Category: Speeches

Gordon Brown – 2004 Speech at the Advancing Enterprise Conference
Below is the text of the speech made by Gordon Brown, the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, at the Advancing Enterprise Conference held at the QEII Conference Centre in London on 26 January 2004.

I am very pleased to be able to welcome all of you, distinguished business leaders, to the QE2 centre this morning. And let me begin by saying what I firmly believe: that the whole country owes you a debt of gratitude for the way, particularly throughout the world downturn of the last few years, you have been meeting the new challenges of the global economy – challenges that have required resilience, fresh thinking and the courage to change.

Today, leaders of business and government come together in one room to discuss the future. And I am delighted that we are all here together to discuss how best we can advance enterprise and equip ourselves for the next challenges of the global economy.

It is the first time this Treasury has done anything like this.

So why, you might ask, have we done so today?

I wanted this get together because we all know that in the modern global economy Britain has to meet competitive challenges that are more fearsome than ever, but that the opportunities for the winners are greater than ever.

I believe that if this country is to achieve its full potential, government and business must work constructively and creatively together.

Through this exchange of ideas – with often different points of view – and through seeking the broadest harmony, our aim is to forge a shared and long term national economic purpose for Britain.

A shared purpose that recognises that wealth creation is, today, even more important to the society we want to build; and that if we have the strength to make the hard long term choices, Britain is uniquely well placed to become one of the strongest, most successful enterprise centres of the world.

So let me thank you for joining this discussion here today – friends from the business community, neighbouring governments, international guests – all of you distinguished in your own fields… all of you with powerful influence on the world economy.

So what are the facts this Monday morning that should both focus our attention and drive us forward?

We all know that the new global economy means speed in innovation – it took nearly forty years for the first 50 million people to own a radio, just 16 years for the first 50 million people to own a PC, but just 5 years for the first 50 million to be on the internet.

But it also means a shift in global production. In 1980 less than a tenth of manufacturing exports came from developing countries. Today it’s 25 per cent: in twenty years time 50 per cent. That’s not just cars and computers but half of all the world’s manufacturing exports coming from developing countries.

By 2015 up to 5 million American and European jobs could have moved offshore – outsourced to countries like India and China as they strive to become the world’s second and third largest economies. Indeed even today China’s significance to the global economy is that every year it, on its own, is adding as much output as the whole of the G7 put together.

And so for companies like yourselves, there is hardly a product or increasingly a service you produce that is not subject to global competition. And at every point you have to look not just where round the world you source not just your materials but your labour and skills, but where your competitors source their labour and skills.

For Britain this means recognising there is no escape from uncompetitiveness by resorting to loss making subsidies, artificial barriers or protectionist shelters. Indeed, the price of failure is not a long period of slow decline but sectors going under altogether. And the opportunity for us is that as low cost, low value production comes under increasing pressure, the continuing challenge of finding and exploiting the high valued added, high tech, high skilled, science-driven products and services is the key to wealth creation in the future.

Here in the Treasury we have been thinking hard about all this. And I believe that Britain ought to be well placed in this new world.

In this world of open, global competition, we – Britain – are the nation that not only pioneered free trade, the very idea of open competition, but have a greater global reach across all continents than any other. With our long history of international engagement, our network of contacts – enhanced by the English language, the language of the internet and business everywhere – extends wider and deeper around the world than any other country.

And we have not just a long tradition of inventiveness and creativity – a tradition that gave us the steam engine, the telephone, penicillin and the television and made Britain the world’s leading industrial power – but since 1945 it is British inventors that have given us the internet, magnetic resonance imaging, the human genome project – all starting from Britain – affirming both our potential as a scientific nation for the future and the need to continue to invest in British science.

And we know we will only succeed if we can build on these inherent strengths and if politicians take the hard decisions making the tough long-term choices that are needed.

When it was clear that decades of stop go had held Britain back, that stability was the essential precondition for Britain to be the success it could be Tony Blair and I took the decision to forswear the power of politicians to manipulate interest rates for short term political advantage and make the Bank of England independent.

This was not an easy decision to persuade other fellow politicians to take.

But its importance is greater than ever in a world of ever more rapid financial flows where investors will gravitate to those countries where there is greater stability and away from those countries that do not deliver it.

And in Britain today, our new monetary and fiscal framework, this British model we have created – decisions we had to take to make the Bank of England independent, impose a symmetrical inflation target, cut debt and entrench tough fiscal rules – has made us better placed than before to cope with the ups and downs of the economic cycle. So instead of being – as in previous downturns – first in, worst hit and last out of any world downturn, Britain has not only avoided recession but has continued to grow in quarter after quarter, year after year, in all six years of our Government since 1997. And we are not just one of the only major industrialised countries to have avoided recession but have been more stable than any of our neighbours over the last few years.

We will never take stability for granted and I can say categorically to investors everywhere that we will continue to steer a course of stability and support our monetary authorities in the difficult decisions they have to take. And we will entrench not relax our fiscal discipline.

At this stage in the economic and political cycle governments have resorted to short termism in fiscal policy and gone on to raise the rate of spending.

But I am determined not to go down the short term road: I have announced that while meeting all our commitments and our fiscal rules the rate of spending growth in the next spending round will be lower than in this round – at all times I am determined that we will avoid the short termism and mistaken monetary and fiscal policies of the past.

And we will entrench this newly won and hard won stability and continue to demonstrate the same willingness to take the hard decisions so we can build on our strengths.

Now it is precisely these British qualities – our global reach, our scientific genius and now our stability – that are the vital assets for winning in a more harshly competitive global economy. And it upon this foundation that I believe we now have a unique opportunity to build the next crucial and decisive ingredient for future British success – a shared commitment to enterprise and wealth creation, and a determination to remove, one by one, all the barriers in its way.

We will take the tough long term decisions that are necessary to drive this through.

Just as with Bank of England independence we will take the long term view – take on political vested interests – and persuade the British people that everything they cherish about this country can only be built on the bedrock of a flourishing culture of enterprise and achievement.

And each session of this conference will focus on both specific barriers that can be removed and opportunities that can be seized so that we do better on flexibility and economic reform, on trade, on skills, on science, and have a stronger and deeper enterprise culture right across our country.

In the first session we want to learn what the imperatives and choices are for making a successful global company for the future. The job of government is to do only what it needs to do, no more than what it needs to do – stability, a competitive environment, investment in science skills and infrastructure.

And at every stage – whether for companies starting up, investing, hiring, training, seeking equity, exporting – our aim is to be on businesses’ side. And learning from US flexibilities, remove all the old barriers holding the enterprising back.

Let me give a few examples:

Planning: Britain must make our planning laws quicker, more flexible and more responsive – and we will.

Pay: Britain must and will do more to encourage local and regional pay flexibility.

Competition: we have just about the most open competition regime in the world.

Transport: we must work with you – private and public sectors together – to tackle the massive backlog in infrastructure investment.

Tax: Britain must do more to reward and encourage investment – and we will. Just as we have already made our choice and cut long term capital gains tax from 40 pence to 10 pence, small business tax from 23 pence to 19 pence and corporation tax from 33 pence to 30 pence, I promise we will continue to look with you at the business tax regime so that we provide incentives for investment in wealth creation and greater rewards for success – and make and keep the UK as the best place for international business.

Most of all in the coming spending round a government focused on the global economic challenge must make hard choices – as we will do tomorrow on university finance – to make investment in science and skills a central priority because they are the investments where government can make a difference and are most vital to our future.

Every one of you here who runs a company knows that you must draw on the potential of everyone in your company to be successful; its no different for a country.

Through Learn Direct, Employer Training Pilots, Union Learning Funds and then the return of apprenticeships, over 1 million more adults are learning today than six years ago. But I want us to be the best educated and best trained workforce and tomorrow’s much-needed reform of university finance – which I urge all Labour MPs to support – is another vital step towards that goal.

Our reforms will extend opportunity and equip young people with the skills to meet the demands of the 21st century and they deserve the support of all who share our goal of securing for Britain world class universities now and in the future.

And I also commit us to taking, in this spending round, the tough decisions necessary, demanding, in return for investment, the highest standards in our schools and further education colleges; reforming university finance to secure for Britain world class universities now and in the future; working with you to – both of us – invest in employee training… all the time encouraging and incentivising a work-your-way-up ethos of self improvement and self reliance among British employees.

And in science all the measures we are taking: £1.25 billion a year invested in renewing Britain’s science base; R&D tax credits; science learning centres; investing in science teaching in our schools; and what I can announce today – our commitment to make a long term plan for science funding over the next decade a central feature of our 2004 spending review… are for one purpose: to make Britain the best location for research and development and for innovation.

The flexibility we need is not just in Britain but in Europe too – and I am very pleased that we will be joined later this morning by some of my European Finance Minister colleagues. The best contribution we pro-Europeans can make to the cause of Europe is by ensuring that in Europe we face up to rather than duck the difficult decisions about economic reform — resisting the kind of inflexibility being added into directives like the working time directive, the agency workers directive, the investment services directive and the transparency directive, as well as insisting on tax competition not tax harmonisation.

And I can tell you that the Irish, Dutch, British and Luxembourg Finance Ministers are today setting out our joint initiative to reduce the burden of existing regulation and to ensure that every new regulation is subject to strict and stringent tests for its impact on enterprise and on the competitiveness of the European economy.

To ensure that enterprise takes centre stage in the drive for economic reform in Europe, the British, French and German governments are also setting out today our proposals for more pro enterprise pro innovation policies in the European Union.

Better trading relationships with the US and the rest of the world help not hinder Europe. So we welcome the restarting of the Transatlantic Business Dialogue. We must do more to reopen the world trade talks by tackling agricultural protectionism. And we propose a review to study – and then strive to secure – the removal of tariff and non-tariff barriers between Europe and America and to agree approaches to competition and regulation.

Finally – a government on the side of enterprise must build a deeper and wider entrepreneurial culture – where starting and growing a business is open to all with ideas and ambition.

Our proposals on enterprise for this year each add up to something bigger than their individual parts – initiatives that taken together can make a difference, and contribute to a change in culture and attitudes by valuing and celebrating the spirit of enterprise throughout Britain:
- We will hold the first ever national Enterprise Week – focused on inspiring the young to be enterprising – in November 2004;
- The Queen and other members of the Royal Family will be visiting the most outstanding examples of enterprise in each region on July 14th;
- In addition to the Queen’s Award for Enterprise, the Government is in discussions with the Palace about new ways of rewarding outstanding individual contributions to the development and promotion of enterprise in our country;
- Young entrepreneurs from Britain will meet and learn from young US entrepreneurs;
- All pupils before they leave school will have the opportunity to enjoy not just work experience but enterprise education too;
- We will launch a new National Council for Graduate Entrepreneurship;
- There will be an annual British competition for the British town or city of enterprise;
- And just as we compete for a European City of Culture we propose a competition for the European City of Enterprise too;
- A joint US-UK Forum on Enterprise – which I hope some of you will attend – this summer;
- In our high unemployment areas 2000 new enterprise areas as zones for new business opportunities with fast track planning, community investment tax relief, the abolition of stamp duty, and the prospect of enhanced capital allowances for renovating business premises. And we have promised Local Authorities who create new businesses in their areas a share of the increase in national business rate as a reward for their enterprise.
But all of this tells us that building an enterprise culture doesn’t just depend on any one initiative or individual but on changes in attitude and outlook which will, in time, transform our culture.

In other words: advancing enterprise depends upon the efforts of all of us.

I’ve sketched out what I think are elements of our shared economic purpose for a global era:

A Britain that is open, outward looking, flexible, reforming, valuing science skills and enterprise;

Government effective where it has to be effective – in economic stability, science, skills, infrastructure;

Businesses able to be the wealth creators they are, and encouraged where it matters – with incentives and rewards to invest and grow;

And a long term shared economic purpose – by that I mean a long term commitment not ever to take the easy way out or the short term course but resolute to get things right for the long term: making Britain a better place to do business – and better still in five, ten, fifteen, twenty years time from now.
January 2, 2016
Peter Robinson – 1979 Maiden Speech in the House of Commons

Below is the text of the maiden speech made by Peter Robinson in the House of Commons on 21 May 1979.

As this is the first occasion on which I have addressed the House of Commons, I should like to thank the House for the great kindness shown to me in my first two weeks in this building. I should like to go further and thank hon. Members in all parts of the House for imparting to me their knowledge and experience.

Although I and my colleagues will sit on the Government side of the House, we shall be doing so as a separate and independent group.

I am told that in making a maiden speech one is expected to be non-controversial. Since I come from Belfast, East, the most important part of Northern Ireland, a country that is steeped in controversy, the House will understand my difficulty this evening. Indeed, I come from a party in which controversy has not been entirely unknown. My campaign was indeed controversial. Indeed, the policies I pursued were controversial, and therefore I face certain problems in making my maiden speech.

