Tag: 2000

Below is the text of the speech made by William Hague, the then Leader of the Opposition, on 24 May 2000.

A few weeks ago the Evening Standard published a story under the headline ‘Trendy oldies join Cool Britannia’. It read: ‘Ministers want to “rebrand” pensioners with a trendy name that will appeal to younger people. Some of Whitehall’s finest minds are working on the problem, while the Government is also seeking outside help to try to come up with the new title … Ministers believe words like “pensioners” or “elderly” carry a grey image with deters young people from thinking ahead’ (29th March 2000).

That story sums up this Government’s attitude towards Britain’s pensioners.

It sums up the attitude of Tony Blair when he talks about Britain becoming a ‘young country’ and has no time for those forces of conservatism who don’t fit in it.

It sums up the attitude of Peter Mandelson, the man in charge of Labour’s election plans, who says there is ‘no mileage’ in targeting elderly voters because they are not ‘aspirational’ (Sunday Times, 16 April 2000).

It sums up the attitude of the Chairman of the Labour Parliamentary Party, who recently came out with the breathtaking insult that pensioners are often ‘racist’. Of course he also said they were ‘predominantly Conservative’ (Sunday Times, 16 April 2000) and we intend to prove him right at least about that.

It sums up the attitude of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who has patronised older people by trying to buy them off with a series of badly targeted, bureaucratic gimmicks and then was only able to offer them a 75 pence increase in the basic state pension.

Britain’s eleven million pensioners know that they are the unwanted, unwelcome, uncool guests at New Labour’s banquet. And they know that they have paid the price through their pockets.

For three years pensioners have been at the sharp end of the Chancellor’s policies.

At the sharp end of £150 average rises in Council Tax for Band D properties as Labour Councils and a Labour Government worked together to waste their money. The Government talks of a £150 winter fuel payment. Many pensioners have found that by the time they’ve paid their increased Council Tax the money has all gone.

At the sharp end of increases in petrol prices. Pensioners who depend on their cars to preserve their independence have seen prices driven close to the £4 a gallon mark.

At the sharp end too, when this Chancellor scrapped dividend tax credits, leaving 300,000 pensioners whose income is below the income tax threshold, having to pay an average of £75 a year more to the exchequer.

In the same £5bn a year raid on pension funds, Gordon Brown set a timebomb for future pensioners by forcing working people to put up to £200 a year extra into their pension funds. Last year he abolished the Married Couples Allowance for all future pensioners too.

He has also scrapped the Widows Bereavement Allowance without compensating all widowed pensioners properly, scrapped tax relief on medical insurance for the over 65s and abolished retirement relief for older people selling off their small businesses.

Pensioners remembered all these blows when they reacted so angrily to the 75p basic rate rise.

Gordon Brown hoped no one would notice. He hoped the anger of pensioners wouldn’t matter. How wrong he was.

As anyone who campaigned in this year’s local elections, who knocked on doors and listened to hard pressed pensioners, knows: boy, did they notice, and boy, are they angry.

Angry at a Labour Government that promised to be the pensioners’ friend and has comprehensively betrayed them.

Angry at a Labour Government that used every low-down trick to win pensioners’ votes at the general election and then forgot all about them the day after.

Angry at a Labour Government that has produced one gimmick after another, but doesn’t trust pensioners with a decent weekly income they can spend as they see fit.

I have listened to their anger and their feelings of betrayal first-hand in hundreds of meetings around Britain.

I listened to the elderly man in Bolton who told me ‘Labour’s priorities are all wrong – look at Europe, the Dome, these asylum seekers – more should be done on health and for the pensioners’.

I listened to the lifelong Labour supporter in Plymouth who summed up what she thought of Tony Blair and his policies: ‘He thinks people like me are old has-beens, who aren’t important or glamorous, people who they think can simply go to the back of the queue’.

I listened to the pensioner in Leeds who could barely contain his anger when he said to me ’75p was a joke, an insult … We don’t want all these gestures and gimmicks – we just want a decent basic pension’.

And I listened also to another pensioner here in London who had a message for Conservatives. ‘I voted Labour because they promised so much. I’m terribly disappointed but I wonder if there is any alternative’.

We’ve been busy listening to people while this Government has been busy forgetting them.

Now we are offering an alternative. Our Party has listened to all these people, and in all sorts of areas we are now offering an alternative to the failed polices and broken promises of this Government.

We offer a law and order policy that will back up the police, punish the criminal, and protect those, such as the elderly, who are particularly vulnerable to crime.

We offer a health policy that will build a stronger NHS that puts patients before politicians, and which doesn’t treat older people as second class patients.

We offer a long term care policy that protects the assets of responsible people who save for their retirement.

Today, I want to build on those policies by tackling the central concern of millions of pensioners: the level of their weekly income and the basic state pension.

What pensioners say over and over again is that they would rather have a reliable weekly income which is theirs by right to spend as they think best, than a series of handouts and gimmicks.

Today we are setting out a carefully costed package based on a Conservative pension uprating in April 2001. It shows what we would do for pensioners in hard figures and in hard cash. We are calling it Common Sense for Pensioners.

We would start by putting the money used on the winter fuel payment and the free TV licence into the basic pension instead. This also brings a bureaucracy bonus as we can save £40 million currently being wasted on administering, often very incompetently, these new schemes. Many pensioners received their winter fuel payments as winter drew to a close. We’re going to take that £40 million out of the budgets of bureaucrats and put it directly into the pockets of pensioners.

We have also identified extra social security savings. We would abolish the New Deal for Lone Parents which is a £90 million a year flop. On the Government’s own figures, it is having zero impact on the employment prospects of lone parents. We have already announced separately our far more effective approach to lone parents. We would also recoup some money from the Social Fund, which has recently been increased substantially by the Government.

Taken together, these measures yield almost exactly £2 billion. We would then put all this money into helping pensioners in the most straight-forward, honest, and effective way – increases in the basic contributory state pension. We would add it to the expected increase in next year’s pension uprating which, if awarded on the basis of current inflation forecasts, would be £2 to a single pensioner and £3 for a married couple.

On this basis, if the normal uprating followed inflation, the Conservative uprating in April 2001would be:

· £5.50 extra (£73 a week) for a single pensioner aged under 75.

· £7 extra (114.90 a week) for a pensioner couple aged under 75.

· £7.50 (£75.25 a week) for a single pensioner aged 75 or over.

· £10 (£118.15 a week) for a pensioner couple aged 75 or over.

We would also adjust tax allowances for older people to compensate pensioners for any extra that they might otherwise pay. And we would adjust means tested benefits to ensure that the poorest pensioners gain at least as much as other pensioners. I heard the Social Security Secretary on the radio this morning claiming that the poorest pensioners would lose out from our proposals. So let me make it absolutely clear that these increases will go to all pensioners, including those on means tested benefits. All pensioners will be entitled to these increases.

These, then, are big increases in the basic state pension.

In the main, we achieve these increases by consolidating all of the gimmicks into something which pensioners would far prefer – reliable increases in their weekly income. In other words, no more gimmicks means more on the basic pension.

But on top of that we are also adding the £40 million bureaucracy bonus, as well as adding money found elsewhere in the social security budget. In total, this amounts to £320 million of new money for pensioners. Our increase in basic state pension will leave all pensioners better off with the Conservatives than under Labour.

