One of Kemi Badenoch’s senior team has been accused of “real brass neck” after saying Britain needed a better work ethic.
Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, said there were nine million working-age people not in work and Britain needed to “lift our game and to up our game”.
He made the comments on the BBC’s Political Thinking podcast when asked whether he thought Britain was missing “a belief in hard work”, telling the presenter, Nick Robinson: “I do a bit.”
“There are nine million working age adults who are not working. And as we compete globally with countries like South Korea, China, India, we need a work ethic. We need everybody to be making a contribution … we need to lift our game and to up our game,” he said.
Figures published this month showed 9.3 million people were economically inactive between September and November last year, down slightly on the year before but still 670,000 more than before the pandemic.
A quarter of those are economically inactive because they are students and another 30% have a long-term illness.
Previous Conservative politicians to have suggested British people need to work harder include Norman Tebbit, a cabinet minister under Margaret Thatcher, who suggested in the 1980s that unemployed people could follow the example of his father, who got on his bike to look for a job.
The former prime minister Liz Truss also once co-wrote a book, Britannia Unchained, with five other Tory MPs, which described British people as “among the worst idlers in the world” and claimed: “Too many people in Britain prefer a lie-in to hard work.”
Responding to Philp’s comments, a Labour spokesperson said: “After the Conservatives’ economic failure left working people worse off, it takes some real brass neck for the Tory top team to tell the public that it’s really all their fault. It’s the same old Tories. They haven’t changed and they’ve learned nothing.”
The Liberal Democrat deputy leader, Daisy Cooper, said Philp’s own work ethic as chief secretary to the Treasury under Truss had “crashed the economy in just 39 days”. She added: “The British public will no doubt take his advice with a bucket-load of salt.”
Badenoch, asked about Philp’s claim that Britons needed a better work ethic, told broadcasters: “I think everybody should be working hard, including myself.”
Philp also waded into the debate over the Conservative party’s approach to immigration on Friday, saying “mistakes were made”.
Priti Patel, the shadow foreign secretary, had on Thursday declined to apologise for high levels of immigration during her time as home secretary in Boris Johnson’s government. Appearing on the Sun’s Never Mind The Ballots programme, she said it was “totally distortionary” to suggest the previous government had “thrown open our borders” to the rest of the world.
But a spokesperson for Badenoch appeared to distance the Tory leader from Patel’s comments, saying the Conservative party under her leadership “will tell the truth about the mistakes we made”. They added: “While the last Conservative government may have tried to control numbers, we did not deliver.”
Philp told Sky News that he and Badenoch had been “completely honest” about errors made by their predecessors, and immigration numbers were “far too high”.