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  • Tim Collins – 2003 Speech to Conservative Party Conference

    Tim Collins – 2003 Speech to Conservative Party Conference

    The speech made by Tim Collins, the then Shadow Secretary of State for Transport, at the Conservative Party conference held in Blackpool on 6 October 2003.

    Someone told me a story the other day. A man arrives at the pearly gates, and sees a clock above his name.

    He asks the angel what it signifies. This, he is told, is a clock whose second hand moves forward every time he tells an untruth.

    The man spots another clock, where the second hand has not moved at all. “Whose is that?” he asks. The angel says, “That belongs to Mother Theresa, who never told a fib in her life.”

    So the man asks, “Where’s Tony Blair’s clock?” “Oh that”, says the angel – “Gabriel has it with him and uses it as a portable fan.”

    Our Prime Minister has a problem with telling the truth. But we are quite happy to tell the truth about him and his Government.

    On transport they have been a miserable failure.

    Tax paid by the motorist up by an extra £13 billion a year – up yet again last week – yet we have had the smallest road-building programme since the Second World War.

    Motorway congestion up by 50 to 250% – while the CBI estimates congestion costs to business rising to over £20 billion a year.

    And train punctuality sharply worse since 1997.

    Transport Secretary Alistair Darling came up with a clever scheme to reduce the number of trains running late. Run fewer trains!

    After all if a train never sets off, it can’t arrive late. But even on his plans, train punctuality won’t return to 1997 levels, even after billions more, until 2010 at the earliest.

    Even worse there is the national scandal of the West Coast Main Line. After billions and billions of pounds of spending, and after months of disruption for engineering work – all designed to enable trains to run faster and to shorten journey times between the North West and London, we have just had the new autumn timetable published. The good news is that there is a 40 minute difference between the old time and the new time for getting from Oxenholme in my Cumbrian constituency to London. The bad news is that this is an extra 40 minutes – meaning that journeys which took three and a half hours ten years ago will be taking four and a half hours in year 7 of this Labour Government. Your money, ladies and gentlemen, is going straight down the plughole – and we all have every reason to be furious about it.

    Listen to people talking about transport and you soon hear frustration, disappointment and anger.

    The train boss who told me of growing bureaucracy from a Strategic Rail Authority set up just to supervise the rail industry, not to run a single station or train, yet shortly due to employ more people in central London than British Rail did when it ran the lot.

    The signalling engineer who told me that moving one signal box a few feet costs tens of thousands just on the contract.

    The residents of small villages – near Rugby and Cliffe, Gatwick and Stansted – with homes and lives blighted by Labour’s plans to destroy historic churches and wildlife sanctuaries in the pursuit of new and bigger airports everywhere – and I challenge Alistair Darling to do as I have done and visit these areas himself.

    I think of the pensioner who told me he was left gasping for breath, frail and fearful of a fall because at one station he had to climb steep steps in deep darkness and when he asked a member of staff for help was told “we don’t do that anymore”.

    Or the disabled person, coping with courage all her life, brought to tears because Gordon Brown’s petrol taxes mean she can no longer afford to drive.

    Think of these people and you will realise – enough is enough. And how dare Labour claim they care about the vulnerable, when this is what they do to the vulnerable?

    Conservatives believe in freedom, in a smaller state, in the unlimited potential of individuals and private enterprise.

    That’s why the motorist will always be hated by the Left, and championed by the Conservatives. It’s about freedom.

    Ten years ago Mr Blair used to tell a story. While canvassing he met a man washing his Mondeo, who said he’d never dream of voting Labour. Mr Blair spent years wooing Mondeo Man. What he never said was that in office he’d try to ensure the only thing you could afford to do with a Mondeo is wash it.

    When will they learn? Driving is not a sin. For millions of pensioners, people with disabilities and rural residents it is the only thing which makes life bearable.

    British motorists get the worst deal in the industrialised world.

    Just 14p in the £ of taxes raised from drivers is spent on roads in Britain. It’s by far the lowest ratio in any G7 country.

    The result? A road system which one Midlands company boss told me is unfair to call Third World – because at least in the Third World many roads are getting better.

    The Lib Dems just offer the same as Labour but with added spite. Even more congestion charging. Even higher motoring taxes. Even less road-building. Not so much an alternative to socialism as an alternative to sanity.

    The Left’s prejudice and intolerance have a sinister consequence.

    Under the Conservatives, the numbers killed on our roads halved – from 6,800 in 1979 to a still far too high 3,500 in 1997. Year after year the numbers fell. But no longer.

    In each of Labour’s first five years over 3,400 people have died on the roads – effectively the same number they inherited.

    What has changed? Cars still get safer. Medical science still gets better. Yet 1200 more people lose their lives each year now than would if 1980s trends had continued.

    However unintentionally, Government policy is largely to blame.

    They stopped building new, safer roads – in 2001, not one inch of tarmac was added to the national road network.

    And they have used speed cameras to replace, not supplement, traffic patrols. Under Labour, police officers on traffic duties have been cut by nearly 10%. As Chief Superintendent Mike McAndrew, former head of traffic policing for the Met, has said “speed on its own is not the real killer – it’s dangerous driving.” Without enough traffic patrols, he says, “people who drive dangerously, recklessly and carelessly don’t get caught”.

    So under Labour the numbers caught for driving without a licence or proper insurance have fallen by 10%. The numbers caught for driving with a defective car have fallen by 30%.

    Yet the number of speeding tickets issued to people who have

    correctly registered their car has shot up by 250%.

    So generally safe, generally responsible drivers are pursued ruthlessly for every mistake they make – while the really dangerous and irresponsible drivers, those without a licence, without insurance, without a safe car are let off time and time again.

    Enough is enough. And so my first announcement today is that we will tell the police and the courts to concentrate not on easy catches but on the really dangerous drivers.

    We will boost the numbers of traffic patrols. Improve driver education. And increase significantly penalties for those driving without a licence or without insurance, including permanent confiscation of their cars and when appropriate longer jail terms. Our Fair Deal for the Motorist starts with basic commonsense.

    Greater safety also comes from new roads. We’ll cut both the costs and the time of building roads, starting by scrapping time-wasting Multi-Modal Studies.

    Unlike Labour, we don’t aim to obliterate every last blade of grass in southern England. Our approach will ease overheating in the South – a sensible regional policy, respect for the Green Belt and, at last, firm and fair immigration and asylum rules to cut the numbers moving here from abroad.

    And of course we’ll keep the presumption, placed into law by the last Conservative Government, against major road developments in National Parks or Areas of Natural Beauty.

    But we also know sensibly planned, sensibly built roads enhance the environment for villages and small towns, cut pollution and congestion, and reduce the number of accidents.

    Most serious crashes occur not on motorways, but on small roads.

    International experience shows that higher and more rigorously observed limits on motorways, combined with lower limits on small roads, strongly help to reduce road casualties.

    That’s why we will on entering office immediately start a swift and comprehensive review of speed limits. It’s likely to mean raising the motorway limit to 80 mph while providing lower limits – of 20 mph or below – near schools or in small communities.

    A more rational attitude towards risk across transport is needed.

    In the eighteen months since the last time anyone was killed on a crashing train in Britain, over 5,000 have died in road accidents.

    It is much safer to travel by rail than by road. Yet very often the opposite impression is given. This distortion has got to stop.

    Because of it, we spend far more public money on rail safety than on road safety, putting a small chance of saving a few lives ahead of much better prospects of saving far more.

    Because of it, we saw a 3 month shutdown of London’s Central Line after an incident with no serious injuries – even though that caused tens of thousands to travel at far greater risk on the roads.

    And because of it, we saw a collapse of rail performance after Hatfield, causing many to switch to riskier road journeys.

    In the same way thousands of speed bumps were constructed, often thoughtlessly – when the London Ambulance Service say more die because ambulances are slowed than are saved by the bumps.

    So a narrow obsession with health and safety is endangering lives, not saving them. And we have yet another way of taking money from taxpayers and giving it to the legal profession.

    I don’t know about you but my view is that the lawyers get quite enough of all our money as it is.

    So my second announcement today is that Conservatives will concentrate on the big risks, not the small ones. When the next rail incident occurs, we will not rush to feed the frenzy of dangerous speculation encouraging people to switch to the roads.

    We’ll revise Government guidance which arm-twists councils into unwise speed bump schemes. Some make sense; many do not.

    And in office we will spend public money available for transport safety not to get headlines but to save the largest number of lives.

    Bus services need to be reliable, speedy and above all accessible, especially for pensioners. So we’ll aim to build on today’s half-priced bus pass to boost mobility for all, not just those near a bus route – because retirement should be a pleasure, not a sentence.

    We’ll be creative about transport solutions in the big cities – we’ll explore entirely private sector means to build London’s Crossrail, and welcome the thinking by Birmingham Conservatives about a privately funded new Tube. I look forward to further talks when next June Conservatives there sweep Labour out and take charge of England’s second city.

    Money spent on our railways must be better spent.

    So my third announcement is a radical slimming for the bloated Strategic Rail Authority. We doubt it makes sense to have three different public sector bodies – all created by Labour – supervising the rail network. And we’ll give longer franchises and more freedom to train companies, in return for much better service.

    We must also end Labour’s non-stop milking of the motorist.

    In London, Steve Norris is campaigning vigorously against Ken Livingstone’s Congestion Charge – not least because instead of the promised millions for public transport it is so off beam that it actually means less money for public transport. And we will resist Labour’s plan for the greatest stealth tax of all: charging 50p a mile for using roads we’ve already paid for many times over.

    In fact, here’s a thought. For years the British taxpayer has paid for new roads in Ireland, Greece, and Spain – and now in Iraq and Afghanistan. How about using British taxes on British roads?

    My final announcement concerns the purpose of the Department for Transport. The next Conservative Government will focus it on a goal which today astonishingly is not even an aspiration – reducing the time it takes to make a journey.

    We’ll address the frustration of millions – that it takes longer and longer to get home from work, get goods to market or visit friends.

    As technology advances, we expect many things to get better year by year. It shows the poverty of ambition of the Left that their aim on transport is just to manage decline into ever greater misery.

    There are no easy overnight solutions. But we can do better than the Left because we will at least try.

    Our policies will help traffic flow, not force it to grind to a halt. And we’ll aim to make journeys easier for all, not just for some.

    Under the Conservatives, the right to travel will not be confined to those with two Jags, huge egos and the sort of staggering hypocrisy which it takes years of socialist belief to create.

    I’m not saying this lot get things wrong – but they do sometimes remind me of the dyslexic devil-worshipper who sold his soul to Santa.

    Conference, let’s take pride in fundamental Conservative values.

    Never has loyalty to our nation-state been more evident in every age group, or more necessary in a changing world. Never has the need to get rid of petty interfering bureaucrats been greater.

    And never has it been more popular to believe in lower taxes – especially lower council taxes for pensioners.

    So let us for goodness’ sake take off the sackcloth and ashes.

    I for one am proud that Conservative Governments won the Cold War, revived our economy, and gave power and wealth and home ownership to millions who only dreamed of it before.

    And I’m proud to point out that today’s prosperity wasn’t built by Tony Blair but by Margaret Thatcher.

    With renewed self-confidence we can take on and take apart a Prime Minister who calls himself “battered”. Not half as battered, Tony, mate, as you are going to be.

    But let’s start with the Lib Dems. Their leader said that it was quite wrong to call his party Left wing – and then his Conference debated turning Britain into a People’s Republic, called for voting rights for convicted prisoners, voted to abolish all effective immigration controls and said most burglars should not go to jail.

    Charlie, the only place those ideas aren’t leftwing is in Fidel Castro’s Cuba. The Loony Left rides again.

    Lib Dem Menzies Campbell says he wants to turn our head of state into a bicycling monarch. We have not forgotten that wonderful Golden Jubilee, nor that we have seen a magnificent half century of public service for which all of us should be profoundly grateful.

    A bicycling monarchy, Mr Campbell? Let me echo Norman Tebbit – on your bike.

    Mr Blair has done so much harm to this nation. Ripped up its constitution, ramped up its taxes, bankrupted its farmers and fishermen, persecuted its motorists and let its violent crime soar.