And to make sure pensioners can rely on it and that they will know that this is a promise that will be delivered, these increases in the basic state pension would be financed out of National Insurance. It would be a return on all those contributions pensioners have made through their working lives.

This reform means dignity and choice and respect for pensioners. It means a larger state pension as an entitlement rather than making pensioners depend on occasional handouts from Government.

By turning the handouts into entitlements, into a proper return on national insurance contributions, and by adding in the extra savings, all pensioners will be better off with the Conservatives. In other words, Common Sense for Pensioners means we are offering a real improvement in the income of all pensioners.

Unlike the Labour Party, I am not going to make exaggerated promises that unrealistically raise people’s expectations only to shatter them later. I know that many pensioners find it difficult to make ends meet. I don’t pretend that an extra £10 a week will solve all the problems of pensioners.

Let me tell you what I do promise.

First, Common Sense for Pensioners means dignity and respect for pensioners.

It rightly angers pensioners, who have paid national insurance contributions their entire lives, to have the government announce payments on budget day as if they were the charitable act of a merciful Chancellor. The basic state pension is not charity, it is a return on years of payments. Understanding this and reflecting this in pension policy is a matter of respect for pensioners. My Party is determined to show that respect.

Quite apart from the fact that the Chancellor’s measures restrict pensioner choice and personal independence they are also patronising. They assume the Government knows better than pensioners how to budget for periods of greater expense and shouldn’t give pensioners money until the Government thinks they should spend it. This patronising attitude, too, shows little respect and is accordingly resented.

Second, our policy simplifies a key part of the benefits system. This is true to another Tory principle that deplores government waste and inefficiency. Gordon Brown has deliberately made both our tax and benefits system more complicated. He prefers to act by stealth. In this way he is undermining confidence in politics and Government. With our reform pensioners will know exactly what they are getting and how much it is worth. That really is common sense.

But let me deal here in advance with some of the slurs and attacks which I expect from our political opponents.

Labour will claim that their policies are targeted on poorer pensioners, whereas we offer across the board increases. That is rubbish. Many of their schemes have been indiscriminate. The winter fuel payment goes to the 220,000 more affluent pensioners in residential accommodation or nursing homes who do not claim Income Support; but the payment is not available for the 280,000 in such accommodation who do claim Income Support. In other words better off pensioners get it and worse off ones don’t.

What we are proposing is better targeted than Labour’s measures. We guarantee that this increase in the basic pension will reach all pensioners including those on means-tested benefits, so that poorer pensioners getting at least as much from the package as others. Moreover, we know that poorer pensioners tend to be older and we have therefore put extra money particularly towards pensioners aged over 75.

Labour will also try to scare pensioners by claiming that the Tories are simply abolishing the winter fuel payment and the free TV licence.

To save them the effort, let me remind the Millbank spindoctors now of what their own former Minister, Peter Kilfoyle, says: ‘pensioners believe that winter fuel payments and concessionary television licences are a diversionary measure … What pensioners want is an increase, week on week, in the basic pension. This is not just a matter of economics: it is a question too of pensioners’ dignity’ (Hansard, 27th March 2000).

The dignity of pensioners is what our package is all about. The key fact, that no amount of Labour lies can obscure, is that all pensioners, regardless of which gimmicks they currently receive, will be better off.

There will be others who say that our policy is no substitute for far-reaching welfare reform. I completely agree. This is not our last word on pensions policy. It is the beginning of presenting our vision for the future, one in which more and more pensioners enjoy rising living standards as a result of the savings and the funded pensions they have built up during their working lives.

We want to ensure that pensioners participate in the rising living standards of the country as a whole. We will be setting out further proposals to spread funded pensions still more widely to the next generation of pensioners.

But that is a policy for people of working age who have yet to become pensioners. It is too late for current pensioners. Many of the pensioners who are managing on such modest incomes retired without any entitlement to a funded pension. However strongly we push forward better funded pensions for the next generation, we still have a debt to the current generation of pensioners. That is what today’s package is all about.

It gives pensioners a real choice, a choice which gets to the heart of the difference between our two parties.

They can choose New Labour’s way. The way that treats pensioners as unfortunate misfits in their dreams of Cool Britannia. The way that patronises pensioners with handouts and treats them almost like charity cases.

Or they can vote for a genuine Conservative alternative, from a Party which has been listening – a reliable guaranteed increase in the contributory basic state pension.

It is quite simply a choice between being treated with contempt or being treated with respect.

Today’s pensioners have contributed so much to building Britain into the great nation it is today. They have served in our armed forces and fought to keep our nation free; they have worked in our country’s businesses and built up its economy; and have they raised our generation and bequeathed us a Britain that begins this new century free and proud and prosperous.

Yet despite all they’ve done their contribution isn’t in the past. They are part of our nation’s future too. For they are among our most active citizens. Among the most important contributors to voluntary organizations. Among the most important supports for family life. They support much which this country depends on.

Today’s pensioners do not want sops or charity. They want to feel that they are getting benefits to which they have all their lives contributing to. They want the independence and respect that they have every right to deserve.

This year, the Conservative Party has been speaking for the great mainstream majority of the British people on crime, on asylum seekers, on tax and on Europe. That is why we won the local elections so convincingly.

Now we are moving on to new areas – areas which Labour have for too long regarded as their own. Today we are speaking for the great mainstream majority of pensioners who feel betrayed and neglected by this Government; today we offer substantial increases in the basic pension instead of gimmicks; today we offer a bold, common sense policy for pensioners.

Below is the text of the speech made by William Hague, the then Leader of the Opposition, on 4 July 2000.

Today, I set out the bold agenda of the next Conservative Government to set Britain’s schools free; and I am particularly delighted to do so under the auspices of Politeia which, under Sheila’s energetic leadership, has made such an important contribution to the debate about education in our country.

Conservative education policy could not be more ambitious: quite simply, I want Britain’s children to be the best educated, most motivated and inspired in the world – ready to seize with both hands all the opportunities which the twenty first century and the new global economy have to offer. I believe that is not possible unless our children are taught in schools that are free of bureaucratic state control, and by teachers who enjoy the professional respect and freedom they deserve.

Good education is an end in itself. In a civilised society, every person has the right to be given the chance to stretch their mind, develop their talents and to realise their full human potential. But good education is also a social benefit. It is about creating good citizens, not by teaching classes in citizenship but by educating children in an environment that teaches civility and respect for others. That leads to a more ordered and law-abiding community. And a good education is also an economic necessity. If our country is to prosper in an increasingly global knowledge based economy, and is to be able to afford better health care and transport and other public services, then we have to have a well educated workforce.

For all these reasons, Britain needs a first class schools system. But you do not need me to tell you that, today, we fall a long way short.

For listen, as our Conservative candidate did, to the children in one school in Tottenham. They will tell you about how the drug dealers openly gather around the school gates. They will tell how discipline in the school has collapsed ever since the teachers were forced by the local authority to take back the young thug who threatened his classmates with a knife. Those children in Tottenham know they are being let down by the system, but they are powerless to do anything about it.

Listen, as Theresa May and I did, to the heads of the teaching unions who came to see us last month and told us that the morale of their members has never been so low; or to the teachers I meet in every school I visit who are drowning in a sea of paperwork, Whitehall plans and meaningless targets.

Listen, as I did, to the two dozen chairmen and chief executives of our leading technology companies, who sat around the table with me a few weeks ago and told me bluntly that unless Britain’s education system improves dramatically so that they can recruit youngsters with the right skills and motivation, then we will lose our foothold in the new global economy.

