At the Conservative Party Conference, the Get Britain Growing reception on October 5th featured speeches by Shadow Chancellor, Sir Mel Stride MP and Dame Caroline Dinenage MP.
Speaking at the Get Britain Growing: Conservative Conference Reception, the Rt Hon Mel Stride MP, Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, delivered an address on the future of Britain’s economy. In his speech he called for fiscal discipline, increased growth and productivity, and a renewed national focus on development, skills, and technological innovation.
He claimed that although there are ‘many strands that feed into’ the UK’s growth and productivity, ‘technology and AI’ are among the most vital. He framed his speech in political terms, seeking to uncover the ways in which the Conservatives can distinguish their stance from the Labour government’s: ‘what to focus on as an opposition […] so that when we get into government, we can then come up with the right policies to drive growth and turbocharge all the great things that everybody is doing today?’.
The Conservatives’ Vision for Growth and Competence
He urged that the next government must be ‘the adults in the room, the grown-ups’, committing to policies that are fully costed and independently verified by the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR). The country, he insisted, ‘will live within its means’, not making unappeasable promises. He considered Labour’s increased social, public, welfare and domestic spending a problem: ‘our national debt at the moment is running at 100 billion pounds a year, which is twice what we spend on defence’.
His vision is one of Conservative accountability: that they will become the ‘party of fiscal responsibility’. He did, however, concede Conservative failure on this point: ‘we will wrestle back that mantle of economic competence, which we did lose briefly’. Stride ultimately seems to express hope for a transformed Conservative party, one that can rebuff the new political threat of Reform, and yet return to a former state of austerity spending and select tax cuts.
Reforming Tax and Spending
Stride set out several areas for reform. He heavily emphasised the need to reduce the tax burden, ‘particularly for businesses’, to unlock investment, job creation, and wealth creation. He then called for more efficient government spending, criticising the post-pandemic expansion of the civil service from 315,000 to 515,000 employees as indicative of ‘a bloated state’. He also underlined the importance of tackling welfare reform and government waste, promising to ‘get on top of the welfare bill’.
Skills, AI, and Economic Transformation
Turning to the future of work, Stride expressed certainty about the transformative power of AI and the imminent radical change of the economic and skills environment required to match its fast-paced development. He questioned the extent to which higher education is actually ‘providing sufficient value’ to students. His introduction of the idea of investing in technologically-driven skills and apprenticeships mirrors Labour’s recent apprenticeship agenda. AI, in this instance, is both a challenge and an opportunity: demanding a flexible response from business, educational institutions and government alike.
Unblocking Infrastructure and Energy
Stride also addressed the supply-side barriers to growth, from planning reform to infrastructure investment. As evidence of how planning delays hold back innovation, he cited Cambridge’s shortage of laboratory and office space, in part due to a lack of water infrastructure. He criticised the UK’s slow delivery of infrastructure: ‘We haven’t built a reservoir in this country for 30 years’.
Energy was also broached: naturally vital to AI due to the vast amounts of energy required to power data centres, he warned that the UK’s high electricity costs will soon be unsustainable. ‘We’re paying about five times what the Chinese are for electricity, five times what the Canadians and the Americans are, 50% more than the French and the Germans’ – not easily reconcilable with a ‘growing and productive economy’.
A Party of Responsibility
Stride’s speech sought to paint the Conservatives as the party of responsibility: ‘we’re going to be the only party out there that’s going to be talking in a sensible and grown up way’. This represents a marked distancing tactic from the chaotic, unprecedented U-turns and disorder during the party’s leadership under Boris Johnson and Liz Truss.