    Worse, he has lied and lied and lied again. But none of this constitutes the most serious charge against him.

    Signing this country up to any European constitution, against his solemn word, is a grave matter. Committing Britain in principle to the current version of that constitution, which represents the end of national liberty, is shameful. But doing so without seeking the consent of the British people in a referendum is an absolute, utter and wholly unforgivable disgrace.

    Mr Blair arrogantly takes a third term for granted.

    Some Labour rebels want to see the back of him tomorrow. Good luck to them, I say – but we all know they won’t succeed.

    The Liberal Democrats have already conceded that they cannot deny him a further term in office.

    Only this Conservative Party can eject Tony Blair from Number Ten within the next two years.

    But we’ve got two obstacles to overcome to do that.

    First, there are some in this party who need rapidly to relearn the virtues of loyalty. Let us remind them – Iain Duncan-Smith was elected overwhelmingly, is daily exposing Tony Blair’s deceit and dishonesty and deserves the undivided support of this entire party.

    So let the message go forth to every Conservative, however eminent, senior or self-important – if you can’t say anything positive about your party, kindly don’t say anything at all.

    Second, we need to raise our sights. Some say our aim should simply be to cut Mr Blair’s majority and prepare to win the Election after next.

    Conference, we can’t wait that long. Those relying on failing public services, those paying skyrocketing taxes, those seeing years of striving to give their children a good education ruined by the corruption of the exam system, those held up as transport grinds to a halt – all these people can’t wait.

    Above all, Britain can’t wait. Another New Labour term could end all that makes Britain what it is.

    That is why our job is not just to oppose this Government, but to replace this Government.

    If we go forward now with energy, and fire, and passion – if we demonstrate commitment and clarity and courage – if we pledge ourselves anew to fight for liberty, for democracy, and for Britain – then we will do more than deserve to win – we are going to win.”

  • Liam Fox – 2003 Speech to Conservative Party Conference

    Liam Fox – 2003 Speech to Conservative Party Conference

    The speech made by Liam Fox, the then Shadow Secretary of State for Health, at the Conservative Party conference held in Blackpool on 6 October 2003.

    I want to begin today with a little general knowledge test. I’m sure we all remember Labour’s 1997 election campaign.

    Remember “24 hours to save the NHS”?

    Remember how they were going to get rid of hospital waiting lists?

    I wonder how many of you have been following the detail. Let me ask you. At the current rate of reduction, after six years of Labour government – how long would it take to deal with the backlog for NHS surgery?

    5 years, 15 years or 20 years? Well, actually, none of these .

    According to the Government’s own figures published last Friday, it will take no less than 62 years and 3 months to deal with the backlog of patients waiting.

    Some 24 hours to save the NHS.

    There is something going very badly wrong in Labour’s NHS. Record amounts of taxpayers money have been thrown at it. Yet despite huge spending increases, the number of hospital admissions actually fell last year. And the average waiting time for an operation actually went up not down. And the number of hospital beds fell …. again.

    It’s all because Labour have never learned the basic lesson that it’s not how much money you spend, it’s how you spend the money. It’s easy to spend money – especially, as a taxi driver in Birmingham pointed out to me last week, if it’s other people’s money. It’s easy to create waste and regulation and bureaucracy. It is much harder to carry out the real and difficult reforms which create greater choice, improved outcomes and more efficient use of taxpayers’ money.

    Yet to listen to Labour Ministers you would think everything was improving no end. Not that we can believe a word they tell us.

    What will they tell us next? That there are no pregnant mothers waiting more than six months for delivery?

    When they announced last year that only 2 patients were waiting more than eighteen months for treatment my office was inundated with calls from patients all over the country wanting to know who the other one was!

    There seem to be 2 NHSs. The one we all use and the virtual NHS that exists in the minds of the Government.

    So we need to ask them:

    If the NHS is doing so well, why are more nurses leaving Britain to work abroad than ever before?

    If the NHS is doing so well, why are we asset stripping some of the world’s poorest countries to staff our wards?

    If the NHS is doing so well, why is it harder to get to see your GP?

    If the NHS is doing so well, why are 3,500 elderly patients unable to leave hospital each day?

    If the NHS is doing so well, why are our hospitals so filthy, and why do so many patients pick up infections while they are in hospital?

    It is an appalling fact that 1% of all deaths in this country, the 4th richest in the world, are caused by hospital acquired infections.

    How many of us here today will be victims of what we catch while in hospital?

    How things have changed. Even when I was a hospital doctor, cleanliness was not a bolt on extra for patient care, it was taken for granted. Now, to add insult to injury, of the 20 hospitals with the highest infection rates, 15 got the Government’s top rating for cleanliness.

    The gap between the spin and the reality gets ever bigger, but it’s the public who are suffering while Ministers look the other way.

    DECENTRALISATION

    Over the past year, we have produced three Consultation Papers on our health policies.

    A central theme of all our reforms has been to take the politicians out of the day-to-day running of our public services.

    We know that politicians couldn’t run the airlines, couldn’t run telecoms and can’t run the post office.

    But if politicians couldn’t properly run any of these things, why does anyone think they can run the NHS? A complex and highly varied body employing over a million people and with a budget the size of the Egyptian economy!

    Too many Conservative governments wrongly believed that they could manage the NHS better than Labour.

    But let me tell you – it cannot be managed from Whitehall, from behind the Secretary of State’s desk. The NHS is too big, too diverse and too complex.

    And, of course, it’s all especially true for a Secretary of State who represents a seat in Scotland, where health is a devolved subject. What an insult to voters in England to have a Secretary of State who will have no electorate to answer to when he gets it all wrong. And what an insult for Labour to use their Scottish MPs to force through health legislation in England when they have no say in health matters in their own constituencies. That is the real unfinished business in the devolution settlement.

    No, when it comes to the running of the NHS, we intend to slash the central bureaucracy. We intend to abolish whole departments where possible. Whole quangos. And we will be able to do it because if we don’t have the targets we will not need those who implement the targets. And if we give more power to those on the front line we won’t need Whitehall babysitters to watch their every move.

    But there are some things we can learn from New Labour.

    Perhaps most importantly, we have seen the benefits Labour has derived from the discipline of an independent Bank of England. It is a lesson we must learn in the NHS. For too long, and especially under this Labour Government the allocation of health funding has been shrouded in mystery and used as a tool of political patronage.

    The NHS must not be used as a political football.

    That is why we will establish an independent NHS Board to allocate in a fair and transparent way the funding within the NHS. This step change will give the clearest possible signal that we are deadly serious about taking the politicians out of the day to day running of the NHS and it will be part of a rolling plan to reduce the powers of the Secretary of State and the Department of Health. It follows on to our plans to give hospitals greater financial independence and our frontline professions more freedoms.

    TARGETS

    But there is one other area of freedom they need.

    If there is one aspect of this interfering, controlling, know-it-all Government that has corroded the ethical basis of the NHS, it is their pathological obsession with targets. Let me give you just two examples.

    In the Thames Valley we have had the ridiculous sight of ambulances loaded with sick patients queueing around hospitals. Why? Because if Accident and Emergency Departments don’t admit the patients then it doesn’t count for their four hour waiting target. So not only do sick patients have to wait in ambulances instead of the hospital but the ambulances are not available when other patients may require them in an emergency.

    Can you think of anything more heartless, stupid or wasteful?

    And if you think that is bad, it is nothing to the experience of patients in Bristol. 25 patients have been documented as losing their sight permanently and, what’s worse, unnecessarily. Why? Because the Consultants who they should have seen for their follow up appointments for their glaucoma were instructed to see new patients instead. Because there is a target for new patients, but not for follow up appointments.

    Going blind to save the targets. Is this the ethical basis of Labour’s NHS? Am I the only one who finds this utterly disgusting?

    What’s worse, it is a policy instruction which comes directly from Ministers.

    It is entirely a product of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown’s whole approach to health care. It tells us all we need to know about the real moral basis of new Labour- run for them and not for us.

    CHOICE

    So we need to alter the balance in the NHS. Labour believe that the patients are there to service the system. We believe the system should be there to service the patients.

    People must be given a real say in what happens to them, or their children, or their elderly relatives.

    Labour’s pathetic so-called choice programme is little more than a watered down version of the system they abolished when they came to office in 1997. But it is the choices that they think you should be allowed to have and you are only allowed to get it once you have reached a maximum waiting time. In other words Labour only believe that patients deserve a choice once the NHS has already failed them.

    Let me remind them. We have already paid for this service through our ever mounting taxes. We don’t want a say about what happens to us- we demand a say in what happens to us. The NHS is not a gift from Government. It is a right we have already paid for.

    Gordon Brown loves to say that the NHS is the best insurance policy in the world. But who would buy car insurance or house insurance where your insurer could keep raising the premium whether you wanted it or not, where they wouldn’t tell you what was covered and didn’t have to deliver when you needed it.

    No, it simply won’t do in the world’s 4th richest country at the beginning of the 21st century for British patients to be denied the freedoms that are taken for granted in Germany, and France, and The Netherlands, and Sweden and Switzerland and any number of other European countries. Gordon Brown says “consumers cannot be sovereign in a health market” which is New Labour gobbledygook for saying that British patients would not be able to understand or operate the sort of choices, freedoms and control that is taken for granted by the French, the Germans, the Dutch, the Swedes or the Swiss. What breathtaking arrogance. What offensive patronising drivel – especially from a Chancellor who thinks that never smiling makes you an intellectual!

    PATIENTS PASSPORT

    That is why we will introduce the Patients Passport. It will work quite simply. There will be a standard price set for each treatment or investigation inside the NHS. Patients will be able to be treated wherever they choose and the bill will be paid by the NHS.

    It means that if you see your GP and they decide you need further treatment you will be able to decide where and when you would rather be treated and by whom. Still free of charge. But for the first time you will have access to a genuinely national health service rather than being sent to the hospital that is more convenient for those running the system.

    Why do we tolerate the elderly widow waiting in pain for her hip replacement when she could be treated more quickly elsewhere?

    Why should women be told that they cannot give birth at a midwife led unit because it is outside their district?

    How can we stand by while a war veteran goes blind when the cataract surgery that would transform his quality of life is denied because his local NHS won’t pay for his treatment anywhere else?

    Under the next Conservative Government each of these patients will get a patient’s passport that will empower them to take control over the treatment they get. After all, they have already paid for it through their taxes. What could be fairer than that?

    But never underestimate how much Labour fear and hate choice. It is at the core of their being that central planning is a good thing. That we need to be told what to do. That the man in Whitehall knows best. If Labour don’t have the NHS to run they don’t know what they’re for. Redundant. Pointless. Obsolete. They have no concept that patients might want to exercise choice to improve the care of themselves or their families. They have never understood that not everyone wants to wait at the mercy of the state – and they never will.

    We, on the other hand, will take patient choice and freedom much further. Each year more and more people use their savings to buy an operation or an investigation. Last year 300,000 patients did this- 3 times the number when Labour came to power. Often they are not wealthy but forced to use their hard earned savings to spare themselves or their loved ones a wait in pain or fear. Yet despite the fact that they have already paid for their healthcare often through a lifetime of contributions, the state will give them no help whatsoever. I believe that those who have already paid for their NHS care but who reduce the queues for others by going to the voluntary or not for profit or private sectors should be given a helping hand. That is why we will give patients 60% of the standard NHS price to take with them.

    What would that mean for a patient waiting for, say, a hip replacement? The standard price might be set at around £5,000. Our Patients Passport would mean that this money would automatically fund the patient’s care anywhere inside the NHS – entirely free to them at the point of use. If they chose to go outside the NHS they could take £3,000 with them to give them a helping hand. They would leave £2,000 behind to help the NHS and the queue would have got shorter. Everyone would benefit.

    Everyone should get a helping hand – choice should not only be available for the rich.

    In the 1980s Margaret Thatcher, our greatest peace-time Prime Minister set out to extend home ownership to those who had previously been unable to afford it. We didn’t force people to buy their homes. Nor did we give them away for nothing. But through our sale of council homes we brought a new choice within the reach of millions of people. Labour fought us every step of the way. But what we achieved in home ownership we are now challenged to do in health care.

