The Conservatives are “up for the fight”, Kemi Badenoch said as she kicked off the party’s annual conference in Manchester.
Breaking with tradition and delivering a welcome speech at the start of the conference on Sunday, Mrs Badenoch acknowledged the Conservatives had “a mountain to climb” as it languished third in the polls behind Reform UK and Labour.
But setting out her party’s plan to leave the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and deport 150,000 people a year, she insisted her party could win the next election by “combining secure borders with a shared culture”.
She said: “Nations cannot survive on diversity alone. We need a strong common culture rooted in our history, our language, our institutions and our belief in liberty under the law.
“That is what holds us together, and that is why borders matter, why numbers matter, but most of all, why culture matters.”
Immigration has dominated the start of the conference, where “stronger borders” is one of the two slogans hanging from the front of the conference centre.
Earlier, Mrs Badenoch had told GB News that every Conservative candidate must sign up to her plan to leave the ECHR, or they would be barred from standing at the next election.
As well as pledging to leave the ECHR, the Conservatives published a plan on Sunday that included a series of measures aimed at deporting 750,000 people over five years.
These included the creation of a “Removals Force”, inspired by the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agency, a radical tightening of asylum eligibility and the abolition of courts handling immigration cases.
Speaking on the conference floor, shadow home secretary Chris Philp said he would deport any foreign national expressing “racial hatred, including antisemitism” or supporting “extremism or terrorism”.
But speaking to the BBC earlier on Sunday, Mrs Badenoch had declined to say where people would be deported to if they could not be sent to their own country, describing this as an “irrelevant” question.
Shadow foreign secretary Dame Priti Patel told a fringe event at the conference that the proposed Removals Force would be “very different” from Ice.
She said: “The two are not comparable. Our system and our structures and our laws are different.”
In her speech, Mrs Badenoch also stressed her party’s commitment to economic responsibility, saying it had “learnt” from Liz Truss’s mini-budget.
She said: “Economic responsibility is the hallmark of the Conservative approach and today it is right back at the heart of everything we stand for.
“We may be in Manchester, but the theme of economic responsibility will run through this conference like the words in a stick of Blackpool rock.”
And she hit out at her opponents in Labour and Reform, saying they were “two sides of the same coin” that both practised “identity politics” and “division”.
She said: “I am black, I am a woman, I am a conservative, and I know that identity politics is a trap. It reduces people to categories and then pits them against each other.
“But I am more than black, female and even conservative. I am British.
“I am British, as we all are, and my children are British, and I will not allow anyone on the left to tell them that they belong in a different category, or anyone on the right to tell them that they do not belong in their own country.”