Before I go any further, I should place on record the appreciation of the people of East Belfast for the outgoing Member, the right hon. William Craig. Mr. Craig has been a colleague of mine for many years, and although we differed on policy matters I can say with confidence that we always maintained our friendship. William Craig has always been a gentleman, and I greatly respect him.

I shall be brief, and I shall do no more in this speech than nail my colours to the mast. Since I come from Northern Ireland, I shall do no other than speak of the most important matter in the eyes of the people of Northern Ireland, and that is the subject of security. I was pleased to see in the Gracious Speech a statement of the Government’s intention to restore peace and normality in my country. While that remains their policy, they will always have my full support and that of my party.

Hon. Members will all be aware of the terrible tragedy of terrorism. I know that it has come close to many in this House who knew Airey Neave. Those of us in Northern Ireland who knew him, loved and respected him, will appreciate the great loss occasioned by his death. In Northern Ireland about 2,000 people have died, over 20,000 people have been maimed and mutilated, and millions of pounds worth of damage have been caused in senseless and savage terrorism.

I ask the Government to adopt as their first priority the defence of the citizens of this part of the United Kingdom. I ask that they adopt the toughest security measures to put down terrorism in Northern Ireland. I may be stretching the idea of non-controversy too far if I suggest that the Government might even go as far as to bring in capital punishment for terrorist crimes.

In Northern Ireland many of us are aware of the great difficulty faced by the security forces. I wish to place on record my appreciation of the great job which they undertake against the propaganda that is put out by the Provisional IRA and other terrorist groups. I know that many hon. Members will take the view that I am too young to advise this House, and that may be so. But, despite my tender years, I have walked behind many a hearse and have looked in many an open grave. I have held the hand of many who have lost loved ones as a result of the terrorist campaign. I have carried in my arms fatherless children of many of the victims of Ulster sorrows.

Tonight, with all the force at my command, I call on the Government—because it is to this Government that my people look—to act with all speed and determination to solve the security problem in my country. On behalf of Ulster’s dead, I call on the Government to act. On behalf of Ulster’s living, I call on them to do it now. I ask them to stand up to terrorism in Northern Ireland and let my people live.

January 2, 2016
Andrew Mitchell – 1987 Maiden Speech to the House of Commons

Below is the text of the maiden speech made by Andrew Mitchell in the House of Commons on 20 July 1987.

I rise to address the House for the first time in a spirit of great humility—deeply honoured to represent my constituency in this place.

I am particularly pleased to have caught your eye relatively early in the Session, Madam Deputy Speaker, so that I may pay tribute to my predecessor, Sir Philip Holland. Philip’s love and knowledge of this place and his service to his constituency was well known and well respected—as much in Gedling as in this House.

I mean no disrespect to Acton when I say that Philip graduated from that seat, from 1959 to 1964, to Carlton, which he went on to represent for 21 years—latterly as the constituency of Gedling, following the Boundary Commission’s most recent review.

Any hon. Member who chairs the Committee of Selection and yet remains so well liked and respected by hon. Members on both sides of the House must be endowed with the greatest of skills. Only time will tell whether any of my hon. Friends will take up Sir Philip’s mantle as a great hunter of quangos. I have been left in no doubt over the past few weeks that Philip’s many friends on both sides of the House will join me in wishing him and Lady Jo Holland a long and happy retirement.

The House may be aware that I am not the first member of my family to have taken his seat in this House; indeed, I am at least the fourth to have done so. Nevertheless, over the past three weeks I have come to the confident conclusion that not since Lloyd George have so many people known my father.

I beg to suggest that the constituency of Gedling is insufficiently well known outside Nottinghamshire. The rural deanery of Gedling, which gave its name to the refashioned seat of Carlton in 1983, is far more compact than its predecessor, having lost all the land south of the River Trent. My constituency stands at the crossroads of England, with a foot in the north, a foot in the south, but its heart in the Midlands.

Many hon. Members wax lyrical about the rural or urban nature of their constituencies and their agricultural or commercial interests. The great delight and at traction of the Gedling constituency lies in the exciting cross-section of the great variety of our national life that it provides. From the rural beauty and farming lands at the northern end to the more industrial areas of Netherfield and Colwick, my constituency includes the prime residential areas of Carlton, Woodthorpe and Arnold, perched either side of a hilly ridge. It also contains the attractive villages of Gedling, Burton Joyce and Stoke Bardolph, which include two of the most beautiful churches in the country which date from Saxon times. The Gedling colliery is achieving record productivity. It has been recruiting new members to the industry over the past six months and is an important feature of my constituency.

The quality of life enjoyed by my constituents is, by and large, excellent. We are particularly well served by the fine health facilities in Nottinghamshire which have seen a 30 per cent. decrease in waiting lists over the past four years. My constituents profit from living under the benign sway of the Gedling borough council, which is continuously singled out for praise by the Audit Commission for its standards of efficiency and service provision. Indeed, the council had its own version of the right to buy before the Government introduced their Housing Bill in 1980. We receive national and international delegations to inspect our housing schemes for the elderly and the frail elderly.

Of great significance is the fact that Gedling lies alongside the city of Nottingham. We know only too well that what happens in Nottingham today affects us in Gedling tomorrow. Gedling’s wealth and success are inextricably linked to the future of Nottingham city. As I try to follow that rocky pathway which is the lot of a Government Back Bencher, travelling as it does between toadyism and revolt, I shall be hoping, Madam Deputy Speaker, to catch your eye in the future when the Government’s bold plans to tackle the problems of our inner city come under discussion. We have much to be proud of in Gedling, and I am pleased to have been able to tell the House briefly some of those things.

Many of my constituents have followed the passage of this Bill with keen interest. The measures which passed into law before the election were widely welcomed. The help for business in dealing with VAT and in reducing small companies’ corporation tax was warmly supported, as was the further help for the blind and the elderly. Above all, we have had the welcome reduction in income tax. Today we are asked to give a Third Reading to this Bill. the greater part of which reintroduces proposals for tax relief for profit-related pay, as well as extending the accessibility and flexibility of personal pension schemes. I warmly welcome both measures. As my right hon. Friend the Chief Secretary said on Second Reading: The working of the labour market remains one of the greatest weaknesses in this country.” —[Official Report, 8 July 1987; Vol. 119, c. 356.] There is common cause on both sides of the House that the level of unemployment remains appallingly high.

I hope that I am being equally uncontroversial when I say that it is the supply side of our economy that must particularly command our attention and the Bill, with these two principal measures, makes a direct contribution on that front. In spite of significant progress on the supply side, there remain real restrictions on job mobility, occasioned by the lack of private rented accommodation and immobility within the council housing system.

The problems within education and training are well rehearsed, but the results are that we do not always turn out children equipped to compete in today’s industries or win tomorrow’s jobs. There are still problems within the labour market which hinder productivity along with our industrial performance. Above all, there is the absurdity of a system whose rigidities can attribute greater value to being unemployed than to working.

Tax relief for profit-related pay will ecourage the widespread adoption of such schemes and will help to dispel any vestige of that bizarre myth which was prevalent during the days of our economic decline in some parts of the private sector —that pay is somehow not in reality always directly linked to profitability.

These measures will help further to eradicate the them-and-us sentiments which for so long have dogged British industry. They will extend and enhance a community of interest between employee, employer and shareholder and secure a more motivated and committed work force. Above all, who can doubt that such measures, when implemented, will act to cut unemployment by ensuring less risk for an employer contemplating taking on labour as well as acting as an alternative to redundancy when times are bad?

I believe that the clauses which relate to private pensions will secure an equally warm welcome. They improve the lot of the early leaver, and perhaps I should declare an interest at this point. It is a sad fact that many who have changed careers during their working life are particularly disadvantaged in respect of their pension entitlements. The relevant clauses in the Bill will not only increase the freedom to choose in pension planning but free another rigidity in the labour market over the long term.

The Bill’s provisions join the many other economic measures taken by the Government to improve choice and freedom for millions of our fellow citizens. Such measures also extend personal responsibility greatly within society. It is the extent to which these opportunities and responsibilities have been grasped throughout society which is truly remarkable. Many of these measures have been practical methods to improve the commercial operation of our economy, but they are part of a shift in opinions and ideas, and expression of a new consensus which has sprung up. They mark a sea change in public opinion. It may be that the Falklands factor disguised the extent of support for this new reality, but the 1987 third election victory is a message which cannot be ignored on the Opposition Benches. Indeed, the right hon. Member for Plymouth, Devonport (Dr. Owen) acknowledges these truths in his books and in his more recent speech in the debate on the Loyal Address. I dare to suggest that even the hon. Member for Dagenham (Mr. Gould) has shown an awareness of these new realities and aspirations over the past few weeks.

It was a Conservative Prime Minister returning to office in 1951 who reflected in the House that the nation required time to allow certain Socialist legislation to reach its full fruition. Although the positions are not comparable, I hope that the Opposition will accept how great has been the revolution in the spread of choice and ownership within society as well as in personal responsibilities keenly grasped. It is time for the Opposition to embrace these verities.

January 2, 2016
Peter Robinson – 2015 Speech to DUP Spring Conference
Below is the text of the speech made by Peter Robinson, the then Leader of the DUP, to the party’s Spring Conference on 28 March 2015.

When we gathered at our annual conference last November we were in the midst of a crisis that threatened the political institutions. Rather than allow the process to drift towards inevitable collapse we took the bull by the horns and forced the matter to a head.

Over ten weeks at Stormont House we spent many long days and even longer nights negotiating a way forward across a range of issues. And against all the odds we managed to hammer out a deal on issues which had for so long proved intractable.

The Stormont House process was conducted in sharp contrast to the Haass process of the year before and unlike those talks an outcome was reached with which we were able to agree. Indeed I have to say that in all the years I have been involved in political negotiations I believe that this process resulted in the best outcome for unionism.

As part of the Stormont House Agreement we were able to deliver on many of our long-term goals. Real progress was made in reducing and re-organising the number of government departments, cutting the number of MLAs, providing for an official opposition and improving how the Executive does its business.

On the past we were able to rewrite and reshape the Haass proposals in a way that defended our red lines. Real progress was made but there continues to be a major job of work in terms of implementation.

Perhaps the most challenging issues to resolve at Stormont House were welfare reform and the Executive’s finances. These issues were a real threat to the viability of the Assembly and devolution.

For the eighteen months, since the Assembly’s Sinn Fein leadership failed to sell the original set of welfare proposals to their Dublin bosses, devolution had been drifting towards disaster.

But in the 5-party talks at Stormont Castle slowly but surely progress was made.

It was perfectly clear from the outset that whatever the UK government was prepared to do for us financially in other areas of expenditure they would give nothing towards welfare reform.   That meant any support, additional to what was being provided in Great Britain, would have to be provided by the Executive and would therefore reduce the funds available for key public services such as health and education.

In the end we were able to reach a 5-party agreement that included the SDLP and Sinn Fein.

That agreement paved the way for a wider deal and the return of the Welfare Bill to the Assembly.

It cleared the way for the Executive to produce a balanced budget, to provide for long-term structural reform of public services and for Parliament to pass legislation on Corporation Tax in Northern Ireland and for the UK government to provide a worthwhile financial package for the Executive and Assembly.

This was a massive breakthrough that resolved outstanding issues and created the potential for long-term financial stability and prosperity.

Delivery remained on track right up to a few weeks ago when, out of the blue, we were asked to believe that someone turned the lights on in Connolly House and Sinn Fein suddenly realised that what they had negotiated and agreed was not what they thought they had signed up to.

This represented either an alarming act of bad faith by Sinn Fein or the most inept negotiating by republicans in the history of the process.

For myself I find it inconceivable that they did not know or understand what was written and detailed in the document agreed by them at Stormont.

And let me make it abundantly clear. Given the sums of money involved – no one with post-primary education could possibly have believed that the funding envelope in the agreement could have covered the entirety of the shortfall for each and every claimant now and in the future.

I make some allowance for Sinn Fein’s poor grasp of economics but not even they could have thought a fund of £20 million per year could have covered what they once claimed to be a gap of £450 million.

And let me make one thing clear, this is not, at its heart, a dispute between the DUP and Sinn Fein: I’m fed up with some journalists characterising this failure by Sinn Fein to implement an agreement as a quarrel or dispute with the DUP, or as the difference between their version of events and ours! When governments and local political parties are lining up to condemn Sinn Fein for its U-turn it’s pretty clear where responsibility lies for the present impasse.

We must not allow anyone to rewrite the history of this issue. It is clear, it is unambiguous, it is clear-cut, and it is inscribed in black and white for everyone to see.

So the responsibility for the present difficulty is established beyond doubt, but a solution still must be found.

