A British Ice and more stop and search: Badenoch’s Tories set out new policies

Kemi Badenoch warned her shadow cabinet in January not to expect any detailed policies until 2027. “We’re not creating policies for 2028 in 2025,” a Tory spokesperson said at the time.

This week that changed. At the Conservative party’s annual conference in Manchester, shadow ministers have lined up to announce detailed, far-reaching and often radical new policies.

Yet with the party languishing at 17% in the polls, many of these announcements have struggled to gain traction. So here is a roundup of some of the most significant.

Leaving the ECHR and establishing a British Ice

One of Kemi Badenoch’s first announcements of the conference was that the Conservatives would take Britain out of the European convention on human rights if elected to lead the next government.

The announcement was part of the party’s “borders” plan – a somewhat tortured acrostic that also included banning irregular migrants from ever claiming asylum. As part of the plan, the Tories would also repeal the Human Rights Act and leave the Council of Europe convention on action against trafficking. They would also end immigration trials and the right of people to claim legal aid to fight their immigration cases.

The policy would also involve establishing a British version of Ice, the American immigration force that has been raiding communities and businesses across the US in search of illegal immigrants.

Nearly £50bn in spending cuts

Mel Stride, the shadow chancellor, announced plans for £47bn in annual spending cuts by 2029. The biggest chunk of those savings – £23bn – would come from welfare, which would be cut entirely for anyone who is not a British or EU citizen or who claims a pension.

The shadow chancellor also promised to cut one in four civil servant jobs in the UK, a cull that he said would save £8bn. An additional £3.9bn would come from banning foreigners from accessing social housing, and £3.5bn from closing asylum hotels.

The rest would be due to come from ending the government’s commitment to net zero.

Abolishing the Sentencing Council and sacking ‘activist judges’

Robert Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary, stepped up his attacks on judges on Tuesday, promising to curb the autonomy of the judiciary and give more power to elected politicians.

The first step would be to abolish the Sentencing Council, the independent, judge-led body responsible for giving sentencing guidelines to judges and magistrates in England and Wales. The second would be to give the Judicial Conduct Investigation Office the power to sack any judge who tweets support for what the Tories called “open borders”.

Jenrick told the Telegraph he had identified 35 judges who had previously advised or helped groups including Bail for Immigration Detainees and the Asylum Support Appeals Project, which give legal advice to asylum seekers.

Tripling stop and search

Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, said his party would hire an extra 10,000 police officers and vastly expand the use of stop and search. Under Philp’s plan, police would be able to stop people and search them for things as minor as smelling of cannabis.

In certain pre-identified crime “hotspots”, officers would be allowed to carry out stop and searches without any suspicion at all. The new powers would go even further than the “sus law” that was blamed for stirring up community unrest before the race riots in 1980 and 1981.

Repealing the Climate Change Act

Badenoch had already announced that her party would ditch its commitment for Britain to reach net zero by 2050. This week she said it would repeal the Climate Change Act, which was passed under the last Labour government in 2008.

Repealing the Climate Change Act would remove the need to meet five-year carbon budgets that govern how much greenhouse gas can be emitted. A Conservative government would also disband the Climate Change Committee, the watchdog that advises on how policies affect the UK’s carbon footprint.

The party also says it would make electricity cheaper by ending the requirement of certain sectors to pay for the carbon they emit, and by ending the renewables obligation, which electricity users pay to fund renewables subsidies.