The National Skills Taskforce reported a week ago that 25 per cent of today’s job vacancies cannot be filled because applicants do not have suitable basic skills to cope with the world of work. Improving the skills of our workforce also means improving our university and further education – and that is a whole subject for another day. Today I am focussing solely on schools.

Of course, not every school is letting its pupils down; discipline has not broken down in every playground; not every school leaver is ill-equipped for the new economy. There are countless examples of outstanding personal achievement in our education system, and many tens of thousands of teachers who do a fantastic job.

But individual success stories can seem like points of light in the gloomy scene of a state education system where, in too many areas, bad schools are still tolerated, parents have little choice, standards are stagnant, the lowest common denominator prevails, teacher morale is at an all time low, headteachers are powerless, discipline has broken down, waste is widespread and bureaucracy is rampant, grammar schools are victimised, the tyranny of political correctness has run riot and the whole thing is in the grips of a liberal establishment whose theories of progressive education have, over 40 years of mismanagement and interference, have brought some of our schools to their knees and betrayed too many of our nation’s children.

It is that left-leaning liberal establishment, of which this Government is the living and breathing manifestation, which is failing our children, failing our teachers, failing the mainstream majority who expect to live in a civil and law-abiding society, and failing Britain as we compete to be a leader in the new world economy.

We have to defeat that liberal establishment. The next Conservative Government will have to defeat it. We have to realise that ambition of becoming the best educated nation in the world by transforming one of the most mediocre education systems in Western Europe. For I issue this warning that if we do not, then Britain will decline into an educational and economic backwater and we may never return.

That is why transforming our education system is the greatest challenge the Conservatives face when we return to office, but one which I relish.

Of course, there was another politician not so long ago who said ‘education is my number one passion’, and who repeated it three times just in case anyone had missed the point – ‘education, education, education’.

Three years later the sense of betrayal felt by many millions of parents was summed up by the mother I met in Birmingham, who said to me: ‘Tony Blair keeps harping on about education, education, education; but it’s all been a lot of wind, a lot of hot air and broken promises, and my daughter’s school has not get better it has got worse’.

Tony Blair promised as the very first of his ten contracts with the British people that Labour would ‘increase the share of the national income spent on education’.

But despite all David Blunkett’s gimmicks and re-announcements of extra money, the House of Commons Library confirms that over the five years of its term in office this Labour Government will spend an average of 4.7 per cent of GDP on education – less than the average of 5 per cent of GDP which the previous Conservative Government spent.

Tony Blair promised, as every parent in the country remembers, to cut class sizes and appeared during the election brandishing one of his famous mugs embossed with the pledge of ‘smaller class sizes’.

Since the election, class sizes for all but 5 to 7 year-olds have risen. The leading accountancy firm Chantry Vellacott has estimated that the proportion of school children taught in classes with 31 or more pupils has actually risen by 14 per cent. This is borne out by the experience of head teachers. As the headmaster of Haybridge High School in Worcestershire put it earlier this year: ‘class sizes in my school have definitely increased and it is very frustrating’ (Sunday Telegraph, 9th April 2000).

Labour’s failure to deliver on education has not been lost on parents and teachers, so why is it that some commentators continue to credit the Government with substantial achievements in this field?

The answer seems to be that they still believe David Blunkett is really a ‘Conservative’. The believe that the man who, as Council Leader, presided over the failures of education policy in Sheffield has re-invented himself as the radical Tory itching to put Politeia pamphlets into practice.

Well it is time someone shattered this cosy myth of the education establishment. David Blunkett is not a Conservative in disguise. In fact, many of the things he has done are left-wing, centralising, bossy, interfering, bureaucratic, and gimmick driven. He is a modern municipal socialist presiding over an education system in which the freedom of parents and teachers and schools is being steadily diminished, and standards are stagnant.

Look at how this Government actually runs Britain’s schools.

First, they have greatly restricted the freedom of parents to choose the best education for their children – a freedom that more than anything else drives up standards in the class room.

In the past three years, all the impetus from the Department for Education has been towards re-creating a monolithic comprehensive system in which choice and diversity have no place.

In an act of sheer educational vandalism, Grant Maintained Schools, which took power out of the hands of local bureaucrats and gave it to parents, staff and governors, have been abolished and former GM schools have had their budgets cut by an average of £125,000 per school.

Despite a ‘personal guarantee’ from the Prime Minister before the election that ‘a Labour Government will not close your grammar schools’, open season has been declared on these centres of excellence. David Blunkett has introducing a rigged ballot system and encouraged Labour Party activists all over England to re-ignite the class war. The whole exercise has divided local communities, consumed enormous amounts of energy in the schools under threat, and flown in the face of parental choice.

Labour has also abolished, for no other reason than dogmatic hostility to private education, the Assisted Places Scheme – which gave gifted children from less well-off backgrounds the unique opportunity of studying at some of the best schools in the country.

Now the Government is planning to take its crusade against parental choice and school diversity into the sixth form. The funding formula in the Learning and Skills Bill currently before Parliament could starve them of finance and force many school sixth forms to close. The impact on individual schools could be severe because, without a sixth form, they will find it harder to attract good teachers. It is all part of Labour’s levelling agenda of enforcing monolithic conformity, and denying pupils choice by pushing them into tertiary colleges.

And there is New Labour’s assault on parental choice which flows from the Government’s desperate efforts to meet its early pledge on class sizes.

The bizarre side effects of the Government’s Class Size Reduction Scheme are brought home in the letter which the Shadow Education Secretary Theresa May received a fortnight ago from a headteacher of a primary school in Kent.

He writes of the case of a young boy who lives in the village and is presently in kindergarten with other children his age. This autumn, however, this boy will be the only child who does not go to the local primary school because the Class Size Reduction Scheme will not allow the school to take 31 pupils in the class. Instead he has to leave his local community and travel every day to another primary school in another village. In the words of the headmaster: ‘because of a policy made without reference to our school, the parents of a four year old child will soon have to explain to their son why all his classmates are going to one school and he is going to another’.

This is not the behaviour of a Government that cares about choice and diversity in education.

Forget, too, the spin about the Government giving freedom to schools, for this Education Secretary has tied headteachers and teachers in knots with a string of Whitehall diktats, meaningless targets and paperwork.

Only last week I received a letter from a school which is being forced to lose a teacher this year because of budget cuts. At the same time, this school has been given a capital grant of £98,000 by the DfEE to up-grade all its windows, despite advice from the local glaziers that there is nothing wrong with the windows and that they will last another 20 years at least. The school would much rather spend the £98,000 on retaining the teacher, but Whitehall rules say it cannot.

Thanks to New Labour’s obsession with gimmicks and pointless plans and irrelevant target setting, this kind of interference is now commonplace throughout our education system. We have had 17 plans including the education development plan, the early years development plan, the ICT plan, the community plan, the school organisation plan, the admissions plan, the class sizes plan, the new deal plan, the asset plans, the post inspection plan, and, my favourite, the education plan of plans.

These plans are designed to meet targets. And we have had the target for truancy, the target for school leavers, the target for exclusions, the target for GCSE grades, the target for numeracy and literacy, and, of course, the target for the number of 16 year olds going to adventure camps every summer.

