candidate selection means that if you vote Conservative, you will get a Conservative MP who will follow through when they get to Parliament.
Our work is already well advanced.
You heard from Katie how we will get Britain building.
The biggest reforms to the cost of housing in a generation.
Saving up to £50,000 on a new home.
Freeing up our financial services from misguided rules which have starved our businesses of the capital they need to grow.
No more regulator-imposed diversity targets or mandatory ESG reporting.
We will repeal the job-destroying, 330-page, union-authored Unemployment Act.
Harmful Net Zero targets go, and we will repeal the Climate Change Act 2008, which has deindustrialised our country without helping to protect our nature.
And we will tackle the one true growth industry in the UK today, the lawfare and judicial review that means building anything is just too hard, too slow and too expensive.
And then, we will back business because their success is Britain’s success.
And we know that only the private sector creates jobs and prosperity.
Now, words are cheap, so let me give you a tangible example.
Countries on the rise have the best infrastructure and connectivity to the world.
But our national hub airport is being held back.
What used to be the world’s busiest airport is no longer even Europe’s.
The Prime Minister says he wants growth in every postcode.
Well, not the Heathrow postcode, apparently.
That is not leadership.
So let me be clear.
The next Conservative government will do whatever it takes to end the delays and boost capacity by backing the third runway.
We are all in for growth and we will legislate to sweep away the blockers.
Cheaper flights, better connections and more exports of high-value British goods.
Conference, I refuse to accept for a single moment that the country of Brunel and Bazalgette, of the Vaccine Taskforce and the Mulberry Harbours, has to sit around waiting until the 2040s to get a third runway built.
Let me conclude with what those speeches and banners in Liverpool last week failed to understand.
Labour thinks hope is something you can hand out like a type of food stamp.
But hope is something people find for themselves when they believe their lives are getting better, that they have more choices and more freedom.
A society that cannot offer hope to its young people has little hope for its future.
As a parent of lockdown-generation children myself, I feel this strongly.
I sometimes see the uncertainty in the eyes of that generation.
Their worries about whether things will be okay.
Too many are already voting with their feet.
Last year, an average of 350 young people left Britain to live elsewhere every single day.
The equivalent of a jumbo jet taking with it their hopes, dreams and ambitions.
Because, like all young people down the generations, they are looking for better jobs and a better life.
Because they see other societies offering hope while Britain under Labour offers more of the same.
Many Labour MPs spend their time talking about safe and legal routes for asylum seekers to come here.
Well, what about safe and legal routes for our own young people to get a job, buy a home and have a good life?
Does that not count?
What kind of government is so passive in the face of its young people leaving?
And what kind of future is it where grandparents must travel across continents just to spend time with their grandchildren?
Conference, it is our duty to offer those young people a better future.
For too long, I have heard it said that young people will not vote Conservative.
Well, in 1979, the most popular party amongst the young was the Conservative Party.
Because that is what happens when it is our party giving them the path to a job, a home and a stake in a growing economy.
Now, you have heard a lot about the challenges today.
I will always be honest about the state of the nation’s finances.
But what you have not heard, what you will never hear, is me talking Britain down.
I am an optimist.
Britain can once again be the best, the most respected and the most prosperous country in the world.
For those countries that get it right, the next decades will be a golden age of longevity and abundance.
Those who have written this country off have always been proven wrong.
So, if you are thinking of leaving, whether you are young or old, do not.
Many of the things we hold dear are threatened as never before, but none have yet been lost.
Stay.
Stay and help us win.
Be part of Britain’s next comeback.
The arc of history is not set in stone.
It can yet be bent to our will.
The changes we seek will not be easy.
They will need people, policies and plans, Bills written, budgets prepared and a team ready to go on day one.
But we can do it.
Conference, the time is coming.
When Britain decides it has had enough of mortgaging its future.
Where hard work triumphs.
When people will no longer be treated as cash machines for the benefit of others while their own hopes and dreams slip from their grasp.
Only one party, the Conservative Party, can meet that moment.
The leader with the backbone to make tough choices.
And the united team to deliver them.
Conference, when the story of Britain’s next economic comeback is written, it will be a Conservative story.
Every generation has its destiny.
This is ours.