    Our principle is clear. We believe that when you pay taxes you do so to cross subsidise your fellow citizens, but you have a right to expect the state, like any other insurer to deliver when you need it.

    And the difference, the essential political, philosophical, ideological difference between ourselves and Labour is this. Labour believe that when you pay your taxes it is their money. We believe that when you pay your taxes it is still your money.

    What we propose is nothing less than the fundamental recasting of the relationship between the state and the citizen – and no wonder the self-serving, centralising control freaks of New Labour are scared.

    No wonder there is no lie they won’t tell to distort our plans. Because they know that when the British people are given a freedom they will never give it back.

    CHRONIC CARE

    People say to me – it must be wonderful to be a doctor in your political position. I want to let you in on a little secret. It can be the most frustrating experience to sit in the House of Commons and listen to debates which have little resemblance to the real NHS that I worked in. Sometimes, to listen to Ministers, you would think that the only things the NHS did were hips, knees and cataracts.

    The PM says “it’s all about hospitals”. Well, actually, it’s not. Most of our health care is in primary care from our GPs, practice nurses, midwives and others.

    And what about those patients with chronic illness? Not the ones who can be easily counted on a waiting list, but those with conditions that cause constant misery. What about the stroke patients, the MS patients, the Crohn’s disease patients? What about those with rheumatoid disease or depression or in need of terminal care. They must be part of the picture too.

    That is why we intend to extend our Patient’s Passport to chronic illness as well. To help stroke patients determine where they are looked after and how support services are provided to them. To help those in need of palliative care to decide if they want to be in a hospital setting or at home or in a hospice. We must never assume that we always know best for the patient and we must never fail to recognise the wonderful contribution the voluntary sector makes to the care of patients and their families. We at this conference thank them and salute them.

    PUBLIC HEALTH

    Over the summer I outlined a new set of proposals on public health to deal with the horrendous rise in diabetes, sexually transmitted infections and TB afflicting our country. We need to act now to prevent not only enormous suffering but enormous financial liabilities arising for the NHS and our taxpayers.

    Today’s young people with chlamydia or gonorrhoea will be joining tomorrow’s infertility patients demanding expensive NHS care.

    Today’s overweight, underactive children will be tomorrow’s diabetics with eye problems, kidney problems or vascular problems. It’s a case of too many gameboys and not enough games.

    But politicians nowadays are too scared to criticise peoples’ lifestyles.

    That is why we are going to introduce a Public Health Commissioner who will be able to force governments to take action when it is needed instead of hiding behind some pathetic and cowardly concept of political correctness.

    One of my colleagues said to me: “Are you mad? Do you know what they would do to us in office”. Yes, I do. They might force us to do the things that are right for our people rather than what is comfortable for the politicians. And isn’t it about time.

    But the most controversial aspect of our proposals dealt with compulsory health screening for those coming to stay in Britain and health entitlement cards to prevent those so called health tourists who have contributed nothing from using the NHS free of charge.

    Let me put it bluntly. We are now seeing the resurgence of TB, especially in London. There are higher TB rates in Brent than Azerbaijan. Higher rates in Newham than Uzbekistan. It cannot be allowed to continue.

    That is why we intend to base our new public health law on the model adopted in Australia. Those seeking to come to reside in the country must satisfy three tests.

    First that they do not have an infectious disease that might put the public health at risk.

    Second that they are not coming to target relatively scarce resources such as renal dialysis or cancer care.

    And third that they will not be an undue burden on the public purse by requiring long term care.

    We are perfectly willing to give care to those who need it and are genuinely entitled to come to this country. That is our moral duty. But we also have a duty to ensure that our own citizens who have paid for these services get the priority they deserve.

    The NHS mustn’t be allowed to become the international health honeypot and a future Conservative government will ensure that it is not.

    There are those who try to claim these ideas are extremist. Let me give them this warning. If we, in the political mainstream are not willing to deal with these issues in a reasonable and responsible way then there will be those on the darker edges of our politics who will exploit them in a totally irresponsible and dangerous way.

    FAIRNESS

    Today we find ourselves confronted by a Government that has tried to hijack our language of fairness. So let’s ask Tony Blair what’s fair.

    What’s fair about patients with brain cancer, prostate cancer or ovarian cancer having to wait longer for treatment now than they did back in 1999?

    What’s fair about a system where those with mental illness are the last to get help and first to be forgotten?

    What’s fair about a system that leaves people blind to satisfy government targets?

    And what’s fair about a system that forces elderly people to sell their homes for care while those who have never paid a penny tax can come from overseas and use the NHS for free?

    No it’s not fair because fairness like truth is a casualty of New Labour’s mindset- that New Labour always come first and the British people come second.

    We now have a Government which has taxed and failed and taxed again and failed again.

    It is the most dishonest and untrustworthy Government we have ever seen.

    It is led by the most self-serving, self-righteous and un-British Prime Minister we have ever had. He doesn’t trust our people, despises our history and would sell out our national interests in a minute. We are constantly given distorted truths and fiddled figures especially in health care.

    But they are not just figures- they represent real people. They could be our families, our friends or ourselves.

    How do we counteract this corrosion of truth?

    We do it by treating our people with respect and telling them the truth even if it is not what they want to hear.

    We do it by remembering that politics is about leading the debate not following it.

    And we do it by remembering what made us such a formidable force. By being a truly meritocratic party which sees Britain as a single nation.

    We should have no talk about the grey vote or the gay vote or the black vote or any other vote that tries to define our fellow citizens. Our party’s and our country’s strength lies in offering opportunity to all those who are willing to contribute to their country. We offer not patronising slogans but opportunity to all those who want it.

    We judge people on the talents and endeavours they will give to Britain not what they look like or who their parents were.

    We have an urgent task. To prepare to be the Government our country needs.

    To govern not for north or south, for rich or poor nor any other divide. But for all our people. And when the call comes let us take our place with pride.

  • Oliver Letwin – 2003 Speech to Conservative Party Conference

    Oliver Letwin – 2003 Speech to Conservative Party Conference

    The speech made by Oliver Letwin, the then Shadow Home Secretary, at the Conservative Party conference held in Blackpool on 7 October 2003.

    Our debate today has been about something that has a real effect on our lives, and on the lives of our fellow citizens up and down this land.

    It has been about millions of people who haven’t had a fair deal.

    It has been about the grandmother who was killed in her shop last week, when she was trying to save her daughter from being shot by armed robbers. That family didn’t get a fair deal.

    It has been about the seven year old girl shot dead a week before, the innocent victim of a vicious drugs war. She didn’t get a fair deal.

    It has been about the two young girls who were tragically murdered earlier this year in streets in Aston that are run by gangs, not the police. They didn’t get a fair deal.

    It has been about the shopkeeper I visited in North London, whose shop has regularly been pillaged by a gang of youths, but who can’t remember when he last saw a policeman on his street. He doesn’t get a fair deal.

    It has been about the estate I saw in Peterborough, where a group of young men leave cars burnt-out after joy-riding, buy and sell drugs with impunity, and laugh in the faces of people who complain. The decent, hard working people who are trying to live in peace on that estate haven’t had a fair deal.

    Today’s debate has been about the people held back and about the people left behind: the victims of crime left behind by a society that can no longer give its people freedom from fear; a society each of whose police officers contends with ten times as many crimes as fifty years ago; a society in which people have lost faith in the ability of the police to deal with crime; a society in which too often it is the law abiding citizen not the criminal who feels the full weight of regulation and authority.

    We have a story in Dorset that may or may not be true, but certainly tells an important truth about our society:

    A farmer sees someone entering his barn at night.

    He calls 999.

    The police say “sorry, no one available.”

    Inspiration comes to the farmer.

    He calls back: “I forgot to say, I’m about to shoot the intruder.”

    Minutes later, amidst the helicopters, police cars and searchlights, the Inspector says to the farmer, who is standing idly by, “I thought you said you were going to shoot the intruder.”

    The farmer replies, “I thought you said you had no one available.”

    Now if we believe in a fair deal for everyone, we have to mean everyone. And that includes…the Government.

    So let us be fair to the Government. Yes, it is true that they have failed. But it’s not because they don’t care. And it’s not because they haven’t tried. It’s because they are the only people in Britain who really believe in bureaucracy, who really think they can work it all out from Whitehall.

    I am going to tell you this afternoon one of the most extraordinary facts about modern Britain.

    For every one extra police officer recruited under Labour, the Home Office has hired more than one extra administrator in Whitehall.

    That’s 9,000 extra police officers… 10,000 extra bureaucrats. So far as I can ascertain it’s a world record. Congratulations, Mr Blunkett.

    The constables are in despair. They joined the police to do a job. They didn’t join to fill in forms for the Home Office. They didn’t join to tell crime victims ‘there’s nothing we can do’.

    That isn’t a fair deal for anyone – not for the police, and not for the people they’re meant to be protecting.

    ***

    To provide a fair deal, to rescue the neighbourhoods left behind, to pull young people off the conveyor belt to crime, to create a neighbourly society in Britain, we have to begin by reclaiming the streets.

    We need a quantum leap in treatment and rehabilitation of young hard drug addicts. We need a quantum shift to longer more constructive and rehabilitative sentences for persistent young offenders. We need more help to rescue troubled young children and to give excluded pupils the training and discipline they need to return to the mainstream.

    But all of these measures to lift young people off the conveyer belt to crime, all of these efforts to be tough on the causes of crime, won’t work unless we also get tough on crime and disorder by policing our neighbourhoods properly.

    Just as they have in Brixton town centre, where back in June, I saw Inspector Sean Wilson and his team reclaiming the streets for local people.

    Burglary is down, robbery is down, graffiti wiped away, abandoned cars towed away. Central Brixton is a safer, happier place than it was a couple of years ago.

    What made the difference?

    I’ll tell you: real and sustained neighbourhood policing, bobbies on the beat.

    Call it what you like, but it works. It worked in New York. And it can work over here.

    I’ve also seen policing that doesn’t work. Or rather I’ve not seen it, because there were no police to be seen. That was the case when I visited other parts of Brixton and when I visited the Clarence Way Estate in Camden.

    They had their police patrols too, of course. Present on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and every other Saturday. Unfortunately I was there after they had gone home. And so were the drug dealers I saw…and the junkies and the pimps and the vandals.

    The police are so overstretched that they have become part-time. The criminals are full-time. In fact they do over-time, blighting the lives of local people every day of the week, every hour of the day.

    I spoke earlier about the tragic killing of the grandmother last week. Her husband said:

    “The law has vanished…the police are completely demoralised. Thirty years ago, there were always two officers walking up and down the street and the crime rate was nil. Now there are hardly any. People know they can walk into a shop with a gun and no one will stop them”

    A National Newspaper noted that he was speaking for millions of people up and down the land. The Newspaper asked: “is anybody listening?”

    There is at least one person listening. I am.

    Ladies and gentlemen, we must put the police back on our streets.

    That is why the Conservative Party is committed to having 40,000 more police officers than there were at the beginning of this year.

    We’ll fund a great part of this by sorting out the shambles of Labour’s asylum and immigration system which costs the country £1,800 million a year – over a thousand million pounds more than it cost in 1997. We will replace the present asylum system – in its entirety – with a system of quotas for genuine refugees and the offshore processing of all claims, to deter all but genuine claims for protection from persecution.

    Of course, we won’t be able to do this if the new EU Constitution comes in, but that is just one more reason why we have to have a referendum, one way or another, and throw that Constitution out.

    Once we’ve thrown out the Constitution, and totally replaced the current asylum system, the savings made will pay for the recruitment of 5,000 extra police a year in each of the years of the next parliament.

    As I said a moment ago, over the years from 1997 to 2003, the Labour Government has provided an average of 1,500 extra policemen a year. We will provide 5,000 extra policemen each year until we reach our 40,000.

    But we have to do more than just provide the extra police officers. We have to make sure that instead of being stuck behind desks, they are put onto the streets and into the neighbourhoods. If they are properly deployed, our 40,000 new police officers can triple the number of officers actually on the beat.

    This is our pledge to the nation, our challenge in Government.

    Your police.

    On your streets.

    Reclaiming your streets for the honest citizen.