I have made it clear, and I do so again today, I’m prepared to look at how we implement the December agreement – but I’m not prepared to re-negotiate it. In particular I am not prepared to take another penny from our vital public services to solve what is at its heart an internal Sinn Fein dispute.

The hypocrisy of Sinn Fein in supporting a strike against a budget they voted for is only matched by their willingness to boost welfare payments by further cutting front-line public services they complain need more funding.

Mr Chairman, this is an historic moment for this party and for this Province.

We stand on the verge of a momentous opportunity for Northern Ireland.

In just forty days time the United Kingdom will go to the polls to elect a new Parliament and a new Government.

All the pollsters and predictions would suggest that no single party will have sufficient seats to form a majority government.

This means that the DUP will have a unique opportunity to help shape and influence the next government to get the best deal for Northern Ireland.

We could have a real say in shaping the next government of the United Kingdom.

Almost every serious political commentator has predicted that DUP MPs can be the kingmakers after the election. If they are right – and opinion polls suggest they may be – then a strong and united DUP team can make a real difference to the lives of the people we represent.

It’s just a fact. No other local party will figure in the talks that follow Election Day.

We, therefore, need the strongest DUP team to get elected in order to strengthen Northern Ireland’s hand in such negotiations.

Every vote will count and every seat will matter.

That’s why this election is so important and that’s why we take nothing for granted. We will work for every vote.

This opportunity may not come around again for a political lifetime.

Northern Ireland can’t afford to waste the opportunity that has been presented to it.

Today, I want to set out why this election matters so much; to publish our Northern Ireland Plan and to officially launch our election campaign.

Every election is different in some respect but this election is truly unique.

Our goal is not about success for the DUP for its own sake – it’s about what we can deliver for Northern Ireland.

Though today marks the official start of the election campaign the preparation work has been going on for months.

I believe that the forecasts are good for Northern Ireland.

At long last unionism collectively is starting to get its act together.

That’s good for Northern Ireland.

That’s why I was delighted to be able to announce, along with Mike Nesbitt, the most far-reaching unionist electoral pact in thirty years.

And it’s working. How do I know? I know it’s working because our political opponents are snorting and ranting – they don’t like it.

I can’t think of anything that antagonises the enemies of unionism more than the idea of unionists working together.

Within minutes of the historic deal with the UUP being announced our opponents were out in force seeking to undermine, confuse and divide. No tactic was out of bounds in order to undermine the deal.

They said the DUP was running scared.

They said the UUP had been sold a pup.

They decried, lamented and bemoaned the lack of choice for unionist voters – though those same critics would never in a million years have considered voting for a unionist candidate themselves.

If there is one common feature in my – over forty years – in politics it is the desire by unionist people for unionist politicians to work together.

Division costs unionism; it always has.

Split votes cost unionism seats and lost seats means lost influence at Westminster.

Whose interests are ultimately served if two or more unionists divide – mostly over matters of detail rather than matters of principle – and allow a non-unionist to be elected?

It’s simply not in the interests of unionism!

In no negotiation will everyone achieve everything they want but I believe that the deal I did with Mike Nesbitt is good for unionism and good for Northern Ireland.

In Fermanagh and South Tyrone and Newry and Armagh I want to pay tribute to our associations who have been asked to stand aside. But make no mistake in twelve months time, at the next Assembly election, the wider interests of unionism will be best served in these two constituencies by voting for the DUP candidates.
Though, again I say it, I hope in that election too we can have a voting agreement that ensures voting preferences go to other unionist candidates.

Whatever anyone may think of the balance of the pact, that debate and discussion has ended

Ideally, I would have liked to see an even wider deal. I would have liked Upper Bann and South Belfast to be included. But let’s be clear the DUP is the largest unionist [JR1] party in both those constituencies. We are leading in the polls in both constituencies and in each of them our main challenge comes from outside unionism.

In Upper Bann there is a fine margin between the DUP and Sinn Fein with the UUP trailing behind in third place – but still capable of endangering the seat. Let’s be clear this is a two-horse race between the DUP and Sinn Fein. If the seat is to be held for unionism it will only be David Simpson who can do it. While Upper Bann remains a strongly unionist constituency the danger to unionism is a split unionist vote allowing Sinn Fein through the back door.

That would be a disaster for unionism.

The same can be said in South Belfast. This is a four party contest. The SDLP, Sinn Fein and Alliance are chasing the DUP who have led all parties in the last two elections in this constituency. There is now a real opportunity for the DUP to win back South Belfast for the unionist cause.

The facts are clear for all to see.

It is only the DUP that can win the seat for unionism. Unionists in South Belfast are already uniting their efforts behind the DUP.

And I can imagine no better candidate than my friend and Ministerial colleague Jonathan Bell.

The UUP are miles behind the four lead parties – and the other small unionist parties in the field will only further shred the unionist vote.   The message in South Belfast is clear. If you want a unionist MP you can have one – but only by backing Jonathan Bell.

Right across the Province we have a slate of candidates unmatched by any other party.

Both in terms of those who have a real opportunity of being elected and those who are the standard bearers for our party in other seats we have an unrivalled team.

We have a mixture of youth and experience.

From my colleague William McCrea who was first elected in 1983 and has spent almost 25 years in the House of Commons, to the more youthful Gavin Robinson who is fighting a Westminster election for the first time – we span the generations.

No. I’m not going to dwell on the East Belfast contest today but I want Gavin and his team not just to win the seat but to do so in a manner that makes it clear that the voice of East Belfast at Westminster is unambiguously and unashamedly a unionist voice.

Let me also wish Jim and Ian, William and Jeffrey, Gregory and Sammy, well in their re-election campaigns. I am confident that their hard work in their constituencies and at Westminster will pay dividends when people come to cast their votes.

After this election I want to see this exceptional team led by our deputy leader, my friend and colleague, Nigel Dodds back at Westminster negotiating the best deal for Northern Ireland.

I was confident that Nigel would win through in North Belfast even without a pact but if we can persuade unionists across the constituency to come out on Election Day Nigel’s re-election can be secured.

Let me make it clear unionism needs Nigel at Westminster to engage in what will be a vital period of negotiations.

Unionism has within its grasp the potential to move from having just one out of four seats in Belfast in unionist hands to three out of the four seats.   What better answer could there be to those who lowered the Union Flag in Belfast than raising the banner of unionism right across that great city.

Over the last few months we have not only been preparing for the election but we have been preparing for after the election as well.

We do not take a single vote or a single seat for granted but if and when the opportunity arises to get the best deal for Northern Ireland it is critical that we are ready for those negotiations.

Our position after the election is clear. Our goal is not to achieve anything for our party or ourselves but for Northern Ireland as a whole.

We will not seek, nor would we accept, any role in government but we would demand a good deal for Northern Ireland.

While other smaller regional parties have limited their options in terms of who they would be prepared to support, we have sought to maximise our options and our influence.

For us more votes and more seats really does mean more influence.

We are not tied to either of the major national parties but will be guided by what is good for Northern Ireland in particular and the United Kingdom as a whole.

Since we became the largest unionist party back in 2003 we have been working to a long-term strategy to move Northern Ireland forward and to strengthen our position within the United Kingdom.

Over the past few months we have been working on a plan to advance this strategy over the next five years.
Today I am publishing the DUP’s Plan for Northern Ireland.

It is a plan designed by the DUP for the benefit of Northern Ireland.

I hope it can win the support of not just our core voters but of many people across the Province who recognise the opportunity that exists to achieve key objectives.

This document sets out our five key goals.

The Plan demonstrates a reasonable and rational approach and one that shows a vision for Northern Ireland. If we can deliver, it will not only be of advantage to Northern Ireland but to the UK as a whole.
We have not sought to unpick the political agreements that have been reached in Northern Ireland nor are we making demands that are undeliverable.

We have a positive plan for Northern Ireland. We want to –
- Make Northern Ireland an economic powerhouse
- Deliver world class public services for our people
- Create a society based on fairness and opportunity for everyone
- Make politics and Government work better in Northern Ireland
- Strengthen the United Kingdom and protect and enhance our British identity
Under each of these values we have set out in much greater detail many of the policies and proposals through which these aspirations can be delivered.

We don’t expect any government to deliver every dot and comma of our plan but we do need to see delivery of a range of the goals at the heart of our proposals in order to elicit our support.

We need to see measures that can help transform Northern Ireland.

This plan will be at the heart of our election campaign.
It will also be the test against which we will judge the terms of any understanding from a potential party of government.

The capacity to deliver across this range of goals will be our only litmus test, nothing more and nothing less.

We are not prepared to play media games of prioritising, weighing or negotiating the terms of any agreement in the glare of publicity or creating artificial red lines. If the circumstances arise we will seriously discuss the nature of any potential government’s own programme and assess how compatible it is with our own.

We are publishing this document at the start of the election to give the national parties the time and the opportunity to understand our proposals.

Exactly how much we can deliver will depend on the strength of our mandate and the need for our votes.

We will respect the verdict of the UK as a whole and will expect the national parties to respect the verdict of the people of Northern Ireland.

So in this election I am asking for a mandate not just for the DUP but a mandate to deliver the Northern Ireland Plan as well.

We are the only party with such a plan and the prospect of delivering it.

There will be those who may not agree with us on every issue and some who may not normally vote DUP, who in the context of what this opportunity could mean for Northern Ireland, may opt to lend us their vote for this task. I hope they will.

Give us the strength and the mandate to deliver on the Northern Ireland Plan.

It would be a tragedy through split votes, shredded votes and wasted votes if Northern Ireland returned a divided, fragmented and ineffective team to Westminster.

That won’t work for Northern Ireland and it will hurt our chances of getting a good deal for the Province.

As this short conference comes to an end, the long hard slog over the next forty days is about to begin.

The battle lines are set. The time for talking is done.

At long last the phony war is over.

It is time for the campaign to commence.

We have the team to succeed.

We have the plan to deliver.

Let us write the next chapter in the history of our Province.

On May 7, let us win a mandate that we can take to the corridors of power in Westminster.

The broadcasters may have conspired to keep this party out of the television debates but I know that no force on earth will keep our team from taking our case directly to the people.

Today, we have gathered to launch this campaign but from Monday we must take this campaign to every door, every street and every hedgerow in Northern Ireland.

It’s our opportunity to make a real difference.

With zeal and enthusiasm let us fight for every vote and every seat.

Strong in our commitment, resolute in our determination, eager to transform our province – we now take our case to the people.

Let us play our part at the heart of the nation we all love.

For a better Northern Ireland, for a stronger United Kingdom.

Only this party can deliver.

Conference, let the election begin.
January 2, 2016
Peter Robinson – 2015 Speech to DUP Conference

Below is the text of the speech made by Peter Robinson, the then Leader of the DUP, to the party conference on 21 November 2015.

Mr Chairman.

Today, I am proud to report that the state of our party is sound, our Province is safe and the Union is secure.

Ulster is no longer at the crossroads – we’re on the motorway and on a clear path to a better future.

On the 6 May this year the people of Northern Ireland were asked once again to pass their verdict.

And I am delighted that the verdict was clear and unambiguous.

Once again we are Northern Ireland’s largest party, with an increased vote share and more votes than five years ago.

While our political opponents try to spin their results, we just have to count our votes.

I want to thank you all for the work you have done and the success we have achieved.

The true test of any political party is not what is written in the newspapers but in the votes cast at the ballot box.

That is where this party is tested and this party is vindicated.
At this conference and in this hall, twelve months ago I declared that our number one target at the general election was to return East Belfast to the unionist column.

Today, I can express my joy that 19,574 people in East Belfast agreed with me and together we elected Gavin as our voice in the House of Commons.

I want to thank each and every one of you who contributed across the province to our electoral success.

It may be the candidates who take the plaudits but we all know that it is only made possible because of the hard work of the team around them.

Once again the DUP received more votes than all other unionists added together and once again we established ourselves as Northern Ireland’s largest party both in terms of votes cast and MPs returned.

While we gained East Belfast we lost South Antrim by a small margin – indeed less than a thousand votes cast differently in two constituencies would have seen us return with ten MPs.

I know that we were all saddened by the loss of William in South Antrim but I want to thank him for all the service that he has given both to the constituency and to this party.

I am absolutely certain that we have not seen the last of William McCrea. In the past William has returned from adversity and defeat and I am sure that he will do so again.

But let’s record our congratulations to Nigel and the Westminster team who were returned in last May’s election. Well done all of you.
Mr Chairman, for a few weeks in May it looked as if there was a real chance that the DUP would hold the balance of power at Westminster.

In the end the Conservatives returned with a majority of 12 but that is not a majority that will see a government through a full term.
We may not yet hold the balance of power at Westminster but make no mistake, in the coming months and years of this Parliament, our influence and our pivotal role will grow and grow.