These plans and targets are the extending tentacles of central government, as it seeks to control and regulate and interfere in everything going on in our education system, and destroy all freedom of initiative in our schools. This Government is turning headteachers into mere functionaries of the central state, and teachers into clerks filling in forms.

As the Government’s own Better Regulation Taskforce investigation into the teaching profession reported in April this year: ‘there is a widespread and deeply held view that increased red tape is acting as a distraction from the drive to raise standards … Over-elaborate processes are being used to achieve straight-forward objectives, leading to unnecessary duplication and confusing excessive lines of accountability’.

According to one survey, schools have received 685 publications and 377 regulations from the DfEE since the election. Add together the various forms, and you have the equivalent of over 17 million lessons a year in teaching time wasted on filling in paperwork. As the headteacher of one secondary school in Hampshire wrote recently to Theresa May: ‘we have received 477 documents from the LEA since 1st April 1999 and only three were relevant and the rest is administrative tripe’.

That will only get worse with the Government’s so-called Performance Related Pay Scheme. It must be a good idea to reward good teachers with more pay, but any proper performance pay related scheme would award bonuses on a year by year basis rather than as a one off payment for all time. As it is, the main feature of the Government’s scheme seems to be the enormous amount of paperwork involved. Some teachers have told me that it is taking them up to twenty hours to fill in the form. Headteachers then have to spend a further two hours on each one of their teacher’s forms, which in large school means weeks of paperwork. The process does not end there. The Government is spending £25 million on an army of hired assessors to go through every single form all over again. Given the failings of the scheme itself, the Government might have spent the money better as a pay-rise to all teachers and save all those wasted hours of form filling.

All this bureaucracy and Government interference not only costs the taxpayer large sums of money, it also affects standards in the classroom. For teachers raise standards by teaching well, not by filling in forms. Headteachers raise standards by managing and leading their schools well, not by following the latest Whitehall plan. Parents raise standards in schools by demanding good teaching from teachers and choosing the best school for their children, not by being forced to choose between identikit schools that cannot respond to their needs.

The single most damaging act of this Government on standards in the classroom has been to restrict the freedom of schools to maintain discipline. We all know how one disruptive child can wreck the education of an entire class. We also know that learning about order and respect for the law at school is vital to creating a law abiding society.

But all this is lost on the Government, which has set schools the completely arbitrary and unacceptable target of cutting the number of expulsions or – to use the proper jargon – the number of permanent exclusions by a third over the next two years. And to make sure their targets are met, they are fining schools up to £6,000 for every disruptive pupil excluded beyond the targets set by civil servants in Whitehall.

If you want to know what that means in practice, listen to story of two London secondary schools which two months ago were forced to re-admit pupils they had permanently excluded for wielding knives and conducting gang-like vendettas. ‘Now’, say the headteachers, ‘all the other pupils are desperately frightened’ and the education of hundreds of children has been jeopardised for the sake of a tiny minority.

Or listen to the story of Angeles Walford, a head-teacher seconded to a failing school, who said recently: ‘I excluded a boy who hit a teacher but was forced to give him a second chance. He came back and hit another teacher’.

It is symptomatic of an Education Secretary in thrall to a liberal consensus that says you have to put the interests of the unruly minority over and above the rights of the mainstream majority. In this case, the rights of a few disruptive pupils are taking precedence over the rights of the many children to an ordered classroom in which they can learn.

The same attitude expresses itself in the Government’s approach to school uniforms. When David Blunkett was in charge of Sheffield’s schools, he waged an obsessive battle against uniforms. Now he has escalated the war to the national stage. A recent DfEE Circular on Pupil Inclusion prevents headteachers enforcing the wearing of school uniforms. It says pupils may not be excluded for ‘breaching school uniform policy including hairstyle and wearing jewellery’, because heaven forbid any headteacher might try to ensure that the children at their school are tidy and well presented.

What all this amounts too, of course, is the slow creep of political correctness through our schools.

In recent months, a number of stories of political correctness in the classroom have caught the headlines. We have had the Prime Minister’s drive to abolish Section 28 and Margaret Hodge’s barmy plans to abolish musical chairs.

But the real damage to our children’s education has been going on for decades, caused by a liberal consensus and its progressive teaching methods. The fashions may change, and the jargon is different, but the assault on more traditional teaching methods continue.

For example, David Blunkett already insists that school children attend special ‘citizenship’ classes. Last week he announced at the C’Mon Everybody Citizenship Conference that he was going to spend a further £300,000 on this pet project.

Of course, we all want children to learn to think for themselves, and we all want them to become good citizens. But good citizenship is not something you learn from a textbook in a citizenship class; good citizenship is something you develop from being in an ordered and civil environment, in which people understand their duties and respect the rights of others.

Now we are told that the Education Secretary is planning to put so-called ‘thinking skills’ into the National Curriculum, with ‘thinking classrooms’ in which children become ‘active creators of their knowledge’. Children learn how to think by studying science or history or literature, not by going to thinking classes.

Citizenship classes and thinking classrooms are part of the world of an out of touch elite in which all must be treated the same, everyone must sink to the lowest common denominator, the best must not be allowed to succeed, the worst must not be allowed to fail, everyone passes, nothing must be too difficult or too challenging, no one must be told to try harder.

It is this patronising attitude that has led to failing schools, poor standards and children who cannot even spell the word ‘Oxford’ let alone aspire to go there. It is an attitude that, whatever the New Labour rhetoric, has pervaded so much which David Blunkett and Tony Blair have done with Britain’s education system in the last three years.

The previous Conservative Government began to turn the tide with grant maintained schools, city technology colleges, the National Curriculum and regular schools inspections. But we did not go far enough and we were hampered in our efforts by left-wing local education authorities. Sadly, some of the improvements we did make have been dismantled by the present regime.

The next Conservative Government will not just turn the tide – we will defeat once and for all the attitudes that are holding back our education system and we will set Britain’s schools free.

Three simple but radical principles will underpin our policy.

The first principle of Conservative education policy is that every school will be a Free School, free of bureaucratic and political control.

All schools will receive all their funding directly, rather than via a local education authority. Headteachers and governors will then be free to manage their own budgets, free to employ their own staff, free to set their teachers’ pay, free to determine their own admissions policy, free to run their own school transport, free to manage their own opening hours and term times, and free to set and enforce their own standards of discipline. Small schools will be able to get together, if they wish, and pool their management.

LEAs as we know them will cease to exist, although the local council will still have a role in certain areas of education – which we expect will include educational welfare, special needs statementing, and discharging the ultimate responsibility of seeing that every child gets an education.

The second principle is that every school will be accountable to its parents.

Parents will be free to apply to whichever school can best bring out the potential of their child. Government money will then follow the pupil, putting financial power behind parental accountability. There will also be some basic safeguards backing up parental accountability. We will give all parents a Guarantee that provides a means of changing the management of a bad school. We will retain the National Curriculum, albeit in a more flexible form. We will retain the literacy and numeracy hours, which owe their origins to the previous Conservative Government. We will give Ofsted greater powers of inspection, and publish expanded, value added league tables. And we will reform teacher training – an issue which I will leave for another speech.

The third principle of Conservative education policy is diversity, for no one will have a monopoly on the provision of education.

We will allow good schools to expand. We will allow new schools to be created, including new grammar schools and specialist schools. There will be state run and state owned schools, but there will also be privately run state owned schools and privately run privately owned schools all operating within the overall taxpayer funded education system. We will ensure that children with special education needs get the right help, and also introduce a form of the assisted places scheme for particularly gifted children. We will set out our policies for both special educational needs and gifted children in greater detail in the future.