    And by your police, I mean just that. Your police force under your control.
    Mr Blunkett believes that local policing needs central control. From West Dorset to West Yorkshire, he wants to run the lot from Westminster. I want him to be the last Home Secretary who does that.

    I want to be the first Home Secretary who doesn’t run any part of local policing in Britain. The age of interference at an end. The web of bureaucracy swept away.

    No more so called National Policing Plans. No more centrally imposed targets. No more Whitehall-based units and initiatives and performance-monitoring.

    Central government off the back of local police officers.

    ***
    The worst thing about the so-called low-level crime and disorder that wreck so many neighbourhoods, is that law-abiding people feel powerless to do anything about it.

    Everyone in this hall, and all our fellow-citizens know what I am talking about: the small town, powerless to stop the police station closing at night; the old lady at the police community group, powerless to get a bobby to patrol her staircase where the addicts leave the needles; the owner of the local curry house, powerless to stop yobs jumping on his roof.

    Why should honest citizens be powerless in these ways? It just isn’t fair.

    They don’t need to be. And if I am the next Home Secretary, they won’t be.

    We are going to give people a real say on the policing of their neighbourhoods.

    Today, I’m publishing – and publishing for public consultation on the web – radical proposals to hand power over neighbourhood policing back to local communities. It works in other countries. Why can’t we have it working here?

    We will remove, by law, the Home Secretary’s power over local policing.

    We will give every Chief Constable a cast-iron legal guarantee of operational independence.

    And we will put each local police force under the direct, democratic control of local people.

    That means wherever you live, your Chief Constable will answer to someone you elected.

    If you don’t like the way your neighbourhood is policed, with a Conservative Government, you will be able to vote for change.

    Giving people a fair deal means trusting people. Trusting people means giving people power over their own lives, their own communities. Giving people power means giving you the power to change. It means giving the police the resources they need and giving people the power to ensure that those resources are used to reclaim our streets for the honest citizen.

    ***

    Edmund Burke once said:

    “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”

    What could be more apposite, more relevant to our predicament as a nation, today?

    If there is one thing in the man made world I believe in, that thing is Britain’s liberal democracy.

    But we cannot and must not take the continuity of that precious liberty for granted.

    I remind you:

    “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”

    If we do nothing; if we fail to address the fears and concerns of our fellow citizens in hard-pressed neighbourhoods who are despondent about the social and physical decay that surrounds them, who are appalled by the drugs and the crime on their estates, and who are terrified of the gangs that roam their streets; if we leave these people behind; if we hold back the police through lack of resources and a suffocating blanket of central bureaucracy; if we do not trust the people enough to give them the power to bring about change; if we leave them with a justified sense of unfairness, then we foster by omission an evil extremism that imperils our peace, our prosperity and our liberty.

    Today, as we go out from this hall and work together towards the re-election of a Conservative Government, we take to the inhabitants of the hard pressed estates, we take to the victims of crime who have been left behind, we take to the hard-working police officers who have been held back by stifling bureaucracy, we take to the people of this country a single, simple message: We are on your side.

  • Damian Green – 2003 Speech to Conservative Party Conference

    Damian Green – 2003 Speech to Conservative Party Conference

    The speech made by Damian Green, the then Shadow Secretary of State for Education, at the Conservative Party conference held in Blackpool on 6 October 2003.

    In 1996 Tony Blair stood on this spot and famously said that his priority was education, education, education.

    Did he mean it ? Or had the autocue stuck? Whether it was truth or spin, it lacked the fundamental ingredient of substance. And ever since, his Government has betrayed teachers, parents, pupils and students.

    In those days, New Labour asked us to trust them. Trust them with the health service. Trust them to make our streets safer. Trust them to educate and train the next generation of doctors, teachers, builders and plumbers.

    Trust them? I would rather trust John Prescott to mark GCSE English.

    Labour failures

    Let’s look at the facts. One in three children leave primary school unable to read, write and count properly. One in three!

    This year, more than 30,000 children left secondary school without a single GCSE. 30,000!

    And up and down the country teachers have been made redundant and schools are plunging into deficit because this Government gives money with one hand, takes it away with the other, and then hopes that nobody notices.

    Well let me tell Gordon Brown and Charles Clarke. Parents, governors and teachers have noticed the way you have betrayed our schools. We don’t forgive you, and nor will they.

    What have six years of New Labour brought to our schools?

    · The confidence in our exam system destroyed
    · Teenagers taking so many exams that they have to give up sport, music and drama
    · Teachers spending hours filling in forms instead of teaching
    · And above all, dozens of useless targets set by Ministers

    Charles Clarke used the targets to say that incompetent heads should be, in his words, ‘taken out’. But when he missed the key Literacy and Numeracy targets in primary schools, he just changed the date by when he needed to hit them.

    So under Labour, when teachers miss their target the teacher gets sacked. But when ministers miss their target the target gets sacked.

    It’s typical. From Education, to Transport, Defence and Health, right up to No 10 itself, this is a Government full of Ministers who refuse to take responsibility, and who never ever own up.

    Let’s look at some of their initiatives. Labour doesn’t want violent pupils excluded from school. In the real world that means that the small disruptive minority can cause havoc in our classrooms. It is time to give classroom control back to the teachers where it belongs.

    Too many children have been turned off school altogether. Whose fault is this? Not the teachers.

    Two years ago, when Iain gave me this job, I stood here and said I would not blame teachers for things going wrong. And two years on I am more convinced than ever that most teachers are hard-working conscientious professionals who want the best for their children—and this Party recognises that.

    Underneath all their talk of celebrating good teachers, the Government has simply failed to trust them. That’s why teachers, and heads, and governors, and parents no longer trust this Prime Minister and his Government.

    I talk to teachers all the time. They tell me why they joined the profession. How they believed that they could inspire the children they taught. And I have seen lessons that really inspire me.

    I sat in on a lesson about Thomas Aquinas where 14-year-olds in a London comprehensive discussed his theory of the proof of God’s existence from the argument of First Causes.

    I know everyone in this hall will be familiar with the theological niceties of all this.

    But listening to a teacher guide a discussion on Thomas Aquinas in a class roughly one third Christian, one third Muslim, and one third with no religion at all was a real lesson in how to bring the best out of all our children.

    So of course good things are happening in many of our schools. But teachers also tell me other things.

    They tell me about their fear that they may be beaten up. Every seven minutes of every school day there is an attack on a teacher.

    Their sadness that at least one member of their class is unlikely to turn up, out truanting with fifty thousand others every day.

    And their disappointment that this Government, and its constant interference, is telling them how to teach their class and how to run their schools.

    So Government meddling lies at the root of these serious problems.

    We will change all that.

    And we are the only party that will deal with the real problems of discipline and standards.

    The Liberal Democrats held an education debate at their conference. Faced with the huge challenges in our schools and universities, what was the big Lib Dem idea?

    Compulsory sex education for 7-year-olds.

    And this from a party that wants to be taken seriously.

    The Conservative Approach to Schools

    Our approach will deal with the real problems. Let me tell you how we will tackle them.

    I have a unique ambition for a politician. I am the first aspiring Education Secretary to want less power not more.

    That’s because our Conservative approach, which we will all be laying before you this week, is about taking power away from the Ministries and giving it back to the British people.

    Trust the people. It was always the approach that served us best and this Conference will see us set out new policies that come from our fundamental beliefs – that local is better than central, and that power should be dispersed, not concentrated.

    Our Party is at its best when it spreads wealth and opportunity. Twenty years ago we gave millions of people their first chance to buy their council house and gain control over their lives.

    We, the Conservative Party, will now give millions of parents their first chance to choose a school they really want for their children, and gain control over how their children learn.

    Council house sales defined the new freedoms that transformed this country in the 1980s. Today I am launching our Better Schools Passport.

    These will define new opportunities that will transform our education system.

    Quite simply, these passports will give the money that the state spends on their child’s education to the parents, and let the parents decide in which school it should be spent.

    It will be a passport to a better school for all children.

    It will offer a radical extension of school choice. It will allow all children to aspire to an excellent education.

    We will start in the inner cities, where the problems are worst.

    Today I am announcing that the Passports will be piloted in big cities including Inner London, Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool.

    And then we will introduce them to the rest of the country bringing real choice to all parents in all schools in all areas.

    Our scheme will give parents access to new schools, funded by the state but run independently, to meet the needs of those parents who can’t find the right school for their child.

    The Better Schools Passport will revolutionise our school system.

    We will allow parents and other groups to create new types of school within the maintained sector.

    What sort of new schools? All sorts.

    Some parents want small schools. Some parents want traditional schools.

    Some parents want schools like the Tabernacle School in North London which Iain and I visited earlier this year. A school started five years ago by a black-majority church to help pupils, most of whom had been excluded from their previous school. These children now find that the small classes and firm but fair discipline enable them to achieve their full potential.

    This school symbolises a vision of hope that our inner cities desperately need.

    It is a vision of hope that all parents want.

    And it is a vision of hope that only the Conservative Party, with our fundamental belief in freedom and choice, will provide.

    We believe that parents know what is best for their children. Not Tony Blair or Charles Clarke or me.

    Some parents will want a school that specialises in vocational education. And how much does this country need a vast expansion of technical schools, so that we can give a decent start in life to children with practical rather than academic abilities.

    And I will tell you one other type of school I am very confident parents will want. The sort of school where academic children from any background, rich or poor, are given a chance to stretch themselves.

    We already have 164 of these schools. They are called grammar schools and Labour and the Liberal Democrats still want to destroy them. We will support our existing grammar schools.

    And we will go further. Under this scheme we will see new grammar schools opening for the first time in a generation. They will provide a ladder out of deprivation for thousands of children, just like they used to.

    Labour politicians ask “Why do so few children from poor backgrounds go to university?” Well, I’ll tell them. It’s because they don’t go to schools that let their talents and intelligence and energy flow. Give them the right schools, with discipline and order and a love of learning, and they will have a chance of real academic achievement.

    Only a Conservative Government can give them that chance. We will give them a Fair Deal.

    Higher Education

    And we will transform the prospects of those who aspire to a university education. An aspiration that Labour’s lies and deceit on tuition fees are taking away.

    In 1997, Labour promised there would be no tuition fees. In 1998 Labour introduced tuition fees.

    In 2001, Labour promised there would be no top-up fees. If Labour win the next election then by 2006 there will be top up fees.

    Labour’s tuition fees are a tax on learning which will leave students with huge debts and universities tied up in red tape.

    Let me tell you now, the first thing a Conservative Government will do is introduce a Bill to scrap tuition fees. Under a Conservative Government entry to university will be based on the ability to learn, not the ability to pay.

    So take this simple message with you out of this hall and onto every doorstep in the country – under a Conservative Government families with children at university will face thousands of pounds less debt.

    Labour also wants to discriminate against pupils from good schools—saying that they are at an unfair advantage when they apply to university. What kind of bitter, twisted world do Labour politicians live in, when they try to penalise children for getting into a good school?

    A university place should be awarded on academic merit and potential, not as a result of social engineering and political meddling.

    Under a Conservative Government tuition will be free, and a degree will always be a meaningful and useful qualification.

    Conclusion

    Education used to be regarded by the pundits as a Labour issue. Well not any more.

    We now have schools where teachers are sworn at and assaulted. We have classrooms where teachers are afraid to innovate because Big Brother has told them exactly how to do their job. And we have universities where quantity has replaced quality as the main driving force.

    Six years of New Labour, and what have they done?

    They have messed up the exam system, downgraded key subjects, second-guessed teachers, hunted for scapegoats, insulted LEAS, demoralised professionals, overloaded governors, undermined authority, damaged confidence, ignored heads, wasted money, destroyed standards, created jargon, imposed dogma, interfered, fiddled, meddled, drivelled, bleated, huffed, puffed, and,
    as Alistair Campbell would put it, totally fluffed it up.

    At the next election we will offer a real alternative on education.

    Freedom for schools
    Trust for teachers
    Choice and diversity for parents
    And a fair deal for pupils and students

    That’s the way to give all children the start they deserve. Only a Conservative Government can deliver it – so let’s get out there and make sure we have one.

  • Steve Norris – 2003 Speech to Conservative Party Conference

    Steve Norris – 2003 Speech to Conservative Party Conference

    The speech made by Steve Norris, the then Conservative candidate for London Mayor, at the Conservative Party conference held in Blackpool on 7 October 2003.

