*None of this propaganda was challenged once by a BBC journalist - in fact the complete opposite of when the BBC interrogate government ministers forensically on their statements*

For fourteen years, Conservative governments raised taxes, increased borrowing, and repeatedly promised—but failed to deliver—social care reform. The idea that the party has always opposed tax rises or borrowing for social care is not just misleading; it is historically false.

Under Boris Johnson, the Conservatives introduced the Health and Social Care Levy, a 1.25% rise in National Insurance explicitly sold to the public as a way to fund the NHS and social care. That single policy alone destroys Badenoch’s claim that Conservatives reject tax rises for social care. They didn’t reject them—they implemented them.

Beyond that, Conservative chancellors repeatedly raised the tax burden: freezing income tax thresholds (a stealth tax rise), increasing corporation tax from 19% to 25%, and raising dividend taxes. By the time they left office, the UK tax burden was at its highest level since the Second World War. To now insist that tax rises are unacceptable in principle is to deny the party’s own recent history.

On borrowing, the story is similar. Conservative governments presided over huge increases in public debt, from austerity-era borrowing to the vast sums taken on during the COVID pandemic. Liz Truss’s mini-budget, with its unfunded tax cuts, triggered a market crisis and forced emergency intervention from the Bank of England. The idea that Conservatives have consistently opposed borrowing to fund public policy is simply not credible.

On social care itself, the record is even more stark. For years, the Conservatives promised to “fix social care once and for all”. They did not. Local authority budgets—the main source of social care funding—were cut by around 40%, forcing councils to ration care, close services, and leave thousands without support. The much-discussed cap on lifetime care costs, designed to protect people who had “saved up over their lives”, was repeatedly delayed and never implemented under Conservative rule.

Badenoch’s appeal to fairness for those who have “made provisions and saved up” rings hollow when set against a system that, under her party’s stewardship, continued to force many families to sell homes to pay for care, with no meaningful protection in place.

Her economic warnings—about businesses closing, youth unemployment, and the cost of living—also point back at her own party’s record. Business investment stagnated, firms relocated post-Brexit, youth unemployment rose after 2016, and the cost of living crisis peaked under Conservative leadership, with inflation hitting double digits and real wages stagnating.

What Badenoch is doing is not setting out enduring Conservative principles; she is attempting to retrofit a narrative of fiscal purity onto a party that spent fourteen years doing the opposite. Her letter is less a statement of philosophy and more a political repositioning exercise: distancing the current Conservative leadership from the consequences of its own decisions, while demanding constraints on a new government that her party never applied to itself.

Badenoch talks about principles. The record shows practice. And the two do not match - and nor does the BBC's.