These three principles of freedom, accountability and diversity are the pillars upon which we will build an education system fit for twenty first century Britain.

But school structures and funding mechanisms are the dry bones of the policy. What will Free Schools actually mean for the teacher in the classroom and the parent who just wants their child to get a good education.

What do Free Schools mean for the school child?

They mean the right to being taught to a standard that gets the very best out of them, and develops their full potential.

In the current comprehensive system, far too many pupils are still taught in mixed ability classes. The result is that less able pupils struggle to keep up, while more able pupils are not stretched. In Free Schools the headteacher and governors will be totally free to stream or set classes according to ability, so that every child gets the appropriate level of teaching. They will be free to keep their sixth forms, which are so important to attracting the best teachers. And they will also be free to set their own school timetables and term times. It will be possible to find time in the week for extra classes for pupils who may need more help, and for pupils who can go much further in their learning. Under a Conservative Government, all schools will be Free Schools, so all schools will have the freedom to innovate in this way.

One of the few restrictions on a school’s freedom will be the National Curriculum. The National Curriculum was introduced because some schools were failing to teach their pupils even the basics of a standard education. In our judgement, that safeguard needs to remain in place longer – at least until the Free Schools system is up and running, and delivering higher standards.

However, I have listened to many teachers who have told me that the National Curriculum is far too prescriptive – and I agree. We will therefore simplify the Curriculum, and we will reduce the Curriculum requirements of consistently high achieving schools, who have demonstrated that they can be trusted to deliver a good rounded education.

It is also crazy that pupils who are struggling to read, write and add up, are forced by the Curriculum to move on to other lessons. We will allow schools to exempt children who have not yet reached basic standards of literacy and numeracy from National Curriculum requirements, at least until they have caught up. Children who cannot yet understand English should not be forced to try to learn French. And we will give post 14 year olds, who feel that academic subjects offers them little, vocational curriculum options that train them for the world of work.

We have also listened to Ofsted and accept their view that Literacy and Numeracy Hours in primary schools are proving a valuable tool in ensuring that for at least two hours a day, young children are taught the basics. The Literacy and Numeracy Hours owe their origins to the work of the last Conservative Government, were developed by the present Government, and I can tell you that the next Conservative Government will keep them.

Free Schools give all school children the right to the best education suitable for their needs and their ability. But that right is meaningless if they cannot be taught in disciplined classrooms, where the education of the mainstream majority is given precedence over the disruptive behaviour of a few.

I have already spoken about how this Government has undermined school discipline, and tied the hands of teachers, with its arbitrary exclusion targets and financial penalties.

The next Conservative Government will abolish artificial exclusion targets and the stiff financial penalties. Good school discipline will no longer mean a heavy blow to school budgets. We will give headteachers and school governors the complete freedom, within the law, to set the standards and rules of discipline in their classrooms.

There is absolutely no point excluding disruptive children from schools if you are unable to provide them with support. Or else, as we all know to our cost, today’s child terrorising a class room becomes tomorrow’s youth criminal terrorising a whole community.

So we will draw on the pioneering work of the Zacchaeus Centre in Birmingham that has achieved remarkable results with difficult and disruptive children. We will establish a network of centres – which we shall call Progress Centres – that will provide everything from a one week’s special teaching for a child at risk of being excluded to full-time education for those pupils who are permanently excluded.

These Progress Centres could be financed either by schools buying a course for a disruptive pupil; or, in the case of permanent exclusions, the Centre being paid the funds that would otherwise have gone to the school. We will also abolish the Government’s ineffective and gimmicky on site school ‘sin bins’ and use part of the money saved to help fund the work of the Progress Centres.

When I announced these policies last month I received the near universal support of teaching unions whose members are fed up with having their authority undermined and their judgement second-guessed. Nigel de Gruchy of the NASUWT said Conservative policies on school discipline were ‘spot on’.

Creating a strong school ethos in which children learn about civility and respect for others does not simply require good school discipline. A school ethos comes from pride in the school, a sense of team spirit, a bond between the teaching staff and the student body, and mutual respect between teachers and parents. There are many ways to bring that about – voluntary service in the community, a particular religious affiliation, interesting school trips, competitions against other schools, a healthy dialogue between teachers and pupils. Competitive sports are clearly very important in this, as are organised sports in primary schools, and we will be setting out our policy to encourage these over the coming months.

A school uniform can also be a vital component of a strong school ethos. The liberal establishment have waged a long war against school uniforms, the latest salvo in which is the Government’s new rule that headteachers cannot exclude pupils who refuse to wear a uniform. The excuse they have used is that parents do not want to pay for a uniform. They clearly have never actually listened to any real parents.

In my experience of speaking to many hundreds of parents, they want their children to go to school looking smart and wearing a uniform. As one parent in Maidstone said to me, ‘school uniforms are a great leveller. They make children respect each other’. The alternative, where children compete with each other to wear the latest brand fashions, is actually more expensive.

The next Conservative Government will give schools the complete freedom to require their pupils to wear a school uniform, and give them the powers to ensure the uniform is worn.

So Free Schools mean giving school children the right to a good education in a disciplined environment. What do they mean for parents?

Above all, Free Schools mean accountability. Every parent wants his or her child to have a good education. Yet every morning, tens of thousands of parents wave goodbye to their children knowing that those children are going to a bad school. And they also know that there is absolutely nothing that they can do about it, because power in our education system rests with local education authorities and Whitehall bureaucrats. No wonder the parents I meet are angry and upset and bitter.

The next Conservative Government will put the power in our education system where it belongs – in the hands of parents, heads and governors. We will do it by giving parents the freedom to apply to any school they feel is best for their child, and then make the money follow the child.

That means schools that offer a good education and a good ethos will attract more pupils and more funding, and schools that offer nothing but bad teaching, low standards and disorder will attract fewer pupils and less funding. In other words, there will be a real incentive for schools to improve and a parent-driven mechanism for forcing the worst schools to close. This does not mean abandoning children in bad schools. Far from it. We will not allow bad schools to continue to fail their children.

We will also give parents a real choice of different schools to suit the ability and talents of their child. Under a future Conservative Government, a great diversity of different schools will flourish.

We will abolish the surplus places rule that prevents good schools expanding. Free Schools will be free to determine their own admissions policies, so that some of them can specialise in areas like art or science or sport or information technology. Some will wish to select 20 or 30 or 40 per cent of their intake, others will wish to be wholly selective. That will mean that new grammar schools can be created, reversing a 30 year policy which has done more than anything else to lower standards in our state education system.

All the evidence suggests that even where all the schools in an area are free to determine their own admissions policy, no pupil falls through the net. For example, in Bromley, where all but one of the secondary schools was Grant Maintained, the schools regularly got together to make sure every child had a place.

Just to make sure, we will give to local councils the ultimate responsibility of ensuring that every child in their area receives an education.

We will also end the monopoly on education provision that has created such a barrier between the state and independent sectors. When David Blunkett took office, he liked to talk a lot about bringing private firms in to run schools and creating education action zones. Three years later, education action zones have run into the sand. Only one school has been contracted to a private company, and that was only because it was in a Conservative-run authority.