As we said during the election, “more votes, more seats, more for Northern Ireland.” I can assure you – when that day comes – we will use our influence wisely.

But the last twelve months have been dominated by the rise and fall and rise again of the Stormont House Agreement.

We have all been around politics long enough to know that no deal is ever the last deal – there is no finish line in politics – it progresses, it ebbs and flows, it develops, it evolves but nonetheless the agreement reached this week does mark a fundamental break with the past and a solid foundation for the future.

It was a long time coming!

Last December’s Stormont House Agreement represented the best deal for unionism in generations and the delivery of key DUP policies that date back many years. Last week’s agreement builds on that and goes even further.

So what does it mean?

I believe that it can mark a break with the past and a fresh start.
It means that politics can work again and start once more to deliver for those who elected us with the threat of bankruptcy and collapse removed.

The fundamental block on politics these last three years has been the refusal of some to face up to financial realities and accept welfare reform.

That impasse soured relations; starved key public services of much needed resources, and threatened the Executive with financial ruin.
This deal ends that uncertainty and removes the obstacles to progress.

It means the welfare reform issue has been resolved on an affordable basis with the most generous arrangements in the UK to protect those who are the most vulnerable.

In turn that means, on the one side, an end to the crippling welfare penalties and, on the other, stable long-term finances for the Assembly.

And this time because the key legislation is being passed at Westminster it means we have absolute certainty that it is going to happen.

It means we can spend more money on public services like health and education.

It means we can provide help to the working poor who will be so badly affected by the changes to tax credits.

In the weeks of negotiations that led to the final agreement, these were the people that I most wanted to support – yes; over 100,000 Northern Ireland families will be relying on that support.

And it means that we can announce the 1st April 2018 as the start date for a 12.5% rate of Corporation Tax that will mean tens of thousands of new jobs for Northern Ireland.

That is one of the achievements in the past few years that I am most proud of. When a few years ago other parties lost their way and lost their nerve on this issue it was the DUP that pressed forward undeterred.

In a few years time I trust that our determination will be rewarded by a buoyant and balanced local economy with our young people no longer having to leave our shores to find work.

We didn’t ask the government for hand-outs. We sought the means to develop a sustainable economy. We are also working with Westminster to cut out fraud and error and for the first time we are sharing the savings.

Through the Voluntary Exit Scheme and other reform initiatives Northern Ireland is leading the way in public sector reform and ensuring that every pound spent will support front-line services.

This agreement delivers on the DUP’s efficiency agenda. The policies we first advocated well over a decade ago are part of this deal. It means fewer government departments from next May and fewer MLAs from 2021. It means the removal of most of the delivery functions from OFMDFM which will become a more streamlined and strategic Executive Office.

It signals further progress from the mess we inherited in 2007 and makes changes in how the Assembly and Executive functions. It offers the creation of an official opposition and it tackles paramilitarism head on .

For months Mike Nesbitt, when he wasn’t apologising to republicans for the singing of the National Anthem during an act of Remembrance, has been complaining about the existence of paramilitary groups – but he delivered nothing. The DUP held its nerve, rolled up its sleeves, did the hard graft and attained the most comprehensive result ever achieved on disbanding paramilitary groups and all their structures and tackling paramilitary criminality and organised crime.

The deal represents the most far-reaching programme to deal with paramilitarism in all its emanations with a new pledge of office for Ministers, a statutory undertaking for MLAs, a cross-border task force to lead the drive against paramilitary and organised crime, a new strategy to completely disband paramilitary organisations once and for all, a new monitoring and assessment body to chart progress and significant additional resources from the UK government to help us combat terrorism and paramilitary crime.

I sometimes wonder if the begrudging parties who have complained about this agreement really think people in Northern Ireland are incapable of seeing through their rhetoric. They complain about the deal not including various features. They complain about the process taken in reaching agreement. Yet these same parties, who have been at the same Talks, for the same length of time as us, never produced or reached any alternative agreement on any issue – even with each other – never mind one that included the two main parties and governments.

The non-achievers, the wreckers’ and the do-nothing coalition carping at those who deliver and those who produce solutions – such hypocrisy! Do these failures really think people can’t see that their disapproval of the deal, we have subscribed to, is but a smokescreen to cover the embarrassment of parties who have no attainable alternative whatsoever?

Anyone can parrot party policy. Anyone can set out their own position and favoured outcome but it requires courage and competence to negotiate a successful agreement with political opponents.

All of this was achieved because we held our nerve and kept firm to our course. The route wasn’t easy, it wasn’t pretty and let’s be honest to get there we had to take unpopular tactical decisions along the way. But as a result we have given hope to the people of Northern Ireland that there can be a better future.

Where would we have been had we listened to the siren voices of doom and despair?

As the UUP consigned itself to the wilderness and rendered itself impotent one Talks wag summed it up best. He asked –
“How many Ulster Unionists does it take to change a light bulb?”
The answer is – “None, the Ulster Unionist Party can’t change anything!”

The truth is that when they left the Executive “principle” and “conviction” were characteristics they never consulted or exercised. This was a base and squalid act of electoral convenience. It was political chicanery at the cost of people’s hopes and future. It was both a short-term and short-sighted political ruse.

It would have been rather more convincing if within weeks they hadn’t started to plot a route to sneak back into the Executive after the election is over!

Carping and criticising from the sidelines is easy. The real challenge is to take the responsibility of putting things right.

I hope that this agreement will pave the way to better politics in Northern Ireland.

If you take a step back you can see how much has been achieved in recent years and how far we have all come together.

It is always a signal you have got it right when the criticism is not about what is in the deal but about what is not in the deal. That means our opponents have to make bricks without straw. So let us look at the issue that was not included – the legacy issue.

The DUP along with all the other parties in a Stormont implementation committee had progressed these matters and in the Talks we tidied up the loose ends in a sizable section that was to form part of the agreement. The Government prepared the Bill on these legacy matters so that it could be introduced in the House of Commons. The DUP approved both the legacy section and the Bill. If there are arguments about the issue not being dealt with – they are not with us. When there was deadlock between nationalists and the government we supported the proposition that all the material that had been developed should be included in the agreement so that the victims sector could make its own assessment and provide advice to the parties.

We also wanted the government to publish its Bill so that there would be an informed and mature debate on these matters. I still think that a consultation process of this kind is the way forward. What has anyone to fear about letting victims and survivors consider all the material and give their advice on how to take the matter forward? If those who are most directly impacted can reach a consensus on the way forward who are we to stand in their way?

Mr Chairman, let’s be clear the agreement we have reached does not mean that politics has come to an end.

However it does mean that there can be a fresh start on solid foundations.

I look back with pride at all that we together have achieved.
If you look around you will see that Northern Ireland is a place transformed.

No matter how difficult politics has been, it has allowed Northern Ireland to prosper.

Devolution laid the foundations for peace and prosperity.
It allowed us to change the image of Northern Ireland from a place known for conflict to one that has so much to offer.

It once was a place where talented people had to leave in order to realise their full potential but now is somewhere that people are returning to once again. It’s a location that investors and tourists are increasingly finding attractive.

We have brought in more jobs than ever before. We are the UK leaders in attracting Foreign Direct Investment. We have the best education results in the UK. Many of the world’s leading health professionals practice in our hospitals and in financial services technology we are the global leaders.

That has only happened because of those who have the commitment to make it happen.

During this recovery from a worldwide economic recession along with our local trying circumstances as we emerge from centuries of conflict and division it’s easy to become dejected and dispirited but in politics there are no short cuts or easy answers. Yet I can see an end to the gloom and darkness. The sun is breaking through.

For all of its faults there isn’t a better solution than Stormont.

Last May I informed our Party Officers that it was not my intention to contest the next Assembly election and earlier this week I publicly announced my intention to retire. The Party Officers have asked me to provide time for the foundations of the new Agreement to be put in place and to allow for a smooth leadership transition.
We are all agreed that it is important this is done in a manner and in a timeframe that allows a new leader to settle in before the Assembly election.

There will also be a need for the new leader to appoint a new First Minister. I have been First Minister of Northern Ireland for seven and a half years, that’s longer than I had planned and, indeed, longer than anyone has held the top Stormont post since the days of Viscount Brookeborough.

So my work is almost done, and now it is time for the next generation to step forward.

I wanted to make sure that I was handing over the reins of a political process that was stable and secure for the long term.

After a seemingly endless process I am delighted that we have finally reached agreement on the way forward. We have resolved all those toxic issues that threatened the continuation of devolution.

So as I prepare to bow out I do so in the knowledge that the Province is on safe ground and this party is in good shape to take Northern Ireland forward.

In councils up and down the Province, at Westminster, in the Assembly and in Europe we are the voice of unionism and the party for Northern Ireland.

I have been exceedingly honoured to lead this party it has been a significant part of my life. I have lived in the DUP from the day of its birth. I recall the endless hours shaping its structure and message. I remember my nomadic existence in the party’s early years as I travelled the highways and byways to build up its branches and membership. I still have memories of manoeuvring up narrow and dark laneways to the most remote and unlikely of meeting places in which any political party has ever gathered.

When it all began for me several political lifetimes ago the DUP was but an irritant to the political establishment, now we are the largest party of government in Northern Ireland.

And back then the decades-long terrorist campaign had just begun whereas now we are slowly but surely emerging from conflict.

Then decisions were taken over our heads and behind our backs but now we have a firm hand on the steering wheel and a foot on the break.

Nowhere was this clearer that with the Anglo Irish Agreement that was signed 30 years ago last weekend. Unionism was excluded and kept in the dark while others decided our future.

As a result we were moved, as I then described it, onto the window-ledge of the Union and had our fate determined by others.

Yet there are still those who would seek to destroy devolution and place our destiny once again in the hands of others – to be settled elsewhere by those who showed little concern for our anxieties in the past and do not have an inborn vested interest in our future.

If devolution has achieve one thing it is that it is now the people of Northern Ireland who take the decisions and it is we who will decide our future.

This is not the moment to reflect on past battles and past glories; there will be time enough for that.

And there is not enough time to thank all of those who have played a part in our success but I could not go without paying particular tribute to the deputy leader of this party and the leader of our parliamentary group, Nigel Dodds. Nigel has been faithful, loyal and wise and always willing to share counsel. You don’t just see him when the cameras role – he’s there to do his portion of the unappealing drudgery that also must be done.

And my thanks to Arlene Foster our Finance Minister who has effectively deputised for me at Stormont. Arlene never refuses to help when asked and is always first to offer support. Hard work doesn’t frighten her and her abilities are recognised in every post she has held.

I count myself fortunate to have had both Nigel and Arlene, not just as party colleagues, but as friends.

In thanking Ministers I want also to include all those who served in past months and years. Conference will forgive me if I single out one former Minister – Jim Wells. Jim, I know I speak for the whole conference when I tell you that you, Grace and your family have constantly been in our prayers. You have faced more adversity than any man warrants.

We all trust that Grace will continue to make progress and I personally want you to know that I have been heartened to see that those who conspired against you are being exposed and I hope justice will be done. I wish you and your family well for the future.
There is one other group of people I absolutely must include in my expression of thanks. Some refer to them as the staff – or Officials – or advisors – I have always seen them as just being part of the leadership team. I could not have functioned without them. Half the time they propped me up – the rest of the time they carried me completely. Nobody will mind if I single out Richard and Tim who have put up with me longer than most and whose judgement I always respected and valued. They all have been an indispensible part of this party’s success.

We know that to everything there is a season. For me this political journey is coming to an end.

In the coming period of time the party will choose a new leader.
I know how difficult a job this will be but I also know how rewarding it is to be able to change things for the better. My successor will face the sometimes ferocious rigour of high office. It is not a task for the faint-hearted. There will be long dark nights but believe me, morning does come.

Whoever the party chooses I will give them my wholehearted and unqualified support.

I will offer them advice in private and nothing other than support in public. That’s what fidelity and dignity require and what solidarity and friendship deserves.

They will need your support too, in good times and in bad.

Leadership means taking difficult decisions, it means making unpopular choices as well as easy ones.

I am absolutely sure that if this party is to continue to prosper we must view outcomes through a long-term lens.

People will be voting at the Assembly elections next May who were not even born at the time of the Belfast Agreement and who were still in primary school at the time of St Andrews.

If we are to retain our position in the leadership of unionism we must connect with the next generation. To do that we need to look forward to the future and not backwards to the past.

In just over five year’s time Northern Ireland will celebrate its centenary. Every poll and every survey suggests that the Union between Great Britain and Northern Ireland is more secure than ever.

But our aspirations must go beyond the politics of the border poll.
Nor do I want this party to look back on our achievement of 38 seats in the Assembly elections in 2011 as the high point of DUP success. It must be seen as a launching pad for future triumphs.

Because of all that we have now achieved, we are the authors of our own destiny.