    There is absolutely no doubt that unless we win in the cities, the Conservatives are never going to win in the country. It is where the vast majority of this country’s population actually live but, more to the point, it is where, every single day, people come up against the kind of problems that no political party can ignore if it is wants to form the Government of Britain.

    I am absolutely dedicated to the idea that politics doesn’t mean anything unless it means you want to improve the quality of life for the people around you, for yourself and your own family, for your own community. In London, I have got another mission as well: you can call it personal if you like. But I desperately believe that London deserves better than Livingstone.

    How do you win in cities? The pretty obvious truth is that you do exactly the same as you would do if you wanted to win anywhere else in the country. You wouldn’t tell people what was right for them. You wouldn’t tell people what they cared about. You would listen. Listen to what they say. I can tell you that if you do listen to people in London – and it’s certainly not something Ken Livingstone has done very much over the last three and a half years – you would find out that they all care about the same kind of things.

    They care about decent health care. They want it to be available when they need it. They want it to be the kind of quality that impresses them rather than appals them. They appreciate what a national health service means but they know it can be better.

    They want decent education for their kids. The vast majority have no alternative to the State and, in too many cases, it is simply not good enough. They just want their local school to be decent and to offer the kind of education their kids can benefit from.

    But above all, and I mean above all, what they want is to feel safe on their own streets and in their own homes. That is all. It is not much. Safe on their own streets and in their own homes. And that is what I aim to do something about in London.

    Every single conference I have been to over the past twenty years, I have listened to speakers quote me statistics about what’s going up and what’s going down. – knowing Oliver he is probably too intelligent to feed you statistics about crime – but I do know this I listen to Ken Livingstone and he tells me that crime in London is down. So that’s alright then. Livingstone has got some statistic that shows that crime in London is down. He has a problem. Which is that not only do I not believe him but that Londoners don’t believe him either. Because they don’t feel as safe now as they did three years ago when Ken Livingstone was elected.

    They feel less safe in London and that is not because of the murder rate or number of bank robberies. Last Friday night, I was in a part of London called Hornchurch in one of those suburban town centres like a hundred others. It was about seven o’clock. Night was falling. We were walking back from the tube station down the high street. Still a number of people on the street coming home from work or doing some last minute shopping. Cars driving past. And we saw a group of kids about a hundred yards away, coming out of the chip shop, next to the bus stop. Quite a crowd of them. As we were about to get into our car, I glanced over, and saw this kid, not a day over 13 I am sure of that, lift her foot – yes her foot – and just start kicking the hell out of the telephone box. And then she picked up the receiver and began smashing it onto the side. Maybe to get the money out. Maybe just to break it? I don’t know.

    But she did it without even thinking about the consequences because she couldn’t care less. She knew that no-one was going to be there and no-one was going to stop her. Because she knew that if you clipped her round the ear you’d be in court and if that she clipped you, you’d probably be in a local hospital. That is what makes people feel less safe in our capital. Low level crime. Graffiti. Just that sort of petty vandalism, public drunkenness, yob culture.

    That’s why people actually feel more threatened in their own communities, more threatened in their homes than they did before this massive additional spending which Livingstone has laid on the shoulders of council taxpayers in the capital. And for which the average Londoner feels no benefit whatsoever.

    Do you know that Ken Livingstone went to New York last year and he came back and he said, “I feel safer in New York than I do in London”. Well Mr Mayor what the hell are you doing about it? Because as far as I am concerned you could never make that statement as Mayor of London without saying, here and now, that’s not good enough. That is something that Londoners demand and deserve that the Mayor does something about.

    Incidentally, let’s be clear about one thing: the Mayor of London has the power and the responsibility to make the difference. The Mayor of London is the one person who can actually make the difference. The Mayor of London controls the £2.7billion budget of the Metropolitan Police. So never ever listen to someone like Livingstone who makes excuses by always saying, “I don’t have the power. I wish I could help but I don’t have the power.” He will always say that, because that’s his only excuse for his failure to deliver.

    Let’s be clear. The Mayor of London has got the power. He who pays the piper calls the tune. He has the budget, the responsibility and the power. All that is needed is the political will and leadership from the top to make it happen.

    And here’s the good news. It can be done.

    Twelve years ago, in New York, you had a city that people said was as out of control. You looked at New York and it was the kind of place you got into and out of as quick as you could. Because it was seen as ungovernable. Crime was everywhere. It was a city where every citizen went in fear. They had Mayors of course: Mayors who didn’t make much of a difference; Mayors who made matters worse. Along came a guy called Rudolph Giuliani – a great Mayor – a name, sadly, I suppose, since 9/11 a name known around the world. But what most people know is that what Rudolph Giuliani is actually remembered for by Americans, what his achievement was in the city of New York was that he made it a place that was safe once again.

    If it can be done in New York, it can be done in London.

    A Mayor can change the perception of a city where people fear living in their own community and make it a city where people feel more safe.

    For me this is personal. I am just a Londoner living in a particular part of a great city of seven and a half million people. But over the last three years, I have had my house burgled – I had the door battered down at four thirty in the morning. I have had my car stolen and I have been mugged.

    But all of that is just an every day Londoner’s experience. Every night, what’s the last thing that you do? You put the chain up. You bolt the chubb lock. And frankly if you live somewhere like I do, you put the alarm so that if anyone gets in on the alarm goes off. And it just says that this is not the city that I want to live in.

    I want to do something about that.

    I will tell you something else too. It’s not just people like me. Not just white, middle class men. Because whether you are black or white, gay or straight, rich or poor, young or old, whether you live in inner or outer London. You feel the same desire to feel safe in your home and in your street. It’s a great mission. It is something that I feel absolutely determined to do in London. I know it can be done.

    Some people say but how can it be done? Let me give you just one simple example. Using the Metropolitan Police’s own figures, if you divide up the total number of officers deployed in the boroughs, there should on an average day be 600 – yes 600 police officers – in every single borough in London. And yet in any part of London at any time of day or night you’d be lucky to find more than a dozen out on the streets. That is totally unacceptable and is something I am not prepared to tolerate.

    I have said to London time and again: if I don’t succeed, don’t re-elect me. But I know that this time, that while Livingstone promises us fewer pigeons in Trafalgar Square and ignores the fact that Londoners feel less safe now than they did when he was elected, he is selling them short.

    London deserves better than Ken Livingstone.

    Next year, on the 10th June, I believe we can elect a Conservative Mayor who is going to make a difference and a Conservative-dominated Greater London Assembly that is going to support the Mayor. We are going to show people in this country and in our party that we can win in cities. And when you can win in cities, you can, as we will, win in the country.

  • Theresa May – 2003 Speech at Conservative Party Conference

    Theresa May – 2003 Speech at Conservative Party Conference

    The speech made by Theresa May, the then Chair of the Conservative Party, at the party’s conference held in Blackpool on 6 October 2003.

    This is the most important conference we have held in a decade. As we meet here in Blackpool, the eyes of the country are upon us. People are starting to look for a new government and they want to know if we can do the job.

    The battleground for the next election is already set.

    The people of Britain are fed up with failing public services.

    They’re fed up with paying more and more in tax.

    They’re fed up with a Prime Minister who covers up his government’s failures with spin and deceit.

    And one thing has become abundantly clear.

    Labour isn’t working again.

    Our task this week is not to tell the British people how Labour have failed. They know that already!

    Our task is to tell them how a Conservative government will succeed.

    Because for the people of Britain, we are the only alternative government of this country.

    We are the only party that can bring an end to Labour’s years of failure.

    But people need to know if we are ready.

    And this week we must give them a resounding answer -Yes we are!

    Everything we say and do must show that we are united in purpose.
    That we understand people’s lives and share their values and concerns.

    And that we have the policies, and the experience, to govern Britain better in the interests of all our people.

    And then there will be one more thing left to do.

    If we want to govern this country, we will have to win.

    And if we are going to win, then from every member of the party to every Member of Parliament, we all must have the will, the drive and the determination to win.

    No politician has the right to be elected. No political party has the right to hold power.
    There is no such thing as a natural party of government.

    So if we are to win, we will have to earn it.

    We can never forget that we are the servants of the people – and they are increasingly critical of the way that politicians behave.

    People want an end to the sniping, the point scoring, the ranting and raving that often passes for political debate in Britain today.

    They want a different kind of government.

    A government that admits when it’s got it wrong.

    A government that owns up to the fact that it doesn’t have all the answers.

    A government that knows that people’s lives are too important for politics to be conducted like a playground game.

    As Conservatives, we should take the lead.

    We should leave the yah-boo stuff to others and instead behave in a way that gives credibility to our promises.

    Politics has changed.

    The world has changed.

    In today’s Britain, we all know that the old binding ties of family or class…

    …the old habits of deference and unquestioning loyalty
    …the old tribal allegiances of party politics
    …all these have gone.

    So today’s political parties win not because they only hang on to their traditional supporters, but because they understand how the people of Britain live today, and because they offer them solutions that can work in Britain tomorrow.

    We have to show we understand the problems parents face just to get their children to a decent school.

    We have to show we recognise what it’s like to watch an elderly parent suffering in pain, because a government target says they’re not a priority for treatment.

    We have to show we care…

    …about people’s pensions being reduced year by year
    …and about the student who wants to go to university, but can’t afford to pay Labour’s tuition fees.

    Because these are the things people care about.

    They’re tired of politicians who parade across the world stage making high-minded promises when all they want is someone to make their lives a bit easier.

    Our leader, Iain Duncan Smith, has lead the way in listening to people in some of the most difficult parts of our country.

    He has shown that this Party’s message is for everyone in this country.

    People want a government that will know when to act and when to stand back.
    Not like Labour – who think government alone has the answers to all our problems.
    And that’s why Labour have got it wrong.
    And they will never get it right.

    So what’s the alternative?
    The Liberal Democrats?!
    I don’t think so.
    Now you might say that some of their policies are a bit loony.
    But the last time we said that we got into trouble.

    We received a letter from a member of the Monster Raving Loony Party’s Shadow Cabinet.
    He wrote to object to our description of the LibDem’s policies as loony.
    We wrote back and we told him that it was official Liberal Democrat policy…

    …to give votes to convicted rapists but criminalise parents for smacking their children;
    …to allow anyone to use any hard drug at home but to ban smoking in public;
    …to make it illegal for teenagers to buy pets but compulsory for seven-year-olds to get sex education;
    and even to outlaw goldfish from being given as prizes at funfairs.

    He replied – let me read you what he said:

    ‘I am afraid that kind of nonsense would find no place in the Official Monster Raving Loony Party manifesto’.

    ‘We’re loonies, not nutters’.

    But the Liberal Democrats don’t win votes because they have good policies.
    They don’t!

    What they’re good at is taking the credit when something gets done, particularly when somebody else has done it.

    And what they’re best at…

    …is being all things
    …to all people
    …all of the time.

    So it’s not good enough for us to sit back in Westminster and simply try to shout them down.

    We have to take them on …

    …on the ground…
    …and show them up…
    …for who they really are…
    …and what they – really – stand for.

    Because the truth is they stand for nothing. They have no answers for Britain.

    But we do.

    We know what we stand for and we know it works.

    Freedom.

    Choice.

    Enterprise.

    Trusting people

    Respect for those who help themselves.

    Support for those who can’t.

    Smaller government. Bigger citizens.
    A belief in the innate good sense of our people and in the enduring values of our nation.

    That is what I stand for.
    It’s what we stand for.
    It’s what we’ve always stood for.

    But today we have to apply those beliefs to new problems.
    And we must redefine them to match the world we live in.

    As Conservatives we actively pursue freedom.

    But that can’t mean leaving people to fend for themselves. Because there will always be those who for whatever reason need a helping hand.

    What it does mean is finding new ways to set people free from the interference of government. Because people always make better decisions for themselves than politicians or bureaucrats ever can.

    That’s why choice should no longer be a luxury for the rich but a reality for all of us.
    And that’s why Conservatism is as vital today as it’s always been.

    Our beliefs teach us to accept how people live and to make no judgements beyond those that are essential to ensure the greatest degree of freedom for all.