We will sweep away the barriers by allowing independent foundations, be they companies or charities or religious groups, to run existing state schools – all under the umbrella of a taxpayer funded education system. We will also allow these independent foundations to found and build completely new schools, which will also receive taxpayer funding on an equal basis to existing schools. These schools will be called Partner Schools, and, to coin a phrase, they will be in the state education system but not run by the state education system.

I believe this could be the most exciting and far-reaching development in state education since Rab Butler’s 1944 Act. Of course, there are those who will be enraged by this. They will hate the idea that some schools might do better than others. They will loathe the idea that anyone but the state might run a school. They will complain bitterly about replacing Whitehall Knows Best with Parents Know Best.

So they will kick and scream, and claim that what Free Schools really means is that the Tories are abandoning sink schools in bad areas, and all that we are interested in is good schools in good areas.

These people have obviously never visited schools like Archbishop Tenison’s School in a deprived area of inner city South London, as I did a month ago. A former grammar school, forced to go comprehensive, losing its sixth form, managed by Lambeth’s loony left, Archbishop Tenison’s was a monument to the absolute failure of our education system. That was until along came the freedom of grant maintained status, and with it headmaster Brian Jones. Now the school, which draws over 80 per cent of its intake from the Afro-Caribbean population, is one of the 29 most improved schools in the country, sends many of its pupils on to university, including this year to Cambridge.

Give parents real power in our education system, and set schools free, and it is schools like Archbishop Tenison’s that will thrive, regardless of where they are located.

Sometimes, however, it is not enough to allow parents simply to vote with their feet. In some areas and for some parents, the choice of schools is limited. That is why we will also introduce the Parents’ Guarantee. Where parents feel their school is not delivering an adequate education, we will give them the right to call for a special Ofsted inspection. Where the inspection confirms the judgement of the parents, then a new management will be sought for the school.

If parents are to make informed choices about which school is best for their child, then they need access to high quality, independent information about the performance of different schools. National league tables and an independent schools inspection service were one of the most important achievements of the Conservative years. We propose to go even further.

Alongside the raw data of school inspections, we will publish value-added league tables that enable parents to see clearly what progress children are making over a period of time in a particular school. That means knowing the point from which the children start, which is why we will publish for all schools the reading and maths results of Key Stage One – information which the Government currently keep secret.

We will also beef up the powers of Ofsted. Chris Woodhead, Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Schools, has done more than anyone else in Britain to drive up standards in our classrooms and challenge our failing schools system. I do not just praise his work, I propose to build on it.

At present, schools know long in advance when the Ofsted inspectors are coming. The result, as one parent in Bury told me, is that ‘everyone in the schools gets ready for it. For the week the inspectors are there, it all runs to clockwork. But as soon they’re gone, it’s business as usual’. That may be unfair on some schools, where the preparation for a visit by Ofsted can lead to a permanent improvement; but there is more than a ring of truth to it. So under a Conservative Education Secretary, Ofsted inspections will take place with little or no notice. But we will also reduce the level of surveillance of schools with a consistently high record of achievement, so that the inspectors can focus their work on schools with real problems.

I have talked of the parents and the school children. But what does Free Schools mean for teachers, who today find themselves under more and more pressure and feel valued less and less?

Free Schools means freedom for teachers. It means slashing away all the bureaucracy and paperwork and red tape that stops teachers doing their job. It means trusting headteachers to lead their schools to the best of their ability and judgement, and let teachers teach.

Politicians are always promising to cut red tape, without ever getting specific. So that you know I mean business, let’s gets down to the specifics.

We will abolish the early years development plan, the area educational development plan, the ICT plan, the school organisation plan, the admissions plan, the class sizes plan, the new deal plan, the asset plans, and, yes, the education plan of plans. And we will abolish all those Government targets on exclusion and university entry and adventure camps and so on.

We will get Government off the back of teachers. All those hundreds of hours wasted filling in pointless forms will disappear, so that teachers can spend more time with their pupils – in other words, doing what they are paid to do. By trusting teachers to teach, and headteachers to run their schools, I believe we will dramatically raise the morale of our teachers and the status of the teaching profession in our society.

Let me finally turn to the gritty question of money. What does Free Schools mean for the funding of education?

Teacher and Parents have all got used now to this Government’s trick of announcing with a fanfare great telephone sums of money for our schools, and then, on closer examination, for those sums to turn out to be a tiny fraction of what was implied. And they have got used to Education Ministers re-announcing the same sums again and again. As no less an authority than the Guardian put it: ‘the truth is that Mr Blunkett’s £19 billion is largely conjured out of thin air by trickery, double counting, treble counting, and a steady stream of fundamentally misleading public statements’.

The big difference between this Government and the next Conservative Government will be the way that money gets to schools. At present, well over £3 billion of the total schools budget is kept back by LEAs to spend, as they see fit, on their own activities and bureaucracy. A further £1 billion is kept back by the DfEE to spend on gimmicky grant schemes and pointless bureaucracy such as the near 300 person strong Standards and Effectiveness Unit.

Under the next Conservative Government, these DfEE grant schemes would disappear and LEAs as we know them would cease to exist – the functions which we expect local authorities will retain financial responsibility for are statementing and special support for children with Special Education Needs, and Education Welfare services.

All the money will go direct to the schools. Schools will be paid on a per pupil basis. And because £4 billion will no longer be kept back by Whitehall and local councils, every school in the country will get on average £540 more per pupil to spend as best they see fit. Of course, schools will have extra responsibilities such as organising school transport.

But it is still £540 more per pupil per school – a real cash boost for headteachers to spend as they wish in the education frontline. And the most important thing is that a pound spent on schools will be a pound spent in schools.

Free Schools mean higher standards for pupils, better discipline in our classrooms, real choice and real accountability for parents, a great expansion in the diversity of education provision, freedom for teachers to teach, and £540 extra per pupil going direct to the school. It means creating the high quality education service that Britain deserves, building an architecture of excellence on the foundations of freedom, accountability and diversity.

I do not pretend that all this will happen overnight. There will be an important transition period, and we will consult widely with parents and teachers and governors and local councillors on how that is best carried out.

But what I have set out today are the principles and practical applications of a radical Conservative education policy that will transform our schools system, put power in the hands of parents and governors, and give freedom to our teachers.

The Government talked of ‘education, education, education’ and has delivered nothing but failure, failure, failure. Where they have failed, we will succeed. The watchwords of the next Conservative Government will be: freedom, standards, discipline.

And our ambition is quite simple: to set children free to realise their full potential; set parents free to choose for their child a better education than they themselves received; set every teacher free to teach; set Britain free so that with skills, the civility and the aspiration, we can be the world leader in the new global economy.

Below is the text of the speech made by William Hague, the then Leader of the Opposition, on 10 July 2000.

A year ago, I asked Lord Norton of Louth to chair a Commission of distinguished parliamentarians and constitutional experts to `examine the cause of the decline in the effectiveness of Parliament in holding the Executive to account, and to make proposals for strong democratic control over the Government’.

In the months that followed, the members of the Commission took their responsibilities with the utmost seriousness. They took evidence from half a dozen ex-Cabinet Ministers, numerous ex-Ministers, journalists, academics, pressure groups, a former Speaker and a former Head of the Civil Service, as well as many current MPs of all major parties including – I am delighted to say – a former Minister of the current Labour Government and the current Chief Whip of the Liberal Democrats. No one can credibly claim that this has been a work of political partisanship.

