Reopening Brexit debate a ‘terrible idea’: Conservative leader Badenoch

Leader of the U.K. Conservative Party Kemi Badenoch has opposed British Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s stated plan to reopen the question of Brexit (Britain’s departure from the European Union), calling it a “terrible idea”.

“Can you imagine having to go through that again? So much time lost arguing with ourselves, arguing with the EU, going round and round in circles… I think that is a terrible idea,” Ms. Badenoch said at the conclusion of the Conservative Party’s annual conference in Birmingham. Last week the Prime Minister had said that Britain would need to consider what its ties with the EU should look like over the long term, suggesting that one option would be to return to the bloc.

Ms. Badenoch pitched the Conservatives as the main opposition to Labour in the next elections, despite the growth in popularity of far right parties Restore Britain and Reform UK. She said her party was ready to govern and had learned from its mistakes. The Conservatives were in power for 14 years, but their popularity had waned and they were beleaguered by internecine battles, cycling through five Prime Ministers over these years, until they lost to Labour in 2024.

In her speech, Ms. Badenoch also pushed back against uniting with parties on the Right.

Referring to the defection of a number of MPs to Reform since the 2024 general election, Ms. Badenoch said, the Tories had had an “export boom” of “drama queens”. Among those who had defected was former Conservative Home Secretary Suella Braverman, who is of Indian descent.

Ms. Badenoch also appealed to former Tory voters who had shifted their allegiance to Reform, saying she wanted them to “come back home”. She criticised Reform, pointing to scandals engulfing several of its leaders, including allegations of financial irregularities around party chief Nigel Farage.

“So, to those who say unite the right, we are not uniting with that,” she said.

The Tory chief, who is of Nigerian descent, took a dig at those on the far right who had , in recent public discourse, taken a view that Englishness was an ethnicity rather than a nationality.

“I don’t want to live in a country run by people who threaten journalists, who call veterans traitors, and debate whether my mixed-race children are English,” she said.

Commenting on the cost of servicing the public debt, Ms. Badenoch said the U.K. was “running out of money”. She announced her party had identified savings, promised cuts to inheritance tax, reforming the welfare system, and backed a third runway for Heathrow airport. Mr Burnham’s government is revisiting the question of whether or not to build a third runway at one of the world’s busiest airports. His predecessor Keir Starmer had announced last year that it would go ahead with the project.

“The era of peace is over,” Ms. Badenoch said, promising to spend 3% of GDP on defence by 2030. Under pressure from U.S. President Donald Trump, the U.K. and other NATO member countries had agreed in 2025 to increase their annual spending on defence to 5% of GDP, with 3.5% of GDP spent on core defence requirements. She announced a national missile defence system, Brittania Shield. Ms. Badenoch, however, pushed back against the notion that it would be as extensive as Israel’s ‘Iron Dome’, after the party itself had used the term in a press release. The party has proposed spending £1 billion annually on the system over ten years, while a system comparable to Israel’s is likely to cost an estimated £80 to £100 billion over that period.