26 September 2026 - 1:00pm
Kemi Badenoch announced this week that she wants to stop some unemployed claimants from buying alcohol, cigarettes and scratchcards with their benefits. Her proposed “back-to-work cards” would accompany a 30% reduction in the standard allowance for unemployed claimants who exhaust their entitlement to full payments. Longer work histories would buy longer protection. Sickness benefits, housing and children’s payments would be unaffected.
The political calculation is obvious. The Conservative Party has been hovering around 20% in the polls since May 2025 and needs a reason for voters to reconsider it. Waiting for Nigel Farage’s Reform UK to implode is hardly a strategy for government, even if it has boosted the Tories’ projected seat share at the next general election.
Nor should we assume that anything resembling austerity-era Conservatism must be unpopular. Back in 2012, then-Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith explored restricted benefit cards. The following year, a report from the think tank Demos found that 59% of people supported some state control over benefit spending. Asked which purchases should be prohibited, 68% selected gambling and 54% things harmful to health, including alcohol and cigarettes. These figures are old, and support for restrictions varied according to whom they would affect. Nevertheless, they suggest an audience for Badenoch’s proposal — especially since support for spending on unemployment benefits has dropped since the pandemic.
Badenoch is not necessarily swimming against the public mood: voters like the idea of a contributory welfare state, even if they’d shudder at it being applied to the state pension. Someone who has spent decades paying into the system would retain greater protection than someone who has barely worked. Voters need not be instinctively hostile to welfare to find that distinction reasonable. The Tory leader has an argument about fairness available to her, if she chooses to make it.
International comparisons offer qualified encouragement. America’s SNAP food assistance already excludes alcohol and tobacco. A 2025 poll by the Center for Excellence in Polling found 58% of likely voters supported restricting eligible purchases to nutritious foods, rising to 72% among Republicans. Meanwhile, according to a 2017 YouGov poll, 65% of Australians agree that welfare recipients who fail drug tests should face restrictions, too. These are different restrictions, but it suggests that directing how assistance is spent can appeal particularly to the Right.
However, Badenoch’s greatest political difficulty is that the voters she needs are not all on the Right. YouGov’s latest tactical-voting research shows that 43% of current Labour supporters and 49% of Liberal Democrat supporters would vote Conservative in a scenario where only the Tories and Reform could win. These are voters prepared to lend Badenoch their support to keep Farage out. She cannot afford to treat their willingness as unconditional.
These voters may well support restrictions on benefit spending, but presenting the policy as a crackdown on people who “can’t be bothered” risks reminding them why they stopped considering the Conservatives in the first place. The “nasty party” label is particularly unhelpful when the route back to power depends partly on being somebody else’s least objectionable option.
Meanwhile, Reform has already attacked the proposals as insufficiently tough. Badenoch should expect more of this: as with immigration, whatever restrictions she proposes, Farage’s party can demand another turn of the screw. Letting Reform dictate the terms would make retaining those more centrist tactical supporters harder still.
That does not mean the Conservatives should retreat into silence. While they are tied with Farage’s party in some polling, drawing level with an imploding rival is not exactly evidence of a restored electoral coalition. Badenoch needs policies which give the Tories a purpose beyond surviving their next set of elections: this is just one part of her current strategy of attacking Reform as reckless, promoting tax cuts without commensurate spending cuts. It is probably the right one.
This is a risk worth taking, provided she makes the case through contribution and fairness rather than contempt. A return to the years of the “nasty party” would be damaging. But a party stuck around 20% needs a bold offering to catch the public’s attention. This might just be that policy.