One year later, the Norton Commission has produced its Report on Strengthening Parliament which is of outstanding quality and far-reaching vision. It is the most important contribution to the debate about parliamentary democracy in Britain in a generation.

The Norton Report takes a fresh look at what Parliament is for, and boldly reminds us why we need proper democratic accountability. It examines with great thoroughness Parliament’s decline under governments of all political persuasions, and sets out the case for radical reform. And, most usefully of all, it proposes many detailed recommendations that are not the stuff of fantasy, but are practical, workable and in sympathy with the history of our country’s institutions.

In short, Philip Norton and his fellow Commission members have done a first class job. I sincerely thank them for all their work, and I think Parliament should thank them too.

The Norton Report confirms what I have long feared: that Parliament is no longer able properly to hold the Executive to account, that legislation does not receive the quality of scrutiny necessary for good governance, and that the House of Commons has become less and less the focus of national political debate.

This is something every Briton should be concerned about. For only in a country with a strong Parliament is there genuine representative democracy; only with a strong Parliament is government genuinely accountable; only with a strong Parliament is political decision making both robust and sensitive; and only with a strong Parliament do the people of that country have a say in the decisions that affect their lives.

However, the Norton Report also confirms what I have long hoped: that the decline is not irreversible, that there are practical reforms we can make which will revive representative democracy, make government genuinely accountable and put a stronger Parliament back where it belongs – at the very heart of our national political life.

The Report is 66 pages long and it contains almost 90 major recommendations for reform.

The recommendations cover everything from the format of oral questions, to the timetabling of legislation, to the composition and powers of Select Committees, to the publication of draft Bills, to the handling of exclusively English laws, to the career structures of Members of Parliament, to the facilities available to the media, to the number of Government Ministers and the overall size of the House of Commons.

It would be an insult to the work of the Commission to announce within minutes of the Report’s publication which recommendations my Party accepts, and which we reject. Each one of these recommendations deserve careful consideration not just within the Conservative Party, but, I would hope, within all political parties.

For the future of Parliament does not belong to one political leader or one political party – it belongs to all parliamentarians, who hold our democracy in trust, and who, I believe, owe a responsibility to pass on to future generations a better and more effective Parliament than the one which they inherited.

However, I am conscious that previous Oppositions have launched policy commissions with great fanfares, and then conveniently left their reports on the shelf gathering dust when they return to Government. To make sure that that does not happen with the Norton Report, I can today make three specific commitments that will form part of our Manifesto for the next general election.

First, as Prime Minister, I will accept the Norton recommendation that the current single Question Time on a Wednesday should be replaced with two Prime Minister’s Questions a week.

As soon as he entered Downing Street and without consulting Parliament at all, Tony Blair cut Question Time down to once a week. It means that in the fast changing world of politics, Members of Parliament and the Opposition only get one chance to hold the most powerful person in the land to account.

Tony Blair’s decision to cut in half the number of times MPs could ask him questions showed his total disdain for the House of Commons and proper democratic accountability. I want to see the Prime Minister of the day held properly accountable to the representatives of the British people. Like the Norton Commission, I also want to see the Chamber of the House of Commons ‘restored to its position as the indisputable arena in which government can be challenged and embarrassed’. That is what democracy is all about. So, as Prime Minister, I will answer questions twice a week in the House of Commons, and I will do so for twenty minutes each time – which, over the course of the week, is longer than any Prime Minister before me.

A second principle which we can immediately accept is that appointments to Select Committees should no longer be controlled by party managers and whips.

Select Committees were proposed by the last Conservative Opposition and introduced shortly after we came to power. I agree with the Norton Report that they have been ‘a major success’ but that ‘in terms of parliamentary scrutiny, they represent the classic half full, half empty bottle’. The present Government has grossly abused the Select Committee system, with its own hand-picked members on Committees to leak Committee Reports to Ministers. The Norton Report makes a number of important changes to strengthen the work of departmental select committees, including changing the way in which the members are selected.

As a former member of a Select Committee, as a former Minister who has been cross-examined by them, I agree that we need to make them stronger and we need to start with the membership. For it must be wrong that the Government, through the Whips Office, chooses the people who are supposed to hold the very same Government to account. I am not alone in thinking this, for Parliament’s own all-party Liaison Committee has reached the same conclusion in its First Report.

So the next Conservative Government accepts the principle set out in the Norton Report and the Liaison Committee Report that appointment of Select Committee Members should be taken out of the hands of the whips and party managers. We will consult with all parties as to what appointment system we replace it with that guarantees the independence of Committee members.

The third commitment I can make today is much broader in nature. Although the specific recommendations of the Norton Report deserve fuller and further consideration, what I can announce is that the work of the Norton Commission will be the route map by which the next Conservative Government dramatically strengthens the powers of Parliament to hold the Executive to account.

Of course, we will be making a rod for our own back. That is why we will make our far-reaching changes to Parliament within weeks of a general election victory – and before ‘governmentitis’ sets in.

By making Parliament stronger, and democracy stronger, the next Conservative Government will stand in stark contrast to the present Government that has, from the moment it took office, sought to diminish our democracy and side-line our Parliament.

This week, we saw the latest instalment of that campaign with the Government-inspired proposals of the Labour-controlled Modernisation Select Committee. These include changing the voting procedures of the House of Commons in order dramatically to reduce the opportunities of the Opposition and the Government’s own backbenchers to scrutinise legislation and hold Ministers to account. The Modernisation Committees latest proposals on voting are a disgrace and we will have no part of them.

Instead, today we have, with the enormous contribution of the Norton Commission, put on the table proposals for reform that will make Parliament stronger and make Government more democratically accountable. We have also made specific commitments to reintroduce two longer Prime Ministers Questions and set the appointments to Select Committees free from the control of party managers.

For I believe the people of Britain deserve a stronger Parliament, better government and a revived and refreshed democracy, and I believe it is our duty to provide it.

Below is the text of the speech made by William Hague, the then Leader of the Opposition, on 5 September 2000.

Today, with the publication of Believing in Britain, the Conservative Party takes another step to advance our common sense revolution.

This Outline Manifesto sets out both the basic principles that guide our Party and the key elements of a bold programme for the next Conservative government.

Today we are sending a copy of Believing in Britain direct to the home of every member of our Party, together with a ballot paper. For the first time in the Party’s long history, the basic principles of our programme for office will reflect the democratic will of the whole Party.

I hope and believe that Party members will vote overwhelmingly to endorse Believing in Britain. And in doing so, we will send out a message that there is one political party that still has confidence in our people and ambitions for our country.

There are some themes in Believing in Britain that will be familiar to many of you. Our commitment to a strong, low tax, competitive economy. Our determination to win the war against crime. Our concern to protect the countryside and enhance rural life. Our belief in a Britain that is in Europe not run by Europe. Our pledge to keep the Pound. And with these familiar themes, we set out new thinking and new policies about how we might achieve them – for example, you have already heard this week of our plans to put British companies at the forefront of the IT revolution, and about our proposals for ‘reserved powers’ that will protect the independence of our country.

But Believing in Britain also contains many new themes and new policies for the Conservative Party.

Policies to endow our universities and set our schools free, so that the next generation are the best educated and trained people in the world. Policies to transform our inner cities and get rid of the worst tower blocks that blight the lives of so many. Policies to provide young people who want it with a funded alternative to the basic state pension, so that tomorrow’s pensioners share in the wealth our country. Policies to give Britain a health service we can be proud of, in which doctors and nurses are set free from political interference. Policies to end the scandal of children in care; policies to help disabled people return to work; policies to encourage charities and voluntary groups to flourish.