Let our legacy not be remembered simply in the history books, but in the lives of our people.

I want to take this opportunity to thank Iris and my whole family who have carried with me the exigencies of my political roles. They have always sacrificed to give me the space to perform my public duties. I trust the Lord will give me strength and time to make up for the price they each have had to pay.

I thank the people of East Belfast who I have been proud to represent for almost forty years and who are special and wonderful people. I leave them in the charge of Gavin and my Assembly colleagues Robin and Sammy. They are in good hands.

Today, I am filled with appreciation to each of you for the opportunity to serve this party and for the honour, bestowed on me, through the DUP, of serving as First Minister of Northern Ireland.

When faced with menace and peril we stood our ground – side by side.

When challenges emerged we all rose to meet them.

When hardship descended we faced it – together.

And above all, I thank the people of Northern Ireland for the privilege of serving them and for the prayers that raised my spirits and placed a shield around me.

My race is nearly run; advancing years and failing health bring with them a sense of mortality and counsel me that in time – though I hope not too soon – I must pass beyond the reach of earthly powers. I thank God that He planted me in this corner of his creation. I thank God that he allowed me to live a life of purpose and service to the people I love. I thank God He placed in my heart a love for my country, its traditions and way of life – and a passion to defend them. I thank God He bound me, in this cause and in this party, to like souls who felt that same conviction and devotion.

Mr Chairman, I am filled with overwhelming gratitude for the constant and unwavering loyalty, support and kindness I have received from friends and colleagues throughout the party.

Expressly I have cherished the friendship and companionship of my senior colleagues who have stood by me – with equal vigor – in the deep valleys as on the mountaintops.

I bid each of you a fond and affectionate farewell.

May God bless you all.

January 2, 2016
Arlene Foster – 2015 Speech Following her Election

Below is the text of the speech made by Arlene Foster, marking her unanimous election as the Leader of the DUP, on 17 December 2015.

The very first thing I want to say is thank you.

Thank you for the confidence you have shown in me, thank you for the opportunity you have given me and thank you for entrusting the leadership of this party to me.

It is an enormous honour and an even greater responsibility to take up this role.

It is truly humbling to follow in the footsteps of political giants like Ian Paisley and Peter Robinson.

For much of the last forty years this party toiled in the political wilderness but today we stand tall as the largest unionist party and the party of Northern Ireland.

That is down to the hard work and efforts of those who have gone before me.

And as a result of that labour this role is not just as leader of the DUP but the leader of unionism.

I want to build on the firm foundations that have been laid and take this party from strength to strength.

It is not a word of exaggeration to say that none of this would have been possible but for the work of Peter.

There will be other opportunities to make our tributes and to place on the public record our appreciation but I cannot let this opportunity pass without saying just a few words.

We all know and history will undoubtedly record the role that Peter has played in building this party and building this Province.

He was never stronger than when times were tough and never better than when there was a political crisis.

Put simply we would not have government at Stormont today if it were not for Peter Robinson.

We owe him a debt of gratitude that words cannot adequately express.

He was instrumental in bringing me and others like me into the DUP and in consolidating our political dominance.

Little did I think that when I joined this party eleven years ago that I would be standing here today.

From the very first day I was welcomed with open arms and made feel at home.

It is the strength of this party that we welcome all those who share our values and our vision.

That is why we grow and that is why we succeed.

In this room we all know that there is not an old DUP and a new DUP, there is only one Democratic Unionist Party and for as long as I am leader that will always be the case.

Tonight you do me the great honour of electing me as your leader. From tomorrow it will be my job to repay the faith you have shown in me.

The style of leadership may change but the fundamental values of this party will not.

I want to take our cause and our case to every part of the Province.

I want to make the case for the Union to every class and creed.

I want us to help make the lives of our people better.

I want us to make Northern Ireland a more harmonious society.

And I want us to fulfil the hopes and aspirations of our people.

None of this I can do alone but only with the support of you all. I know in the times to come I will rely on your trust, your support and your counsel.

We are starting a new phase of our journey but we do so confident about the future.

Many of us can remember what it was like just 20 or 30 years ago.

Northern Ireland was a very different place.

A place full of great people but not much hope.

But throughout the worst of the Troubles we never lost our belief that we would pull through.

That terrorism and tyranny would be defeated and that peace and democracy would triumph.

It was a long hard road. Too many didn’t make it.

We will never, ever forget their sacrifice. Nor will we allow others to rewrite our history. Sullying the memory of those that stood up for freedom and democracy in a feeble attempt to justify murder and mayhem.

We are on the cusp of Northern Ireland’s second century. Just think about that for a moment. In six short years, Northern Ireland will celebrate its 100th birthday.

Can any of us imagine what it must have been like for our founding fathers back in the early 20s? Building a new state from scratch. One that was under threat from the very start.

No one thought Northern Ireland would last. Terrorist campaigns and less than loyal governments sought to deprive us of our birthright. Yet the people of Northern Ireland stood strong and withstood whatever was thrown at them.

When I was growing up, many of our family and friends firmly believed that a United Ireland was inevitable. I can recall people talking about emigrating when that fateful day would come.

But it never arrived. Something that seemed so certain for many in a generation battered by terrorism and betrayed by governments in London they looked towards to defend them, has given way to a new found sense of certainty that Northern Ireland is here and it’s here to stay.

With the safety and security of knowing that the constitutional question has been settled, it should inspire us with the confidence to look forward into the future and transform Northern Ireland into the sort of society that was denied to so many because of the Troubles.

Our place within the United Kingdom has been fought for and secured by the sacrifice of others. It is now up to this generation to seize the opportunity to move Northern Ireland forward.

We must remain ever vigilant. We can’t be complacent or let our opponents use other means to erode the Union, our heritage and our culture.

But our politics need not be consumed by the constitutional argument in the way that it once was.

It is a sign of our success that our political discourse is no longer dominated by disagreements about the constitution. That our efforts have settled an issue many thought insoluble.

The best way for us to cement the Union for this and future generations is to do something that our enemies did their best to prevent. And that’s to make Northern Ireland work.

How do we do that? By focusing on ideas and not ideologies.

The people of Northern Ireland don’t want to hear their politicians squabbling about issues that seem unconnected to their daily lives.

People who get up early in the morning, get their kids to school, go and do a hard day’s work and come home tired, don’t want to turn their TVs on and hear us sound completely and utterly out of touch with real life, arguing over things that don’t matter to them or their family.

They want to know that when they work hard and pay their taxes that their government is doing its best to ensure that their children get a good education, that their parents will get the healthcare they need when they need it and that they will be supported if times get tough.

We will never resile from our belief that Northern Ireland is best served being part of the Union. But unionism is about all of us and not anyone alone. It is about everyone working together as one, for the greater good, to build a Northern Ireland we can all be proud of.

I want people to support the DUP because we are the best defenders of the Union that is so important to the success of Northern Ireland.

But I also want people of all religious persuasions, from all social backgrounds to make this Party their home because we are the ones who can create a growing economy, who can best reform our NHS and who can tackle educational underachievement in our working class communities.

Sometimes it can be hard in the here and now to appreciate how far we’ve come. How much progress we’ve made. How improved things are.

But be in no doubt. These are better days.

Better days than we’d ever have imagined possible or dared to dream about back in the deepest, darkest days of the Troubles.

Dark days that cast shadows over far too many homes in Northern Ireland. Mine included.

They are experiences that will live with me forever.

I could have been overcome forever by the anger or animosity that experiences like that can understandably create. But I didn’t. If anything, those experiences have served only to strengthen my determination to do absolutely everything I can to ensure my children and another generation don’t have to endure what we did.

A generation is growing up with no understanding of what it was like to live in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. For many, it’s just something they learn about in history at school. It’s an echo from our past. Thankfully it isn’t something they have to live through today. And that’s how I want things to remain. I want our children and those that come after them to live in better days than we did.

There will always be the sneerers and the snarlers who will talk down the progress this Party has made. But be in no doubt the DUP has helped deliver better days for Northern Ireland.

And better not just because we have a degree of peace and political stability that seemed so far from our grasp for many years.

But better because we are beginning to build a Northern Ireland that is realising the potential that we know that this wee place we love possesses in abundance.

Better because we are attracting more inward investment than at any time in our history.

Better because our children achieve the best GCSE results in the whole of the United Kingdom.

These are better days. But we can have better still.

But we have moved on and we can go further.

As far as we have come in recent times we know we have further to go. The Northern Ireland of 2015 is an infinitely better place than the one of the 1970s or 1980s but we have not yet reached our full potential.

We’ve made massive progress but the absence of violence is not in itself enough.

I want to see us achieve much more.

Some like to talk this place down. They say we are too small. We are stuck on the edge of Europe. We can never compete against others.

The same was probably said a century ago when this part of the world was an economic powerhouse. A global player. An engine in our Kingdom’s economy.

Why did we fight so hard to reduce corporation tax after others gave up?

Why do we endeavour to attract inward investment?

Why do we focus so much on growing our economy?

Not simply because of the benefits it brings business. But because of the benefits it brings our whole society.

And it also creates the chance to usher in an era of opportunity for everyone in Northern Ireland. To create a Northern Ireland in a new century that is as good as we know it can be.

A Northern Ireland which offers its citizens a good start in life.

A good working life.

A good family life.

A good place to grow old.

And a good place to do business.

Northern Ireland should no longer be somewhere where second best will suffice.

We aren’t held back by the Troubles. Or the inability to shape our own destiny. We don’t need to look to anyone else for help. Or point the finger of blame in another direction. Our future is in our own hands.

A further, better shore may not always be the clearest to see or seem the easiest to reach. But it is there. And it is not beyond us.

Better days do indeed lie ahead for Northern Ireland. But they are only possible if we begin to believe.

Begin to believe that we can transform our economy.

Believe that we can have the best schools and hospitals.

And believe that we can build a united community.

Our job in the weeks and months and years ahead will be to instil that same belief that better days are yet to come in the people of Northern Ireland. That we are the ones who will help this country be the best that it can be. That the DUP – and the DUP alone – leads the way to better days.

Tonight with humility and hope for the future I accept your nomination and endorsement to lead this party. Tomorrow the next phase of our journey begins.

Together let us work to make sure that we strengthen the Union and to make Northern Ireland a place in which we can all be proud.

January 2, 2016
Sian Berry – 2015 Speech to Green Party Conference

Below is the text of the speech made to the Green Party Conference held in Bournemouth on 27 September 2015.

Hello Conference, I’m Sian, and it seems you want me to be Mayor of London.

It’s so great to be back on the campaign trail. Thank you so much to London Green Party for selecting me.

Politically it’s a really exhilarating time. Impossible things are becoming a reality. All over the world, in Barcelona, Madrid, in Paisley, Renfrewshire, and closer to home, candidates that started off as massive long shots are sweeping in and winning elections.

I look at these remarkable movements and I see what positive, principled politics, combined with the power of the people, can deliver.

I want all of these victories to inspire our campaign. And I want to give my huge thanks to Rashid, Benali, Tom, Caroline and Jonathan who all stood for Mayor alongside me – because you made it a strong and positive campaign, you raised new issues and brought in new supporters.

And I’m so pleased to have you standing with me still. And lined up with Shahrar, Noel, Dee, Andrea and Rosemary to win the seats we need on the London Assembly where we can hold the balance of power in London again.

I also want to give the biggest possible shout out to Jenny and Darren. Next May their hard work will have kept the Green flag flying proudly at City Hall, for 16 years – and we will build on that in 2016.

Now I’m going to introduce you to some of the Londoners we’ll be working with and for. Our campaign will bring their voices into City Hall, and I want to start by bringing them into my speech.

So this is what just a few of them told me on the towpath this week.

They definitely know what our city needs.

All of us here, like them, want a better, fairer, more equal society, where we work together for the common good.

This isn’t impossible. It is not a false hope. It is a resolute statement that there’s a better way for us to exist together. It is an understanding that things which once seemed impossible can happen when the people decide to make them happen.

Who could have foreseen the political movements of the last two years? First in Scotland. Then our Green Surge, then the huge wave that has overwhelmed and overturned the establishment in the Labour Party.

The landscape has changed so much, and it’s clear the political field remains wide open. The stakes are high. For our planet, for us and for the next generations.

As a Councillor in Camden I meet people every week in severe housing need. Families living four in a single room, and they want to know why there aren’t new homes for them to move into.

In King’s Cross in Camden we’ve seen nearly a quarter of the promised affordable homes cut this year. It’s the same all over London. In Earls Court just 11 per cent of homes will be affordable, in Mount Pleasant just 12 per cent. These projects are taking huge chunks of what used to be public land and turning them simply into speculative private investments. And this is happening not just under Boris Johnson’s gaze, but with his active help, overriding local communities and councils to push these deals through.

In City Hall, we will be different.