    It’s Labour that seeks to herd people into groups, to label them and deal with them collectively.

    It is the Conservative Party that respects people for who they are and welcomes them as individuals on their own merits.

    Rich or poor. Straight or gay. Black or white.
    Whoever you are, wherever you’re from, the Conservative Party is for you.

    Our trust in people will shine through each and every policy we announce this week.

    From David Willetts’ proposals to tackle the pensions crisis and end the indignity of means testing through Liam Fox and Damian Green’s plans for more choice in health and education.

    To Oliver Letwin’s innovative ideas for giving people more say in their local policing and David Davis’s plans to give power back to local councils.

    The reforms we are outlining go with the grain of our times.
    For a world that’s more competitive, for a society grown more demanding, for a people who deserve better.

    We’ll deliver a Britain freer, fairer and stronger.

    Just think…

    …once teachers are free to serve parents not bureaucrats then school hours can be set to help working families.
    …once patients are given greater choice then appointments and treatments can be set to suit them.
    …and once the police are made more responsive to local people’s demands then elderly people will not have to feel that the streets are a no-go zone.

    These are just some examples of how today’s Conservative Party could make people’s lives so much better and deliver a fair deal for everyone.

    It’s why we have begun rebuilding our support among the British people – just look at our success in May in the local council elections in England, in Scotland and in Wales.

    But people have only just begun looking around for an alternative to this government.

    There is still a lot to do.

    But have no doubt.

    Under Iain Duncan Smith’s leadership, there will be no going back.

    There is no future in the past.

    Under Iain’s leadership, the Conservative Party has set out on a new journey.

    We are on the right path.

    We are moving in the right direction.

    We’ve asked people what they want.

    And they want a fair deal for everyone so that people who build our communities, drive our economy, pay their taxes, and run our public services are not held back.

    They want a fair deal for everyone so that people who are disadvantaged, dependent on others, or who need a helping hand are not left behind.

    A fair deal for everyone.

    It’s the theme of our conference.

    It’s the mission of our party.

    It’s what we stand for.

    When you came into the hall today you were given a document.

    It’s not a manifesto.

    It’s not a policy proposal.

    It’s not a roadmap.

    It’s a message of Conservative belief and ambition for our country.

    And after every speech this week, you will receive fair deal cards that spell out how each major policy area fits into that message.

    Take them. Use them. Spread our message.

    Because remember that in an age when less and less attention is paid to what we say and do in Westminster, you are the main channel between the Party and the voters.

    I want to thank you for the work you already do.

    In many parts of the country the fair deal message is being lived out by Conservatives in local government and local communities.

    We’ve made a great start.

    But I want to ask you for more.

    We need to build a 21st Century Party to complement the 21st Century policies we have in place.

    That means…

    …turning a structure that was designed to support the government of yesterday.
    …into a vehicle that can deliver the government of tomorrow.

    Between now and the next election, I will be focusing on nothing else.

    If we are going to build a party to win, we are going to have to challenge and change the things that hold back our ability to win.

    Last year, I challenged the Party to think about the sort of candidates we should be choosing for today’s Britain, to think about finding the right people to represent our party.
    You responded, and as a result the face of our party is changing.

    What better example can we have than Wolverhampton South West? Enoch Powell’s old seat where they’ve selected an Asian woman – Sandy Verma. Well-done Sandy.

    And congratulations to Adam Afriyie who has just been selected as our candidate in Windsor.

    We have made progress.

    But there’s still more to do.

    And we have to make progress in other areas too.

    When we campaign, we must use the most up-to-date techniques. It means using email and the internet, using new media, being willing to embrace new ideas and not just relying on our tried and trusted methods or the way we’ve always done things.

    It means adopting different methods for different groups.

    Look at Conservative Future.

    They’re running a national text message campaign to tell people that only the Conservatives will scrap all Labour’s university tuition fees.

    This is the campaigning of today.

    We must look at how we target our resources too.

    I was keen that in this year’s local elections we targeted our resources carefully and the great success of those elections proved that it works.

    But we can’t leave it there – not if we are serious about getting back into government – If we’re going to win.

    We must take the fight to our opponents, not only in seats that we already hold, but in places that we need to win if we are to be the next government of this country.

    We must support the seats that will make the difference.

    This is our challenge if we want to win the next General Election and not just fight it.

    We must deliver the campaigning and organisation to win.

    It’s the task Iain has charged me with completing.

    And we must all do it because we firmly believe this party – the party I joined as a teenager…

    …the party I have always been proud to call my home has the answers to the problems Britain is facing today.

    My only interest is in winning the next election so that we can make Britain a better place to live.

    That’s why I’m here.

    That’s why we’re all here.

    We can win the next general election. But let’s not allow ourselves to think the hard work is over. Let’s not allow the speeches you hear this week to remain merely words. Let’s ask ourselves what must we do to turn those words into action?

    People care about the things that affect their lives.

    They care about their families and the places they live.

    They don’t care about the things that obsess the Westminster village.

    Bill Clinton may have got a lot of things wrong, but he was not wrong in saying this:

    “People don’t care about the rhetoric of left and right…
    And liberal and conservative…
    And who is up and who is down…
    They are real people… They have real problems… and they are crying desperately for someone who believes the purpose of government is to solve those problems”.

    Ladies and Gentlemen: we must be that government!

    And we can be that government.

    But one question still hangs in the air:

    Labour have done enough to lose the next election.

    Have we done enough to win?

    Have we done enough to earn the right to be in Government once again? Or could Labour win the next election by default? Our country cannot afford another five years of Labour Government and we are the only party that can put them out of business.

    So as the eyes of Britain focus on us this week, let us show them the real Conservative Party.

    A party of hope and aspiration.

    …of freedom and social justice.

    …of fairness and opportunity.

    A united party – for everyone, and of everyone.

    A party of today.

    A 21st Century Party.

    A party that can win…

    and be a 21st Century Government.

  • Tim Yeo – 2003 Speech to Conservative Party Conference

    Tim Yeo – 2003 Speech to Conservative Party Conference

    The speech made by Tim Yeo, the then Shadow Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, at the Conservative Party conference on 8 October 2003.

    Party conferences are when politicians set out their stall at the seaside.

    Two weeks ago we learned that the Lib Dems won’t let you smack your children

    Even if they’re seven years old and miss a sex education class.

    With Labour the trouble is what they do doesn’t get mentioned at Conferences.

    Last week Tony Blair didn’t tell us about Labour’s sixty tax increases.

    The tax increases on health and pensions and insurance and investment.

    Tax increases on petrol and cars and lorries and diesel.

    Tax increases on jobs and self-employment and marriage and mortgages.

    You name it and they’ve increased the tax on it.

    You can avoid tax increases under Labour

    As long as you don’t save, don’t insure, don’t have a pension, don’t have a job, aren’t self-employed, don’t drink, don’t bet, don’t drive, don’t get married don’t buy a home, if you do buy a home, don’t have a mortgage.

    It could be worse, though.

    Yes, really.

    If the Lib Dems had their way tax would be even higher.

    Let me make one thing clear

    I will never agree to a rise in damaging business taxes

    I’ll tell you what else we won’t do.

    I won’t tell people how to run their businesses.

    I won’t second-guess markets.

    I won’t intervene in relations between employers and employees any more than is absolutely necessary.

    But under Patricia Hewitt there are more laws telling employers how to treat their workforce than ever before.

    Patricia Hewitt learned her politics under Neil Kinnock.

    That’s a bit like being taught to ski by Eddie the Eagle.

    If the Cabinet were in Celebrity Big Brother

    She’d be out first.

    Unless of course Gordon Brown had the vote.

    Then she’d be out second.

    Because we all know who Gordon wants to get rid of.

    This week we’ve set out how we’ll make Britain a better place to live in.

    Making our streets safer with 40,000 extra police.

    Helping sick people with our Patients’ Passport.

    Giving parents more say over schools.

    Ending Labour’s war on the motorist.

    Making everyone more secure in retirement.

    Restoring trust in government.

    But we can’t make Britain a better place to live in unless we also make it a better place to do business.

    Delivering a fair deal for everyone depends on wealth creation.

    A fair deal for business and enterprise isn’t just crucial to business people, it’s crucial to everyone.

    We believe in business for its own sake.

    Unlike Gordon Brown, who sees business only as a milchcow from which to extract more and more tax.

    Instead of helping business create wealth for everyone’s benefit.

    He wants business to provide wealth he can spend for Labour’s benefit.

    Do you remember how Tony Blair and Gordon Brown posed as the friends of business?

    Six wasted years later

    After £47 billion of new business taxes

    Hasn’t that turned out to be the biggest spin of all?

    Nothing less than a cynical fraud against Britain’s hard-working business people.

    Gordon Brown talks about his golden rule.

    There’s only one golden rule for business when it comes to Labour.

    Don’t believe a word they say.

    Like many of you I’ve been in business myself.

    I remortgaged my home to start a business.

    I woke up in the night wondering where the next order was coming from.

    I worried about the people whose jobs depended on me.

    I worked in service industry and manufacturing, for companies small and large.

    I learned first-hand the challenges business faces.

    Today investment and jobs are more mobile than ever before.

    Businesses are moving from Blackpool to Bangkok.

    Norwich Union staff now process insurance claims more quickly and more cheaply in East India than East Anglia.

    Industries where Europe used to lead the world are migrating to the Asia Pacific region.

    And sadly, Britain faces this challenge weaker than it should.

    After six years Tony Blair and Gordon Brown have squandered their golden economic inheritance.

    Britain’s deficit in traded goods is the worst since records began in 1697.

    Business investment is collapsing.

    Productivity has risen only half as fast as it did under the Conservatives.

    More days were been wasted through strikes last year than in any year for over a decade.

    More than 2,000 manufacturing jobs have been lost every single week since Labour came to power.

    Worsening trade, collapsing investment, slowing productivity, more strikes and haemorrhaging jobs.

    Is this what Tony Blair meant when he said things could only get better?

    And surprise, surprise, even the low unemployment total Tony likes to trumpet is more spin than substance.

    Jobs in the productive, wealth-creating part of the economy are falling.

    A fall that’s hidden by the huge rise in the number of Government bureaucrats.

    That can’t go on forever.

    You can’t conceal a loss of manufacturing jobs by manufacturing new jobs for pen pushers in the public sector.

    Under Labour Britain has become a worse place to do business.

    In four years small business failures have trebled.

    More businesses went bust in 2002 than in any year since 1994.

    Company profits have fallen to its lowest level since 1993.

    That’s the dossier on business even Alastair Campbell couldn’t sex up.

    No wonder foreign investment in Britain, which boomed under the Conservatives, has halved in the last two years.

    Never mind, the DTI are on the case.

    Or a case, anyway.

    While business struggles, DTI bureaucrats have drawn up a new foliage strategy.

    I’m not kidding.

    I’ll quote the document:

    “Where an area has moved to New Ways of Working (defined as open-plan, having new-style furniture and soft seating (break-out areas)) funded displays will be allocated only to the break-out areas. Any movement of plants outside of these areas must be agreed prior to its happening and will be subject to Health and Safety restrictions”.

    There’s a complete chain of command to determine where the office yucca plant should go.

    The DTI may not do much for business

    But they’re obviously keen on pukka yucca.

    Don’t we all know exactly where business would tell Labour to stick its yucca.

    Unlike Labour, we’ll make Britain a better place to do business.

    We’ll restore the competitive advantages Margaret Thatcher won when she transformed Britain from being the sick man of Europe into a country which held its head high.

    We’ll cut regulation, which the Institute of Directors says costs Britain £6 billion a year.

    We’ll halt the rise in business taxes.

    We’ll rebuild our infrastructure.

    And we’ll give our workers the skills they need.

    You’ve heard the pledges Michael Howard, Tim Collins and Damian Green made about tax, transport and education.

    I’ll now make a pledge about regulation.

    Within days of taking office I’ll lighten the burden.

    Because regulation hurts every business, raises prices for every consumer, cuts returns for every saver.

    And it harms especially small and medium sized businesses, the engines of job creation.

    The British Chambers of Commerce say that employment admin costs the smallest companies 50 times as much per worker as the largest.

    We will never regulate disproportionately to risk.

