Kemi Badenoch has denied she compared a new air defence system proposed by the Conservative party to Israel’s Iron Dome, despite using the term in her press release and a newspaper article. This was reported by Qazaqyia.kz citing The Guardian.
The Tory leader said the party’s proposed “Britannia Shield” would not be comparable to the missile defence system in Israel, which is primarily designed to counter short-range attacks.
The party has proposed allotting £1bn a year towards building the system, though the former army general Richard Barrons told Times Radio the cost of a system similar to Israel’s would be upwards of £100bn.
In a round of interviews at the Conservative party conference in Birmingham, Badenoch also admitted her party was “not out of the woods” despite what appeared to be the most unified and optimistic gathering in years. The Tories are still polling below their 2024 election defeat.
“We are feeling chipper because we are going back to first principles,” she told the BBC. “We’re not out of the woods yet.”
She added that “people at conference aren’t happy because we’re about to win an election. We’re happy because we know who we are.”
She also said she would rather have another general election than do a deal with Reform UK to form a government, as senior party figures attacked their rightwing rivals with a ferocity that appeared to make the chances of any pact more remote.
In her own conference speech on Wednesday, Badenoch is expected to announce plans to cut – but not abolish – inheritance tax, which is levied at 40% on all estates with property worth more than £500,000.
She is expected to say the country is “running out of money”, adding: “Almost everything else flows from this. Our national debt currently stands at nearly £3tn and we are adding more than £100bn every year.
“Last year, four in every five pounds borrowed by the government was spent on debt interest alone. That’s like taking out a second mortgage just to pay the interest on your first mortgage.
“This is crazy. Unless we start creating more value, unless we start growing our economy, something is going to break.”
The Tories have promised to cut employers’ national insurance from 15% to 7.5% for people aged 21-24 in an attempt to drive down the youth unemployment rate. Badenoch is expected to say she will fund the £2.3bn scheme through welfare cuts.
However, she admitted it could be “difficult” to reverse Labour’s planned changes to the pensions triple lock once they had been brought in, as it emerged her party could head into the next election without a social care plan.
In several interviews, the Tory leader was forced to clarify her party’s “iron dome” defence policy, as she tried to distance herself from using the term. She told Times Radio it was a “semantic argument” and that the new system would protect Britain from increasing threats.
She told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that the description had come from newspapers – though the Conservative party press release described the system as “in essence a British Iron Dome”.
In a piece by Badenoch in the Sun, which illustrated its front page with an image of Israel’s Iron Dome, she wrote: “Modelled on Israel’s ‘Iron Dome’, Britannia Shield will invest £10bn over 10 years in the radar, missiles and technology needed to detect these threats and stop them before they reach British soil.”
But Badenoch told Today that was not the aim. “We are not building the Iron Dome. We are doing what other European countries are doing: Greece, Benelux countries – Belgium and the Netherlands – and Germany. We are designing something specific for the kind of threat that we face here.”
The shadow defence secretary, James Cartlidge, likened the phrase “iron dome” to the vacuum cleaner brand name Hoover when asked why Badenoch had denied the Conservatives were proposing an Iron Dome-style system.
Asked on Times Radio if the aim was to be able to intercept any attack over the entire country, Badenoch said: “It should, but it needs to protect critical national infrastructure … Critical national infrastructure protects the entire country. If we lose even one thing, the entire country is in a real problem, and that’s what we mean.”
On Today, asked whether she was ready for an election, Badenoch said she believed polls would improve but admitted the party was still unpopular because of the previous government’s record, even though her personal popularity had improved.
“I think people still associate the Conservative party with the things they didn’t like about the previous government,” she said. “I need to work hard to change that … these things take time. I am the leader and I need to show that this party is different from the party that the people said no to two years ago.
“I am confident that when that election is called, people will see that the Conservative party has the best offer. We have a strong team, we have a plan and we’re all about common sense.”
A Labour source said: “It’s no surprise Kemi Badenoch wants to forget how the Tories hollowed out our armed forces.
“But hoping her half-baked defence promise based on fantasy numbers will be forgotten just hours after it was made shows how unserious she is about our country’s security. The Tories can never be given responsibility for keeping Britain safe again.”