The Earl’s Court scheme is not good enough and I will block it. And Greens will put resources and staff into a new Community Homes Unit so that Londoners can decide what to do with land like this all over our city.

This isn’t just a policy for London. It’s based on a successful model in Cornwall, where 13 community-led housing schemes have been finished since 2009.

So as with Bristol Green Party’s amazing swing in May, on this too, London needs to follow where the South West has led.

And don’t get me started on private rent. I rent my flat and I don’t mind saying that rising costs have left me really worried I’d have to move out of the city I love.

We need to redefine affordability in terms of wages not market prices, and to stabilise rents. And along with Caroline Lucas, with London MPs, and with the help of Generation Rent, I have already been working on this. And I hope to see these powers added to the powers of city mayors by Parliament this autumn, so that they are ready for me to use them in May as the new Mayor of London.

And of course housing isn’t our only crisis. Air pollution causes the early death of nearly 10,000 Londoners every year. And the absolute scandal of Volkswagen cheating its emissions tests shows that we cannot rely on manufacturers’ pledges on cleaner vehicles to solve this problem. To put it mildly, we cannot rely on them at all.

I am demanding prosecutions, an independent inquiry right now.

And for car makers who have lied to us and not cleaned up their cars? I want them to be made to pay for the buses, walking and bike infrastructure, trams and trains we need to reduce traffic and get people off the car dependence that leads them to buy cars in the first place.

That would be real justice for this criminal fraud.

What’s the thread running through all these stories? It’s the abuse of power.

We want to win a Green Mayor and Assembly Members to put power back in the hands of the people, not to hoard it for ourselves.

Greens will give London back to Londoners, bringing the voices of its amazing campaigns and citizens into our campaign and then into City Hall.

We don’t have the resources of other parties because we don’t sell out. But we do have one thing that has made the impossible possible in campaigns all over the world: you and tens of thousands of other activists. And seven months.

So we need your help. We need you on our doorsteps, we need you online, sharing our campaigns and actions and events, we need your ideas. Come and talk to me about them afterwards. And we need your support and lots of retweets for our crowdfunder, which launches next week.

London is at the heart of the crises we face and it will be at the vanguard of how they are solved. In this exhilarating political climate, we can reclaim our city, and all eyes, across the UK, will be on London’s election next year.

I’m here to ask you to organise, to recruit, to contribute, to be active in support of our London campaign. Because if we work and stand together, anything is possible.

January 1, 2016
Caroline Lucas – 2015 Speech to Green Party Conference

Below is the text of the speech made by Caroline Lucas to the Green Party Conference held in Bournemouth on 27 September 2015.

In 10 weeks’ time, the world’s leaders will gather in Paris for the next round of international climate talks.

We’re at a crossroads: climate change is accelerating, the daily lives of millions are already being devastated by the consequences, and time is running out.

And we are under no illusions. For more than 20 years, governments have been meeting at global conferences to talk endlessly about the crisis, yet greenhouse gas emissions have continued to rise.

For those of us who remember Copenhagen and Kyoto, Lima and Nairobi, it’s easy to be cynical. World leaders jet in. They fail to do a deal – then either pretend they’ve saved the world, or break down in bitter recriminations.

What will be different this time? Well, it being Paris, I’m sure the champagne will be properly chilled and the canapés second to none. But the fear is that once again our leaders will put their own, short-term political interests above those of their citizens.

Once again, the main winners will be the corporations and their lobbyists. The stakes are high and the obstacles even higher.

We know that global corporations and governments will not easily give up the profits they reap through the extraction of coal, gas and oil reserves. The brilliant 350.org tell us that just 90 companies are responsible for two-thirds of recorded greenhouse gas emissions worldwide.

Genuine responses to climate change threaten corporate power and wealth, threaten free market ideology, threaten the structures and subsidies that support and underwrite them. But resistance is fertile. And Paris is as much a beginning as it is an end.

Because in 10 weeks’ time, Paris will also be home to the world’s largest non-violent direct action civil disobedience. It will be home to a mass mobilisation from global movements that aim to leave political leaders no other choice than to change everything.

Conference, the Stone Age didn’t end because we ran out of stone. It ended because we had a vision of something we thought was better.

And so in and after Paris, we will be articulating a vision of a fairer, more compassionate world, where energy is in people’s hands, not the hands of corporations, and powered by the sun, the wind and the waves. And sending a message, loud and clear, as we do from our own conference here today, that we need to leave fossil fuels in the ground.

That the era of fossil fuels must end.

That change also requires a transformation in the way we do politics.

The future we want for our children is not going to be created through the politics of the past. When everything has changed so much, and the threats we face as a society and a planet are so deep and complex, we need a new kind of political life.

From Obama’s first election, to the Arab Spring, from Spain to Greece, from Scotland to the Green surge, and now Corbynism – politics is increasingly defined by waves of energy that swell up – seemingly from nowhere – and coalesce around people, parties and decisions.

These waves are not, sadly, the monopoly of those who believe in a better world. The future can also be more brutish and authoritarian, if we let it.

But by being open to doing politics differently, we can ensure the future is about change made by and for people, in places and ways that make sense for them.

Of course, we need an effective state to intervene on many issues such as the regulation of global financial markets. But more than anything, the politics of the future must be about the creation of platforms, spaces and spheres in which people can collectively change the world – from workplace democracy and self-management, to civic engagement and generating our own community renewable energy.

But these efforts will be fatally undermined if the neoliberal deregulating zeal of the Tories remains the dominant force in British politics.

Slashing public services; stamping out trade union rights; and environmental vandalism on an epic scale – ripping up energy efficiency measures, privatising the Green Investment Bank, and taking a wrecking ball to what was once our thriving solar industry.

Conference, we say enough. We are working for something better.

And Conference, being in a position to actually deliver that vision of something better is what, I believe, makes it so imperative that we see a realignment of progressive votes to maximise electoral impact.

Finding and cooperating with others with whom we share a belief in a much more equal, democratic and sustainable world.

Of course we will have differences. But we also know that no one individual, no one party, has a monopoly on wisdom. Cancelling out each other’s votes is bad enough, but fighting in essentially the same terrain for the same issues and fundamentally the same belief set is madness, when it simply lets the Tories in.

We share a commitment to a much more equal, democratic and sustainable world. It is beholden on us to find a way to make the desirable feasible. In a world as complex and rich as ours, we need an equally complex and rich political response. To create a different mood, culture and sentiment to our national politics – one where we see that our differences can become a source, not of division, but of strength.

Conference, the truth is, we need a progressive Labour Party – if that’s what Jeremy Corbyn transforms it to be – to do well. Because, like you and me, it’s part of the movement for change.

Progressives are spread about the political battlefield – often more intent on fighting each other – and not the real enemy. But things are changing fast. Old tribal loyalties, that are blind to the good in others, are dying away. We can – we must – respond to that change.

And conference, I’m about to say something a bit controversial!

Who has been one of the most effective advocates of human rights in Parliament? Conservative MP David Davies. Who has pushed the case tirelessly for a reformed voting system? UKIP MP Douglas Carswell.

If we can make common cause, on a case by case basis, even with those with whom we most profoundly disagree on most issues, then why not with those with whom we have so much in common, in other progressive parties?

There is here a simple truth. We are stronger when we work together.

We know this in our own lives, as families, communities, amongst our friends and in our workplaces. This is one of the inspiring principles of the co-operative movement, of the trade union movement.

And I believe it should guide us as a political movement – strong and self-confident in ourselves, but also ready to reach out to work with others. With 1.1 million votes we Greens have a vital place in shaping that future, and a distinctive responsibility to the politics of people and the environment, over the politics of individualism and greed.

We don’t have forever to get this right, and I don’t say it will be easy. But Conference, if we’re serious about the urgency of our task, I believe we have no other option.

As in politics, so in Europe. The same underlying principle that we are stronger when we work together.

That doesn’t mean closing our eyes to what is wrong with the European Union. Too much power is in the hands of the elites. Too little democracy and accountability. Ordinary people feeling closed out from its decisions.

But the same can be said about our own British Parliament. Concentration of power, corruption, remoteness.

Our response to that is not to say, ‘let’s do without Parliament’. It’s to say we must reform it.

The same can be said of the United Nations. But would the world be better off if there were no international institutions to try – yes, failing much of the time, but still trying – to solve the world’s problems?

From the climate crisis to the refugee crisis, from air pollution to workers rights, consumer protection to hazardous waste, we face so many challenges that can only be tackled at a European level.

We need institutions where we can meet as Europeans and try and resolve these issues. And as with the realignment of progressive politics, we have a duty to engage, and to recognise that much for which the EU is criticised is the responsibility of the individual member states.

Greece is, in the main part, suffering because of the intransigence of free-market national governments.

TTIP – the deeply damaging Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership – is simply an extension of the free-market logic that pervades all trade relationships negotiated by right-wing governments like our own, and others across Europe.

The way we can free Europe from the forces of globalisation and elitism is not by walking away, but by fighting at the ballot box at general elections in every member state.

As Greens we are committed to the principle of EU existence, to working internationally on the shared issues we face, and to making Europe better from within.

If we want the kind of future we believe is possible, then we need to harness the amazing energy, passion and skills that can be found throughout our party.

Our members have always been the life-blood of our organisation. Democracy, participation and giving people a voice is at the very core of our identity.

And at a time when other political parties are looking to us, to try and rediscover radical ideas such as a party conference that is there to make policy, not look good on TV, it seems right to take some ideas from them in return.

One of these is how we can best nurture our talent, including bringing on the next generation of Green MPs: potential leaders and opinion formers who have the judgement, commitment and a propensity for the incredible hard work that it takes to get elected under our first past the post system.

We will be asking an awful lot from them in the years to come. We must do everything we can for them in return.

That’s why, today, I am proud to announce the launch of Generation Green – a new programme to nurture talent within our party.

It will start by giving five of our election candidates the kinds of training and preparation that their rivals in the other political parties have always accessed. It’s part of a vision to make our party stronger from the grassroots up; to amplify the voices setting out why we are distinct. Leading by example. The party of the future.

Which brings me on to Sian Berry: one such talent, and whom I am delighted to introduce as the Green candidate in next year’s London Mayoral elections.

I’ve had the pleasure of working with Sian and I know she will bring conviction, intellect and professionalism to the campaign. On everything from housing and transport – both vital issues across the capital – to making sure the UK’s economy is no longer in thrall to the city’s financial sector, Sian will be a fearless and dedicated voice for Londoners and for Green ideas.

In the 2009 Mayoral race, with Jenny Jones at the helm, we won a record share of the vote and became London’s third party, reflecting her long and remarkable service as a London assembly member.

In 2016, we are aiming even higher.

Conference, please put your hands together and welcome onto the stage, Sian Berry.

January 1, 2016
Natalie Bennett – 2015 Speech to Green Party Spring Conference

Below is the text of the speech made by Natalie Bennett, the Leader of the Green Party, to the spring conference held in Liverpool on 6 March 2015.

Thank you everyone, and particularly thank you Caroline – for being the standout MP in the parliament of 2010, just as I’m sure you’ll be the standout MP of the parliament of 2015 and onwards!

And thank you Liverpool for hosting us again, just a year after our last visit.

I’ve been back in between, often visiting the beautiful Sefton Park Meadows – the threatened green space that I hope I’ll be able to visit again in the future.

Thanks to all of you, this has been a momentous year. A year in which the Green Party has taken its place at the forefront of UK politics. A year in which young people in particular have embraced our message of hope and real change. A year in which nearly 300,000 people joined together to help ensure we took our place in the national leadership debates. A year in which we are matching, and often exceeding, the Lib Dems, a party of government, in national polls. And a year in which we have become the third largest political party in England and Wales!

In the space of 12 months we have grown from 13,000 members to 55,000. Our membership has quadrupled!

But of course conference, today’s speech is not addressed to you alone, it is also for voters across the country. Because one thing that the green surge means is that more than 90% of you will have the chance to vote Green on the 7th of May – for some that means the first-ever chance to vote Green.

In just nine weeks’ time, you will have in your hands something miraculous… the possibility of a peaceful political revolution.

Your vote can change the face of Britain.

It can end the failed austerity experiment, end the spiteful blaming of the poor, the sick, the vulnerable for the mistakes of the wealthy.

This election can be a turning point in history. The moment where we can deliver a better Britain, a Britain which works for all its people… A Britain which cares.

Vote for what you believe in, vote for the policies of hope not fear, vote for policies that work for the common good not just the few, and Britain could be a very different country on the 8th of May.

We, the Green Party, can be the agents of change.

Real Change.

It is time for Green Politics – the politics of the future.

The politics of the future delivers a living wage – provides jobs that workers can build a life on – and ensures those who need help receive the support they need.