In short, Believing in Britain is a striking new social agenda for Conservatism based on one very simple, very Conservative principle: Freedom.

Freedom for parents, for families, for pensioners, for teachers and doctors and nurses; freedom for inner city communities, for universities and schools, hospitals and local councils; freedom from big government, bureaucratic control, and all the targets, and gimmicks, and bossy, nannying, Whitehall interference that are the hallmark of the present Government.

This new Conservative social agenda of devolving power to local people and local institutions and local communities shows that we have listened and learnt, and that we trust the instincts of the British people.

It shows that we have the energy and the ideas to tackle the deep seated social problems of our country.

It shows that we are not just interested in a healthy and strong economy, but also in a healthy and strong society too.

Conservatives know the sort of Britain we want.

We want a Britain where the creative and the talented can get ahead, because the government gets out of their way.

We want a Britain where communities thrive and public services serve the public, because the government has handed back power to local institutions and given choice to local people.

We want a Britain where the old and the sick and the vulnerable are cared for because the government reforms the welfare state to strengthen family life and personal responsibility.

We want a Britain where women are safe to go out in their own street at night and parents need have no fear when their children play outside because government supports the rule of law with all its might.

We want a Britain where the people of this country can hold their government to account because the country still governs itself.

We know the sort of Britain we want.

We want a Britain which the people of Britain themselves are crying out for – an ambitious, self-confident, prosperous, decent, responsible, independent country that is, quite simply: the best place in the world to do business, the best place in the world to live, and one of the most admired and influential counties in the world.

Believing in Britain reflects those three ambitions.

It shows how the next Conservative government will make Britain the best place in the world to do business.

We will make Britain a world centre for the new economy, because we understand the way new technology is changing the rules.

As business becomes more mobile, Conservative Britain will be cutting taxes. We will reduce the burden of tax and spend more on vital public services. That is because we will plan spending increases in line with the growth of the economy. For Government cannot spend what the nation hasn’t earned.

As global trading becomes easier, Conservative Britain will also be cutting regulation. We will establish regulatory budgets for Whitehall departments and exempt small businesses from whole classes of red tape.

As the opportunities provided by the internet and the IT revolution expand exponentially, Conservative Britain will be the capital of the new economy. Today, we set out a comprehensive package of specific policies to help IT industries flourish in our country – including reforming damaging brain-drain taxes, radically deregulating the telecommunications industry and encouraging more competition in local internet connections.

And as good education becomes the most important resource a country can possess, Conservative Britain will transform our schools and universities so that they equip the next generation with the skills they need and liberate all people by giving them the chance to reach their full potential in a first class education service.

One of the most exciting policies in Believing in Britain is our proposal to set our universities free for suffocating government control to become world-class centres of excellence. We will use the money raised from future government sales similar to the sale of the mobile phone licences to endow universities so that they are progressively less dependent on government funding.

Believing in Britain also shows how the next Conservative Government will make Britain the best place in the world to live.

We are going to have a common sense revolution in the way our public services are provided.

We may be the fourth largest economy in the world at the dawn of the twenty first century, but you wouldn’t know it if you visited some of our schools, or many of our hospital wards, or tried to travel on our congested roads, or spent time in parts of our inner cities.

It is not surprising when our public services are interfered with constantly by politicians who are blind to the choices and preferences of those who use it, patronising and untrusting of the people who work in it, and have turned their back on all that we know makes enterprise work.

Today we show how will use patient choice, and the clinical judgment of doctors and nurses, and co-operation with the independent sector to help us transform the National Health Service from its present state of crisis into health system the people of Britain deserve.

Today we show how we will use parent choice and the trust of teachers to help us transform education in Britain from a heavily centralised system where too many schools suffer from low standards and poor discipline, into a great diversity of high achieving, ordered, parent and teacher-run Free Schools where the money goes straight to the classroom and not to bureaucrats.

Today we show how we will support families with Family Scholarships and by reintroducing a recognition of marriage into the tax and benefits system. And we show too how we will encourage charities, faith-based groups and voluntary organisations, so that people do not always turn to the state when they need help.

We are going to have a common sense revolution too in the way welfare works.

Our welfare system and policies to protect vulnerable are failing. As presently constituted how could they do anything else but fail? Anything would fail that penalised responsibility, was so badly targeted, was so needlessly complicated, was so unwilling to police its own rules, was so tolerant of a culture of failure.

Today we show how the welfare bureaucracy will be transformed so that those who work in it are rewarded most when they get people off welfare into work.

We show how welfare for disabled people will be reformed so that those who want to work are helped with rehabilitation and so that those who are able to save aren’t penalised when they do so.

And, in one of the most important sections of this document, we set out our plans to reform the pension system so that today’s pensioners are given real dignity and choice, and so that tomorrow’s pensioners – today’s young people – are given the chance to build up a funded alternative to the basic pension. Let’s be clear. The basic state pension will still be paid to all who want it, but now people will have a genuine choice.

Believing in Britain brings the common sense revolution to transforming our inner cities, which for a generation have trapped people in poverty and bad housing and crime-ridden estates. We’re going to get rid of the worst tower blocks, we going to protect people from ‘nightmare’ neighbours and we going to make sure these communities get the good schools and the proper law enforcement they deserve.

We will expand on both our pensions policies and our inner city proposals in due course.

And we are going to have a common sense revolution in the war against crime.

Today we commit ourselves to reversing Labour’s cut in police numbers, to making sure criminals serve the sentences handed down in court, to abolishing special early release, to getting persistent young offenders off our streets, to tackling the evil of drug and child abuse, and by fighting the war against the criminal with no holds barred.

And as we make our country the best place to do business and the best place in the world, we will ensure that Britain is one of the most admired and influential countries in the world. We do believe in Britain.

Extraordinarily, the Conservatives will be the only major party fighting the next election determined to stop the surrender our most precious right as a country – the right to govern ourselves.

By a combination of deliberate act and complacent failure to act, within a decade, perhaps less, many of the things that make our country a country, that make our nation a nation, that make Britain ‘Britain’, could have disappeared. And there we would all stand, the generation that threw away the rights and independence that so many of our countryman lived for and sweated for and died for.

Say what ever else you like about a Conservative Britain, but at least a Conservative Britain will still be Britain.

We live in a time of peace, of stability and of prosperity. The great mistake would be to do nothing and to change nothing and to reform nothing. Spend the money, take the stability for granted, let the future look after itself.

That is what we fear our country is doing. Even though we have a Government that started with every political and economic advantage: a strong economy bequeathed by their predecessor, one of the biggest parliamentary majorities in history, unprecedented goodwill from the public and the media. They are frittering it away and squandering the chance. Our taxes are rising, our public services are failing, our inner cities are not improving, our welfare system is unreformed, our independence as a country is being undermined.

Within a few years the money will have gone and we’ll still have the bills to pay. Within a few years business will have moved away and we’ll have the memory of a happy yesterday. Within a few years we’ll try desperately to act but even our power to do so will have been given away. Our country will pay dearly tomorrow for today’s complacency and drift.

There is an alternative. I think the British people can take it. I think they can take it because they are ambitious for Britain. They have confidence in Britain. They believe in Britain. And so do we.