    We will never regulate by law if a voluntary approach is possible.

    The smaller the organisation, the lighter our touch.

    So a business with two employees has a lighter burden than one with two hundred thousand.

    That’s why I’ll make sure firms with fewer than twenty workers are exempt from the most onerous burdens.

    Some people claim all this red tape comes from Brussels and there’s nothing we can do about it.

    That’s not true.

    At Maastricht we won the opt-out which kept the pound and the opt-out from the Social Chapter, which Labour threw away,

    Conservatives proved that a Government determined to defend British interests can do so.

    The trouble is that Ministers often make European regulations tougher when they’re applied here in Britain.

    Like the charges slaughterhouses pay for health inspections – optional in France and Germany and Italy and Spain but compulsory in Britain.

    When I’m Secretary of State I’ll never destroy British jobs by forcing our people to play by rules other countries are flouting.

    Because when a British small business pays a compulsory charge, it can’t take on the extra workers its continental competitors can.

    When paying that charge involves form-filling British business people are stuck in the office at 10 o’clock on Friday night ticking boxes on a form for faceless bureaucrats to file while their continental competitors are at home with their families.

    When a voluntary code is replaced by a compulsory one British ceramics companies find a nine-page guidance document turned into a ninety-page Directive

    Which Labour Ministers haven’t looked at

    Which needs more bureaucrats in Whitehall to enforce and more inspectors in the regions

    To monitor the way business monitors its own workforce.

    And all this is paid for by you and me.

    The new Proceeds of Crime Act requires retailers to report every individual theft to the National Criminal Intelligence Service. This will cost £50 for each of the seven million retail crimes each year.

    In the rest of Europe only the largest crimes are reported individually. The others are aggregated together.

    But here in Britain retailers and shoppers face a £350 million bill simply because labour says we must.

    And that’s before Tony Blair’s thrust the EU constitution down our throats.

    The one he won’t let us vote on.

    When I exempt the smallest firms from the most onerous laws

    When I apply sunset clauses to Labour’s Employment Acts so we can find out if they’re creating jobs or destroying them

    I’ll do it not for the sake of employers but for employees.

    To help workers of all ages, both sexes and any skill level find decent, satisfying work.

    To make sure no business is held back.

    And no worker is left behind.

    I’ve talked a lot about regulation but I’m concerned about consumers, too.

    The DTI is responsible for one industry where each of us is a consumer.

    Energy.

    We’ve been reminded lately what happens when the power fails.

    Chaos on the streets. People stuck in the Underground. Offices in the dark. Old people injured at home.

    Modern life, at home and at work, depends on electricity.

    Yet Labour have let the safety margin of generating capacity fall to its lowest level for years.

    The experts fear this means more cuts.

    If your house is cold this winter, if your child is sent home from school because the lights go out, you’ll know who to blame.

    And looking ahead, it’s not getting any better.

    Britain has used up its cheap North Sea oil and gas and soon we’ll be importing gas on a huge scale.

    Half all of our needs in 2010. Ninety per cent in 2020.

    Most of it from Russia, Algeria and Iran, funny countries on which to depend to keep the lights on.

    And Ministers are ignoring climate change, too.

    Right now, Britain’s carbon dioxide emissions are going up, not down.

    We’re failing to meet our international commitments to reduce them.

    Despite all those bright sparks at Number Ten, Labour haven’t a clue what to do about energy.

    There’s another thing the DTI is responsible for, that we all use every week.

    The Royal Mail and the Post Office.

    Under Labour the Royal Mail has lost £1.8 billion in the last two years.

    Three thousand post offices are being closed.

    To make matters worse, Ministers cancelled our plans to let every pensioner go on receiving their pension in cash at their local post office.

    Over the next couple of years that’ll make life hard for thousands of vulnerable people.

    And because someone who gets cash at a post office counter often spends a bit of it in the same shop Labour’s policy will force more post offices to close.

    Next month I’ll set out a better future for Royal Mail and Post Office workers and pensioners and for Post Offices, without spending a pound of taxpayers’ money.

    And when I am Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, I’ll cut the bureaucracy in the DTI itself.

    I’ll bang on the desks of my Cabinet colleagues

    To make sure they know what they’re doing to business.

    Under the Conservatives everyone in Whitehall will know that Britain must be made a better place to do business

    So we can achieve the other things we want.

    We’ve got a message for Tony Blair.

    Instead of increasing National Insurance Contributions he should cut the tax on jobs.

    Instead of taxing pensions he should encourage saving.

    Instead of forcing universities to dumb down he should back our world class institutions.

    Instead of abolishing the House of Lords and ignoring the House of Commons he should answer for his Government’s mistakes.

    But Tony Blair’s had his chance

    And he’s squandered it.

    Lost the trust of the British people.

    Voters are fed up with all the broken promises.

    Fed up with the arrogance and the lies and the spin.

    Fed up with a Government that says it’s listening but goes on lecturing.

    Fed up with a Third World transport system.

    Fed up with a Government that’s destroyed the security of every pensioner.

    Fed up with a Prime Minister who’s corrupted our constitution and now wants to give Brussels more power under a European one.

    In 2003 Britain is a nation yearning for politicians who provide leadership they can trust.

    A nation yearning for a Government that has integrity.

    A nation yearning for Ministers who show courage.

    A nation yearning for policies that are honest.

    As I look around this hall I see people who yearn for the Conservatives

    To provide that leadership

    To offer that integrity

    To display that courage

    To deliver that honesty.

    Iain Duncan Smith and the Conservative Party are rising to that challenge.

    Our task is urgent.

    We must begin today.

    He that hath no stomach to this fight: let him depart.

    To everyone else I say

    Together we can drive Tony and his cronies out of Downing Street.

  • Michael Howard – 2003 Speech to Conservative Party Conference

    Michael Howard – 2003 Speech to Conservative Party Conference

    The speech made by Michael Howard, the then Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, at the Conservative Party conference on 8 October 2003.

    Introduction

    I want to begin by thanking my team. Howard Flight, Stephen O’Brien and Mark Prisk in the Commons; Maurice Saatchi and Judith Wilcox in the Lords; Theresa Villiers in the European Parliament; and Mark Hoban, our Whip, have all worked hard to help me expose Gordon Brown’s mismanagement of our economy. I am very grateful to them all.

    Of course if you listen to Labour ministers, things have never been more rosy.

    And let’s give credit where credit’s due.

    It’s true that, where they have stopped taking the decisions, like setting interest rates, the decisions have generally been the right ones.

    But where they’ve taken the decisions, they’ve generally been wrong. And our job is to hold them to account.

    Public Services

    Let’s start with our public services.

    In Bournemouth, Labour promised a new Jerusalem for our public services. Just give us more time, they said.

    Yet in the very same week, a 72 year old pensioner won a court case against the Government because she had been forced by the length of waiting lists to have her operation abroad.

    That is the reality behind the rhetoric.

    Six and a half years. And still no delivery.

    · 60 tax rises, but one in three children leaving primary school unable to read, write and count properly.

    · 60 tax rises, but crime up by almost 800,000 in the last five years.

    · 60 tax rises, but almost a million people on waiting lists, and 300,000 people without any health insurance having to pay for their

    treatment every year – three times as many as when Labour took office.

    Is it any wonder that Trade Secretary Patricia Hewitt said: `When we talked about delivery, that may have been something of a mistake’?

    Yes – she did say it.

    You see sometimes they do tell the truth – by accident.

    As we have seen from the Hutton inquiry, this is a Government that only tells the truth by accident.

    Is it any wonder that they’ve lost the trust of the people?

    Tax Rises

    Tony Blair told the British people he had `no plans to increase tax at all’.

    Now, every year they say higher taxes are needed for better public services.

    But every year we just get the higher taxes.

    · 60 tax rises since 1997.

    · 50 per cent more tax than we paid in 1997.

    What does it actually mean for the people of our country?

    It means:

    · Higher taxes for families buying a home.

    · Higher taxes on petrol for people driving to work or to school.

    · Higher taxes on energy for industry trying to create wealth and jobs.

    · Higher taxes on those taking out insurance, including pensioners taking out medical insurance.

    · Higher taxes on IT entrepreneurs and on charities.

    · Higher taxes for getting married.

    · Higher taxes on jobs.

    · Higher Council Taxes

    Tax rises this year alone cost a typical family £568 a year.

    Labour’s Council Tax rises are driving those people on fixed incomes like pensioners into real hardship. Labour talk about relieving poverty – the sad truth is they are creating poverty.

    Is it any wonder that they’ve lost the trust of the people?

    The fact is that people are fed up.

    Fed up with endless tax rises.

    Fed up with endless promises.

    And fed up with failure to deliver.

    Waste and Lack of Reform

    And why is it that Labour are taxing and spending and failing?

    The answer is simple.

    They promised reform.

    They’ve talked about reform.

    But they have failed to deliver reform.

    Without reform of our public services, the extra money Labour have spent just hasn’t made the difference.

    That is the central failure of this Government. They have spent the money – taxpayers’ money – but they’ve not carried out the reform.

    And here are some facts you won’t find in Labour speeches:

    · More bureaucrats than beds in the NHS.

    · A 22 per cent rise in health spending leading to a 2 per cent rise in treatments.

    · And spending on running government departments up by £6.7 billion a year, nearly 50 per cent more than in 1997 – more than double the annual capital budget of every school in the country.

    The cost of running the Treasury alone has doubled.

    Gordon Brown

    It can’t all have been spent on Gordon Brown’s campaign drinks parties.

    Last Monday he delivered his campaign speech.

    In one of his less coded sentences, he told the Labour Conference that ‘TB’ was `a curable disease’ – and that he was the cure.

    By Wednesday he was looking much less hopeful.

    In two days flat he went from the Incredible Hulk to the Incredible Sulk.

    From Brown to green with Blair in between.

    Further Tax Rises

    Now. I want to be perfectly honest with you this afternoon.

    There are splits on tax.

    Peter Hain says Labour should put up taxes.

    Gordon Brown and Tony Blair want him to shut up.

    They all want to put up taxes. They just cant agree on whether they should admit it.

    That’s the real split on tax.

    And that’s what the media should be concentrating on.

    Everybody knows that, under Labour, taxes will rise again.

    Tax rises are at the heart of Labour. Old Labour. New Labour. Any Labour.

    They have put up taxes.

    They are putting up taxes.

    And because of the failure to reform the public services, they will put up taxes for as long as they’re in power.

    Liberal Democrats and Tax

    Of course it’s not only Labour that wants higher taxes.

    Anything Labour can do, the Liberal Democrats can do worse.

    Let me tell you of the taxes they want to pile on.

    · A regional income tax.

    · New regional NI contributions.

    · A new higher rate of income tax.

    · VAT on new homes.

    · A new Development Tax.

    · New toll taxes.

    · New parking taxes.

    · An energy tax.

    · A new capital gains tax on death.

    I haven’t finished yet!

    · A water tax.

    · A higher Landfill Tax.

    · More powers for the European Union to levy taxes.

    · And last but not least they want a local income tax – meaning families with two people at work will see bills soar.

    Of course they don’t spell all this out in their leaflets!

    One Liberal Democrat activist was seen distributing a leaflet which said:

    `Your local Liberal Democrats have succeeded in having speed humps removed from your street’.

    An alert resident said to him:

    `Hang on a minute. Weren’t you distributing a leaflet six months ago which said “Your local Liberal Democrats have succeeded in having speed humps installed in your street”?`

    The Liberal Democrat looked round furtively to make sure no-one was listening and said:

    `You know. You’re the very first person who’s noticed’

    It’s an absolutely true story. The alert local resident is closely connected with our favourite newspaper – the Guardian. He’s in the hall this afternoon.

    Pensioners

    Taxpayers are not the only people counting the cost of Labour’s broken promises.

    Gordon Brown’s pension tax has cost 12 million savers on average around £400 a year.

    A typical pension saver now retires on just half of what he or she would have received five years ago. Yes. Half!

    In opposition, Gordon Brown told the Labour Party Conference `I want the next Labour Government to achieve … the end of the means test for our elderly people’.

    But almost 6 in 10 pensioners are subject to the means test as a direct result of the changes he has introduced.

    In all up to 25 million people could soon be in households on means-tested benefits.