The politics of the future delivers public services run for the good of all – our railways run not for shareholders but for passengers, our NHS not handed over to profiteers but kept in public hands.

The politics of the futuredelivers social housing, council housing. Meets our housing needs.

The politics of the future delivers for everyone within the limits of our one planet – because that’s the only place we have to live.

That’s the politics of the future.

That’s the politics of the Green Party. Because no one should be living in fear of being unable to put food on the table.

No one should be forced into debt just for trying to get an education.

No one should be worrying about a fracking drill burrowing into the heart of their community.

No one should fear being left destitute by Iain Duncan Smith’s punitive benefit sanctions.

The politics of the future is not a politics of transaction, that discredited politics which offers selected individuals and groups a bribe of short-term, unsustainable personal advantage.

History tells us that is now the old politics, the tired politics, the failed politics. The Green Party is offering instead a society working for all of us; a society that works for the many, not just the few; a society in which those who can contribute do so, and no one in need goes without.

It asks voters to make a choice that will deliver a society fit for themselves, their communities, and their children.

That’s why the green surge is much more than just a hash tag – although a highly successful hash tag it has been – the green surge is much more than just membership numbers.

That’s why people are becoming engaged with the Green Party.

I have seen the green surge on the ground, around the country, from a village hall in Ilkley Yorkshire, to an enormous, snaking queue of hundreds at Exeter University, to a Valentine’s Eve Friday night crowd at the London School of Economics.

And of course we saw it last May with the election of Molly Scott Cato as the first Green member of the European Parliament in the South West – and boy, hasn’t she delivered for her voters!

The green surge is the result of your hard work as Greens. It’s thanks to you in this hall, and to all of the Green Party members and supporters up and down the country – to your commitment, your belief, your dedication and your hard work – that we approach the General Election as a central player in UK politics.

And of course, it isn’t just Green Party.

Up and down the country, campaigns demanding a new politics are getting stronger, getting bigger, getting more effective.

There’s People’s Assemblies, Occupy Democracy, the anti-fracking movement and the fossil fuel divestment campaigns: the tide is growing, the demand for change is louder and clearer.

At last, the people are fighting back! Five years ago we made a huge breakthrough with the election of Caroline Lucas as the first Green MP, and she’s given Brighton a spectacularly good local voice and a national impact far beyond any other MP. Caroline has led the debate on issues from railway ownership to statutory Personal and Social Education.

She’s led the debate on parliamentary transparency and she has put her freedom on the line to oppose fracking.

Because Caroline shows what voting Green delivers: passion, sensitivity and courage.

On May 8, just imagine, a strong green group of MPs at Westminster – able to build on and expand Caroline’s work.

A group which would never, ever support a Conservative Government.

A strong group of Green MPs – in a parliament where they could have a huge say, a huge impact – that is a real opportunity to start to deliver a new kind of politics.

We know that the way things are in Britain is not sustainable.

Continuing as we are is not an option.

Since 2007, food prices have risen 22 per cent but wages have fallen 7 per cent.

Almost seven hundred thousand people are listed as ‘in work’, despite having no guaranteed hours week-to-week.

It’s time to end the scourge of zero hours contracts. Almost half the new jobs created since 2010 are for the self-employed, yet nearly 80% of self-employed workers are living in poverty.

I applaud the growing number of individuals who contribute to, who volunteer in, who run, food banks.

But this Individual charity is no substitute for collective justice.

This the outcome of the years of Blair, of Brown, of the Cameron/Clegg Coalition and austerity Britain – this is the record of George Osborne’s “long term economic plan”.

The Green Party are calling time on the politics of low wages, job insecurity and fearing the food bank.

We are calling time on privatisation – the sell-off and the handing over – of public assets into private hands.

We are calling time on the trashing of our natural world – the world on which everything,depends.

Our economy, our lives, our future depend on society, which in turn depends on the earth and its resources.

That puts a huge weight, a huge responsibility on our shoulders – a responsibility we have to meet in the next few years.

We know now the damage we are doing to the Earth, as we didn’t know in the past.

We have to be up to the task.

The whole ideology of Thatcher and her successors, be it Blair, Brown or Cameron, has failed.

Change has to come. The market is short-sighted and short-term. It is blind. It is senseless. It works for the 1%, it fails the rest of us. All in it together? I don’t think so.

The current model of economics and society has served only those with power and wealth.

In austerity Britain, the super rich grabs more than anywhere else in Europe.

We must be first and foremost citizens, paying fairly to common funds to look after the poor, the weak, the old and the sick.

Everybody contributes what they can and everybody benefits from that. This is what the politics of the future will look like, what the Green Party will deliver. The old politics, the failed politics of letting the market rule has to end.

There’s nowhere that’s more obvious than in our NHS.

The insidious but rapid infiltration of the profit motive into our health service, the dreadful, senseless PFI schemes that have deliver despair and threaten bankruptcy, must be reversed. The market costs us big time. In 2010 the Health Select Committee reckoned it consumed 9% of total NHS costs – well over £10bn a year.

As Caroline has already said – we will repeal the Health and Social Care Act, which is damaging and threatening the health service.

And we will go further – we will replace it with an NHS Reinstatement Bill that removes the market mechanism from our NHS.

But of course there is another side to care.

Free healthcare is the very cornerstone of our NHS. Whether you are rich or poor you have the right to the best that is available.

That’s something the Green Party will restore – and extend. For that same principle should apply to social care – the support and services that you need to lead a fulfilling life should be available when you need it, free at the point of use.

We believe that to be a decent, humane, caring society, social care must be free.

We believe those who have the most should contribute to help pay for social care.

We need a range of new taxes aimed at making Britain a more equal society.

We would introduce a new wealth tax, rigorously clamp down on tax avoidance and evasion and introduce a financial transaction tax – a Robin Hood Tax, and we are not ashamed to say that those on incomes above £100,000 should pay more income tax.

Providing Free Social Care for the Over 65’s means security and freedom from fear, suffering and loneliness for many, and it means 200,000 new jobs and training places.

We will consult experts, users, and care workers on its exact design – but our manifesto will include this as a core pledge: social care is not a privilege, it is a right!

We know that the younger generation – many of whom are supporting the Green Party – have it tough. But we acknowledge, we stress, that isn’t the fault of their elders.

In a Britain of solidarity, in a Britain of community, in a Britain of care, we all need to look out for each other. Of course – and I cannot stress this enough – we can only do this if you, the people of the UK have your say on May the 7th.

It is impossible to overstate the importance of each and every person who can vote registering to do so and making their voice heard.

The deadline is April 20th, but please don’t wait – register today. Only then can you deliver the politics of the future, help us deliver for the Common Good. There are people who want to see business-as-usual politics continue. People who are happy with politicians who learnt nothing from the global economic crash. People who’ve quietly forgotten the scandal of MPs expenses. Who are resigned to the failed austerity experiment, to low wages and to the swift demise of public services. Those people will probably vote for the parties of yesterday.

To counteract them, you need to use your vote.

At this election, if we all vote Green, we can change Britain.

Together we can create the society we all deserve a society that cares, a society that works for all of us.

Vote for the party that cares. Vote for the common good. Vote for the politics of the future. Vote Green.

January 1, 2016
Natalie Bennett – 2015 Speech at Green Party Conference

Below is the text of the speech made by Natalie Bennett, the Leader of the Green Party, in Bournemouth on 25 September 2015.

Hello Bournemouth – it is great to be in this lovely town for the first time for Green Party conference, soon after it elected its first Green Party councillor, and just a year after the South West elected its first Green MEP – and hasn’t Molly Scott Cato done a brilliant job!

Yes, I am aware that we are following the Liberal Democrats in this venue – we’re getting used to taking seats from them – but I promise that’s the only thing we’ll be following them on.

In the Green Party we know what our policies are, we know that our values and principles are solid, unmovable foundations. We don’t tack around with the political winds: we stand up for what we believe in.

I know many of you here will be at your first conference. But let’s start with some members who’ve been around for longer. If you were a member of the Green Party before January 1st last year, please put your hand up!

Thank you – you’re the veterans.

Now who’s joined after January 1st?

Welcome ‘green surge’.

But I know that many of you are veterans too, veterans of campaigning for free education, veterans of fighting against the privatisation of the NHS, veterans of Transition Towns, Friends of the Earth and many other organisations.

Many new members told me that they had come to realise that lobbying, campaigning, pushing against the closed door of the old politics, just wasn’t going to deliver the results that our economic, social and environmental crises demand.

We can’t keep electing the wrong people and hoping they’ll do the right things.

What we need to do is elect many more Greens in the proportional representation elections – the fair elections – coming up next May in Wales, in London, and in Scotland.

Now I could ask the Green MP and House of Lords member to put their hands up, but I don’t think you need help identifying them. Of course if we had a fair electoral system Caroline Lucas would have 24 other Green MPs with her in the Commons, but she, like Jenny Jones in the Lords, does the work of at least that many average MPs, so all we can say to them is thank you!

And who here is a Green Party councillor? Please put up your hand. I want to offer you my thanks, our thanks, for all of your hard work.

And promise you that next year, in the elections in May, we’ll be electing many compatriots to join you. In Bristol, in Liverpool, in Sheffield, and many other cities, towns and villages up and down the country, we built a great foundation in the general election. In a year’s time I look forward to that question raising a forest of hands… quite appropriate for the Green Party, I think.

For it’s clearer by the day, that the political times they are a’changing. It’s the time of new politics.

Greek leader Alexis Tspiras this week in his victory speech thanked the European Greens for their support for a different kind of Europe. The clear re-election of Syriza in Greece and the strength of Podemos in Spain are just two examples of the future of politics in Europe.

In Britain you can measure that not just by the rise of Jeremy Corbyn to the Labour leadership, but by the Green Party’s more than 1.1 million votes in the general election and the ‘green surge’ that’s seen our membership more than treble. And by the left-positioned SNP’s comprehensive wipe-out of right-wing Labour in Scotland, and the daily-stronger surge in political activism across England and Wales and beyond.

The pressure is growing against the failed politics of austerity, on the disastrous privatisation of public services, on treating the planet as though it were a mine and a rubbish dump.

The failings of successive governments in Britain are attracting widespread attention, widespread concern, widespread opposition.

The United Nations is investigating the Tory government’s treatment of the disabled and breaches of their human rights.

The world is increasingly questioning the Tory government’s environmental failings. Al Gore led the way this week: “Will our children ask, why didn’t you act?” he said this week.

Judges will also be questioning more and more the abuses of basic human rights, and the destruction of civil liberties in the disastrous Trade Union Bill and the snoopers’ charter.

Politics is heading towards the understanding that social and environmental justice are indivisible – and essential to all of our futures.

Politics is heading, fast, towards the policies the Green Party has consistently pursued and promoted for decades.

And politics is far more diverse than ever before – making the argument for long-overdue electoral reform overwhelming, an issue that I hope Jeremy Corbyn will be putting at the top of his political agenda. The government only has a majority of 12 – a fragile majority that’s already dissolved on a couple of issues. United in a just cause, we can win electoral reform.

The new politics – the politics that demands electoral reform – is a people’s politics, founded in everyday life, everyday struggles.

On the streets, in community centres and pubs and cafes, online, people are talking together, gathering together, working together – recognising those immortal words: “Ye are many, they are few.”

Many of you I’m sure were on the streets on June 20th for the People’s Assembly Against Austerity, and again this month at the massive, inspiring Refugees Welcome march.

At both marches people assembled under many different symbols, under the banners of church groups and the flags of unions, under the homemade placards of the unaffiliated and the organised groupings of long-established campaigns, all saying: “we’re not going to take this anymore: no more austerity, no more privatisation of public services, no more planet-trashing, and no more of this unfair, inhumane, unjust immigration system”.

The marchers got their message across, and more than that, they got the message that the Green Party is their party.

For these growing, increasingly coalescing movements of people power need a political wing. They need representatives at the heart of the places where decisions are made: in local councils, in Cardiff and Westminster, in Brussels.

Campaigners up and down the country are understanding that the Green Party is the natural home of the community campaigner and the Transitions Towns member, the natural home of the campaigner against the privatisation of the NHS and the anti-evictions activist, the natural home of the immigration rights advocate and the defender of environments local and global.

Local parties, far stronger and more numerous than ever before, are able to reach out into new parts of their communities, to offer their help, to be a guide through the frequently forbidding, deliberately opaque bureaucracy of town halls, Westminster and Brussels.

I know that some commentators are asking: what’s the difference between Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour and the Greens? Communities up and down this country who are dealing with Labour councils know one answer to that.

They have Labour councils who aren’t listening to them, aren’t meeting their needs, are too often in the pockets of the developers and big business, who believe despite all the evidence that ‘economic development’ comes from supporting an out-of-town supermarket that destroys local independent businesses by the score.

