Economy: can we trust the Tories again?
Coffee House Shots
The Spectator
4.4 • 2.1K Ratings
🗓️ 6 October 2025
⏱️ 12 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Tim Shipman and Michael Simmons join Lucy Dunn live at Manchester for Conservative party conference. It's day two, and we've heard from shadow chancellor Mel Stride, who unveiled various pledges including business rates relief and spending cuts.
The Tories are clearly trying to position themselves again as the party of 'fiscal prudence' – but are people listening to them? As the team points out – whether through a lack of protestors or the speedy serving times at the conference bar – the convention centre is pretty quiet.
Produced by Patrick Gibbons.
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Transcript
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| 0:47.6 | Hello and welcome to Coffee House Shots. I'm Lucy Dunn and today I'm joined by Michael Simmons and Tim Shipman. Today we're recording from Manchester where the Conservative Party |
| 0:52.2 | Conference is in full swing. We've just heard a |
| 0:54.7 | speech from Shadow Chancellor Mel Stride. Michael, you've written a blog on this for Coffee House. |
| 0:59.6 | What were the top lines? Sure. So the big announcement that they'd sort of kept a hat on |
| 1:04.9 | until the Shadow Chancellor's speech was that there'll be 100% relief on business rates for hospitality, retail and |
| 1:12.9 | leisure companies. So essentially, taking away business taxes for pubs and restaurants. Now, that's |
| 1:18.8 | going to cost something like $4 billion a year, but could make a serious difference to the |
| 1:25.0 | hospitality industry that we're always hearing is in such great trouble. |
| 1:29.4 | Now, to pay for that, the shadow chancellor also announced 47 billion pounds a year of spending |
| 1:36.5 | cuts that he'd like to bring in if he ever makes it to number 11. |
| 1:41.4 | And that's essentially, the bulk of that is on welfare. But if we go through |
| 1:45.3 | the rest of it first, there's about £8 billion on cutting over 100,000 civil service jobs, |
| 1:50.9 | $4 billion on social housing, $7 billion on aid cuts. There's another around £4 billion on |
| 1:57.8 | the tightening up the asylum system. But as I said, the bulk of it's on welfare, |
| 2:02.3 | where 23 billion pounds will be cut from working age benefits, so making it harder to get |
| 2:08.6 | sickness benefit if you have what he described as low-level mental health. But crucially, |
| 2:13.1 | and this is what I was writing about in coffee house today, there's zero billion pounds of cuts to |
... |
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