When it comes to standing against planned nuclear plants from Hinkley to Anglesey to Hartlepool, when it comes to resisting the power of the oil and gas lobby that keeps supporting this government’s fracking, underground coal gasification and coal bed methane fantasies from Blackpool to Middlesborough to Warwickshire; when it comes to resisting the concreting over of the greenbelt for expensive, poor quality homes by mass builders out for a quick pound, communities know that it’s the Green Party that consistently backs them.

But we’re not just following and supporting, we’re also leading.

And leading on the issue of climate change – the issue on which all of our futures, as inhabitants of this one fragile planet, depends.

The Green Party is at the front of a broad push to make the Paris Climate Talks not just successful in their own terms, but to be a vehicle for putting tackling climate change at the heart of every community effort, the plans of every council, the work of every official.

We’ve already launched our ‘Climate Sense’ campaign – yes that’s the hashtag – and this is the Green Party’s ‘Climate Sense’ conference.

Green councillors and parties up and down the country are at the forefront of the broad campaign to get institutions and pension funds to divest from fossil fuels.

And we’ve joined the European Green Party in calling on everyone to share their ‘climate moment’ – the second when they as individual human beings recognised that climate change was already here – and just how urgent it is to change direction before it is too late.

For me it was January 1st, 2006. Yes, it was New Year’s Day. It was time to make an assessment about the state of my life and the state of the world.

I’m unusual in British politics in that I have a degree in science, and I took the knowledge from that, looked at the state of the world, and it frightened me. I thought: “I must do something.”

So I joined the Green Party. Although I never would have predicted where that would lead me.

And I would not have predicted that in the leader debates before this year’s general election I would have been the only one to talk about climate change. That in three and a half hours, the Labour leader, the Liberal Democrat leader, the Conservative leader, the SNP leader and the Plaid Cymru leader wouldn’t find space for those two momentous words, climate change’.

That has to change. It has to change now. We cannot have another major political debate that doesn’t have climate change at its heart.

But I’m a strong believer in the idea that deeds not words are what matter the most when it comes to tackling climate change.

It does not bode well that, just two months before the crucial Paris climate talks, the Prime Minister last week appointed a fossil fuel industry insider as his key adviser on energy and environment.

This isn’t just disappointing, it’s scandalous.

If the Prime Minister is even half way serious about success at the Paris climate talks and tackling the threat of climate change to our security, prosperity and natural world, he should ask for Stephen Heidari-Robinson’s resignation with immediate effect. And instead appoint an advisor without association to a climate-destroying industry. The UK’s green economy is a huge success story – often in spite of government policy – so he won’t be short of options.

This disastrous approach has to change. It has to change now.

As the Pope said this week, this is a critical moment of history. The problem cannot be left for future generations to deal with.

Dealing with climate change has to be at the centre of every policy, every decision, the responsibility of everyone. If we don’t make that a reality, our children and grandchildren will never forgive us.

As part of the work towards that, today I’m issuing a special request to every Green Party in the country to hold at least one public meeting to raise this issue up the agenda in their community.

More, I’d ask everyone listening to take action. Organise a meeting in your community group, in your union, in your university, school or college, in your local pub. The next few months are critical – please play your part.

In Scotland a grassroots referendum campaign drew many into political involvement, into issues local and global. We can do the same by taking understanding of the issues around climate change into the heart of every community.

Let’s summon up, to draw on Abraham Lincoln, every better angel of our human nature to this great, the greatest, cause.

Together we can ensure that everyone has the chance to find out more, to understand how tackling climate change isn’t just essential, but also a positive framework that can improve our society, our lives, and the lives of future generations.

And I’d urge everyone not to pin all of their hopes on the Paris talks, but to see this as a stepping stone, one branch of a plan to reshape our societies to live, to thrive, to meet the needs of future generations on this fragile planet.

I’m going to borrow a phrase from the climate change campaign 350.org: this is the point where everything breaks apart and everything comes together.

But we can only protect our planet in a fair, humane society. That’s at the absolute core of Green Party values and principles – and it is at the core of solving our climate crisis.

For the Green Party is the solutions party. We know that the crises we face in our economy, in our society, in our environment are not happening at the same time by coincidence.

The cause – the nature of our economic system, the hypercapitalism of the multinational oil giants and the sweatshop-based fashion chains, the sealife-destroying giant trawlers and the cruel, destructive factory farms, the hugely subsidised private landlords and the zero-hours-contract employers – are all part of the same system.

And the solutions to deal with the crisis need to tackle these together. It’s joined-up thinking – the kind of thinking that’s in the Green Party’s DNA.

And it is thinking that demands real change – when it comes to dealing with our social and environmental crises only 21st-century thinking will do.

We can’t go back to the failed 20th-century answer of perpetual growth; that can’t continue on a finite planet.

We can’t go back to the failed 20th-century model of centralised administrative monoliths imposing models on diverse local communities.

We can’t go back to the idea of a wasteful industrial economy built around giant companies.

We need new solutions.

The Green Party has long championed treating our homes as the critical national infrastructure that they are – a plan to lift nine out of 10 households out of fuel poverty, to create at least 100,000 jobs, and cut carbon emissions. Not bad for just one Green policy!

The Green Party has long demanded investment in public transport, not the botched, illogical HS2, but local and regional schemes that help to rebalance our economy, linked to local bus services under the controlling hand of local councils. Such a transport policy would not only tackle congestion and air pollution, but also help to cut the NHS bill for dealing with obesity and diabetes. Not bad for just one Green policy!

And we’ve long understood that the only secure, sustainable economic future is based in strong local economies, with local needs met by local suppliers, with a rich ecology of farming, manufacturing and services businesses supporting each other.

Think global, act local is a long-term Green vision – and an essential one to secure our future.

But there’s no doubt there are forces out there, powerful forces, with huge amounts of cash and influence, who want to keep things just as they are.

But every day their power wanes, they have to struggle harder for a grubbier, weaker hold.

They’re in a crisis of legitimacy. They cannot be trusted. They are rotten to the core.

I was going to say that the emperor has no clothes, but after the news reports of the last week I won’t inflict that image on you… Even better, I’ve carefully combed this speech to ensure there are no porcine references at all.

What I will refer to about Lord Ashcroft’s book is his self-declaration that he expected donations of millions of pounds to buy him a place at the heart of the British government. The core is rotten – it must be removed.

And that’s true also of our financial sector. The list of scandals is almost endless, from Libor to Forex rigging, PPI to money-laundering and tax evasion.

The finance sector exists not to serve the real economy but to fuel speculation in financial instruments and property that’s become entirely detached from the reality of homes and business premises, to fund its own empty structure. It expects be propped up by the sweat and pain of communities far from the glass towers of Canary Wharf when it fails again.

We’ve seen just this week another emerging scandal – a giant, respected, global car manufacturer has confessed – after it was exposed – to rigging tests about the emissions from 11 million diesel cars it has manufactured, and put on the streets. And there are questions now about whether it was just that manufacturer.

Our politics is rotten. Our finance sector is rotten. Our industrial sector is rotten. Even some of our sport is tainted. Fifa, in control of the ‘beautiful game’, is rotten.

The people newly engaged in politics, the people of Britain overall – if not the people currently running things – see very clearly that we cannot continue on our current path.

Increasing numbers of Britons understand instinctively that David Cameron’s ‘recovery’, built chiefly on consumer debt, has no firm foundations – and that’s particularly clear to the people of Wigan and Rhyl, Gateshead and Ramsgate – the many communities that have seen precious little sign of this ‘recovery’ at all.

They’re deeply worried, as people across Britain are worried, about the kind of world we’re leaving future generations.

Realism means understanding that massive change is coming, and it can be, if we make the right choices, pursue the right policies, change for the better.

To achieve that, we need new political structures, as well as new economic, social, environmental structures.

To get those we need to break the shackles of a 19th-century electoral system.

There’s one number I’d urge you to remember – 24%. That’s the number of eligible voters who supported this Tory government.

Even if you count the people who chose to vote, the Tories only won 37% of that vote. As a Swedish Green Party minister said to me recently: “surely you can’t form a government with that!”

The route to electoral reform is not clear and obvious. In an ideal world the Tory government would say, ‘clearly the current situation is intellectually and morally untenable and we have to introduce proportional representation, fair elections, for both the Commons and a new House of Lords’.

But don’t worry, I’m not holding my breath for that.

What I am doing is asking Jeremy Corbyn as the new leader of the Labour Party in a parliament where the Tories have an extremely narrow, already tottering, majority, to join with us and others to deliver a fair, simple system in which voters can participate with confidence that their vote counts.

Already the Green Party is working with campaigners, working with other parties, to keep electoral reform, a proportional, fair, electoral system, on the political agenda.

And if that gives Nigel Farage the chance to photo-bomb me in the Mirror, so be it!

But we don’t have to wait for electoral reform – for coming up we’ve got votes in already reasonably fair elections in which voters can simply vote for what they believe in.

Those elections are in London, for its Assembly, in Wales, for its Assembly. In Scotland our sister party has a great chance to increase their parliamentary representation to historic highs, and in Northern Ireland, our fellow Greens will be seeking to increase their Assembly numbers from one to three.

You’ll be hearing from Pippa Bartolotti, leader of the Welsh Greens, later today, about the exciting prospects of our first Assembly members in Cardiff. And on Sunday you’ll be hearing from Sian Berry, our London mayoral candidate, about the prospects for growth in our Assembly representation.

And here’s a tip: the bookies have Sian’s odds of waking up as London mayor on May 6th considerably shorter than Jeremy Corbyn’s during the Labour leadership contest.

But next May the prospects are much broader than that.

Since the general election I’ve been travelling the country and visiting new and revived local parties, already gearing up for next May’s council elections – aiming to win their first councillors, build their local representation, be the challengers, the critical scrutinisers lacking on so many councils.

In Hitchin in Hertfordshire, which I visited for the town’s first-ever anti-austerity rally in June, I met Green Party members already campaigning for elections in 11 months’ time.

In Swansea, I heard from Green Party members how they’re working on the ground, at the grassroots, literally, rescuing the abandoned Ganges Field from litter, vandalism and council neglect, turning it back into the community asset it should always have been.

In Darlington, which I first visited two years ago, for the founding rally of what would become the brilliant campaign 999 Call for the NHS, I was delighted just last week to attend the formal founding of a new local party, a party which in May from a standing start was able to put up candidates in nearly every ward in the town, and aims to elect its first councillors next year.

These are local Green Parties that are seeing what needs to be done, and doing it. And more than that, they’re feeling the tide of history approaching.

Here in Bournemouth, we’ve been consistently supporting the proposed wind turbines of the Navitus Bay offshore wind farm, sadly only the latest victim of this government’s disastrous energy policies.

Of course this government’s had to grapple with a difficult concept: the wind turbines are big, but are far away.

But the Navitus Bay developers can subject this arbitrary decision to judicial review, as I hope they will, just as we can use not just democratic, but legal mechanisms, international mechanisms, to hold this government to account.

The rotten politics, the old politics, is in its last throes.

Politics is moving in our direction. Historians will look back and see 2015 as the year change started – the year that a fundamental shift in politics saw it move away from the mantra of ‘greed is good, the environment doesn’t matter’ that rose with Margaret Thatcher and will fall with David Cameron.

It’s time for a new approach – the Green approach – a society that works for the common good within the environmental limits of our one fragile planet, a society that works for its people, not for the few global corporations and the richest 1%.

That’s what Green Parties around the globe, green movements around the globe are working for. In Norway, the Greens have just recorded their best-ever election result – calling for an end to all oil production there within 20 years. In Rwanda, the Green Party is bravely leading the struggle to defend a democratic constitution. In the European Parliament, the Greens’ group is leading the way in calling for fair, just, humane treatment of refugees across the Union and outside it.

The problems we face – in Britain and around the world — are huge. We need to think big to deal with them. We need a politics powered by people, communities powered by renewables, our economy powered by small businesses, social enterprises and cooperatives.

We need a politics of the people – Green politics.

If you’re facing decades of unpayable student debt – join us and fight it.

If you’re stuck in a zero-hour, low-pay job, join us and fight for jobs you can build a life on.

If you’re disabled or have been ill and suffered from the dreadful work capability assessment – join us and fight it.

If you’ve suffered under our abusive, inhumane immigration system – join us and fight it.

If you believe that Britain should get rid of Trident, those hideous weapons of mass destruction – join us and fight them.

If you believe that Britain should not be bombing Syria, following the failed policy that’s had such disastrous consequences for the people of Iraq and Afghanistan – join us and fight for change.

If you’re a parent who cares about your children’s and grandchildren’s future – join us and fight for their future, fight for a liveable planet.

Politics should be something you do, not something done to you.

2015 can be – must be – the start of the century of Green politics.

Let’s get together and make it happen.

January 1, 2016