    And that rise in means-testing sends out loud and clear this signal: the more you save, the less you’ll get.

    In opposition, Labour said ‘Britain needs a `savings culture’.

    But the amount people save has halved since Labour came to power.

    Is it any wonder that Labour have lost the trust of the people?

    Labour’s Broken Promises: the Economy

    And what an example Gordon Brown is setting!

    At the last election he said it was partly by cutting interest payments on government debt that he was able to fund health and education.

    But just look at him now!

    Two years ago he forecast borrowing at £30 billion. Last year his forecast went up to £72 billion. This year it went up to £118 billion – a fourfold increase in two years!

    High taxes and falling real incomes mean that families are borrowing more too.

    Taken together, families and Government are now borrowing more than 15 per cent of the nation’s income – the highest amount since records began.

    Yet this is the Chancellor who said `you cannot build the New Jerusalem on a mountain of debt’.

    This is the Chancellor who said productivity growth was a ‘fundamental yardstick of economic performance’.

    But, Britain’s productivity growth has almost halved under Labour.

    This is the Chancellor who described investment as the `key to future economic success’.

    But business investment has suffered its biggest fall for almost a decade.

    Is it any wonder that they’ve lost the trust of the people?

    Roadshow

    Now everyone knows that, since Sweden said no to the euro, British membership this side of an election is a dead duck.

    But do you remember the roadshows Tony Blair promised, to sell the euro?

    We haven’t seen much of those so we’ve been asking a few questions.

    · Tony Blair told Parliament there had been 60 events.

    · But Number Ten said none involved him. And none was planned.

    · The Treasury said they were too many events to list. But they had all been low-key. There was no specific start date. And they couldn’t actually identify any of them.

    · The Foreign Office said they hadn’t even started.

    · Then finally the Minister for Europe said it was never meant to be a literal roadshow. That, he said, was just a figure of speech.

    Just like all this Government’s promises. Never meant to be taken literally. Just figures of speech.

    Lessons for Conservatives

    But there are lessons for us in what has happened to Labour.

    Lessons on how we should approach government. Lessons for us in opposition too. Lessons we’ve learned under Iain’s leadership.

    He and I know we must only make promises we can keep.

    Only pledge what we can deliver.

    Let me make one thing clear.

    We believe in low taxes.

    We are the Party of low taxes.

    All our instincts are for low taxes.

    We know that under Labour, people and businesses have been hammered by higher taxes, and too much of their money is being wasted. We know that people have worked hard for their money, and that Governments must spend it wisely.

    We can and we will reform public services. We will always be a lower tax government than Labour. And we do plan to cut taxes.
    But unlike Labour’s, our plans will be carefully costed. And unlike Labour’s, they will be clear for all to see.

    Their overhyped rhetoric and overblown promises, their `figures of speech’, are not for us. That is not our way.

    Fair Deal

    Under the Conservatives, as Iain has always insisted, a fair deal on tax and improving the public services will go hand in hand.

    Because reforming and improving the public services is the only way to break Labour’s vicious circle of ever higher taxes and ever failing services. It is the key to everything we want to achieve. It has got to be done and we’ll do it.

    People want to know there’s a real alternative to Labour’s policy of tax, and spend and fail – not just the Liberal Democrat alternative of tax more, spend more and fail more.

    And that’s what the work we’ve done under Iain’s leadership has been about.

    A new asylum policy. That would pay for 5,000 more police officers every year.

    Increasing pensions in line with earnings. And showing how we would pay for it.

    Saving children from being trapped in failing schools.

    And giving NHS patients a passport to choose their hospital inside or outside the NHS so that waiting times can be cut for all.

    That’s our alternative to tax and spend and fail.

    We will give power to the people.

    Conclusion

    We’re here to make people’s lives better. We’re here to help people fulfil their potential and remove the obstacles holding them back.

    We’re here to put principles back into politics.

    We won’t do it through flashy smiles or empty promises.

    We’ll do it by telling the people the truth. What we’re going to do. How much it will cost.

    And by the commitment, the drive and the determination to put these ideals into practice.

    Under Iain’s leadership that exactly what we are doing. We are focusing on the things that matter to people. We are winning the arguments over policy.

    This next election will be the most exciting for a generation. For the first time in fifty years the people of our country will have a real choice about how our public services are to be delivered.

    They can opt for the old failing system or they can choose a newer way which will respond to their needs, which will achieve their aspirations, which will truly improve their lives.

    It’s a heavy responsibility. We must show our country that there is an alternative to this deceitful, dishonest, and discredited government.

    There is a better way.

    We must show that we can save our country from this deceitful, dishonest and discredited government.

    We must not be found wanting.

    Because my friends, for Britain, for this country we love, nothing but the best will ever do.

  • Bernard Jenkin – 2003 Speech to Conservative Party Conference

    Bernard Jenkin – 2003 Speech to Conservative Party Conference

    The speech made by Bernard Jenkin, the then Shadow Defence Secretary, on 8 October 2003.

    You remember Iain told the Shadow Cabinet: look to the public services in other countries’ for proven and successful policy ideas.

    Drug re-habilitation in Sweden;

    Policing in New York;

    The health service in France.

    Well, I have been abroad to see the best too.

    I have seen some some excellent military forces in other countries.

    – peace keeping in Kabul;

    – Airlifting military supplies to Kuwait;

    – rebuilding in Southern Iraq.

    It won’t surprise you to know: these armed forces were all British –

    And they were already the best.

    Our armed forces are resourceful, adaptable to almost any challenge.

    They are utterly dependable.

    How unlike this New Labour government.

    The Hutton inquiry is laying bare the true character of New Labour.

    Mr Hoon confessed to the Hutton inquiry that he had no idea what was going on in his own department.

    Not so much his finger on the button, as found sleeping at the switch. He has lost all credibility.

    So why does the Prime Minister now praise Mr Hoon?

    For just one reason.

    To save his own skin.

    So how can New Labour possibly command the confidence and respect of the armed servicemen and women in their care?

    The philosophy of the armed forces is to serve and lead – taking control and accepting responsibility for those they command.

    Of real service and real leadership, New Labour knows nothing.

    Even where the defence of the realm is at stake, nobody can believe a word this Prime Minister says.

    That’s why we still need a wider inquiry.

    But, the continued and undoubted breach of UN resolutions – the defiance of the international community – was enough to justify military action against Saddam Hussein.

    Even the Liberal Democrats agreed that.

    So why didn’t the Prime Minister stick to the simple truth?

    Because he could not convince his own Party, his own MPs, and now, we know, not even his own cabinet.

    He squandered the integrity of his office to appease factions in his divided party.

    Let us not lose sight of the truth.

    The liberation of Iraq was a just cause and remains so.

    The Conservative Party made the right decision.

    Those who fought, those who still risk their lives, and those who have made the ultimate personal sacrifice: we salute them.

    There is nothing this prime minister or his shabby government can do to devalue that service and sacrifice.

    Here in Blackpool, there will be no crocodile tears, or phoney emotion, about how tough it is for us to take these decisions and to face the consequences.

    No parading of private letters for political gain.

    We politicians rarely face real dangers.

    We don’t have to endure the desert heat or bear real scars on our backs.

    It’s our armed forces who have the real job.

    Many of my colleagues in Parliament have served in the armed forces.

    Not least, our leader, Iain Duncan Smith.

    He is proving that he knows how to serve, and how to lead.

    He’s doing exactly what you elected him to do.

    He is putting together clear policies to offer the British people at the next election, based on honest Conservative principles.

    I shouldn’t have to say this.

    But it’s about time he got the backing of every single one of us.

    Two of our number are still serving in the forces.

    The Member of Parliament for Westbury is Surgeon Cmdr Andrew Murrison, Royal Navy, who has just deployed to Iraq.

    The member for New Forest West is Major Desmond Swayne,

    While Geoff Hoon is fighting for his job, Desmond is fighting for our country.

    Our armed forces should get the backing they deserve.

    They should never be taken for granted.

    Yet they do feel let down.

    By shortages of manpower and equipment;

    Cancelled training.

    Cancelled leave.

    In the infantry, the gap between tours of duty is meant to be 24 months.

    The average is now only nine months.

    The Royal Scots just back from Northern Ireland, are off to Iraq in December – less than six months.

    Never forget how this affects the families.

    The Royal Green Jackets, based near here, have just been rushed to Iraq at four day’s notice and yesterday, I went to meet their families.

    They hope they will be home by Christmas, but after eight weeks training, they are off again, to Northern Ireland.

    Overstretch.

    Not enough resources or manpower to match all the commitments.

    How can this be?

    We are told the economy has been growing.

    That Britain is so prosperous.

    Yet, as they lined up for battle on the Iraqi border, there weren’t enough chemical suits or desert kit to go round.

    What a shabby way to treat our soldiers!

    As a senior general acknowledged, we were ‘perilously close’ to not being ready for action.

    It is shaming that the Prime Minister wants to use the armed forces more than ever, but will not come up with the man power and equipment that they need.

    Why is it, under Labour, the tax burden has risen so much, defence commitments are increased, and yet defence spending is lower in real terms than in our last year of office?

    Because Labour just think they will get away with it.

    But it is only the sheer commitment and quality of the people of the armed forces that enables them to get away with it.

    Labour promised to increase the size of the army.

    Instead, we have the smallest army since Wellington.

    Labour have the wrong priorities.

    They have cut trained personnel in the armed forces by 12,000, but they have increased the number of tax collectors in the Inland Revenue by 16,000.

    Well, I suppose they’ve got all those 60 extra taxes to collect.

    But that says all you need to know about New Labour’s real priorities!

    Yet it doesn’t end here.

    Another defence review is coming.

    They want to cut Army manpower again.

    To sell off more Royal Navy Ships and submarines.

    To cut the size of the long promised new aircraft carriers.

    To cut the orders for new Destroyers.

    To cut the orders for new aircraft.

    And by the time we next meet, the Sea Harrier, our most capable air-to-air fighter, will be gone forever – probably sold off to another country.

    They are even cutting future service pensions!

    The armed forces deserve a fair deal.

    Enough boots on the ground to meet our peace keeping commitments.

    Enough warships, fully crewed, to meet our international obligations.

    Modern aircraft, to meet the threats of today and in the future.

    Homes fit for our heroes and their families.

    A quality of life that meets the aspirations of all those who serve Queen and Country.

    Our Conservative policy is based on a real assessment of threats and potential threats we face, not wishful thinking or false optimism.

    We all want peace in Northern Ireland, but Labour shouldn’t use it as an excuse for cutting the infantry.

    Every lesson of history teaches, especially in such a dangerous and unpredictable world, that we must be prepared for the unexpected.

    We will maintain Britain’s independent nuclear deterrent, and we will set out how it will be sustained beyond the present Trident system.

    Labour should be starting this process now.

    No sign of it.

    A rogue state with missiles, such as North Korea, might threaten us or our allies at any time.

    That’s why we also support global missile defence.

    Why are Labour dragging their feet on this?

    We will rebuild the Territorial Army and the reserves, so they can provide a credible home defence force and reinforcement for our regular forces.

    Iain has appointed a Shadow Minister for Homeland Security.

    In government, he will ensure we can better prevent terrorist attacks and set up proper civil protection.

    We fully support the ‘expeditionary principle’ – the ability to send large forces wherever in the world we need them and to sustain them.

    We will fully fund the defence capabilities that are essential to safeguard national security and to fulfil our international obligations.

    That is the only way to ensure a fair deal for the armed forces – and for your security.

    The British armed forces are Britain’s prize asset – Mr Blair’s aces – in international politics.

    But he is recklessly throwing them away to appease European Federalism.

    He is bargaining them for favours in a European Constitution that nobody in Britain wants.

    When he’s with President Bush, he supports Nato.

    But when he’s with Schroder and Chirac, he betrays Nato.

    European nations should certainly share more of the burden for European defence and for global security.

    But this EU Constitution is a direct challenge to the primacy of Nato and, ultimately, to the sovereign independence of our own national defence and foreign policy.

    We don’t need a Euro-army.

    Nato already provides for European Defence.

    Every concession Labour makes to the EU defence agenda strengthens those who want splits between the US and Europe.

    The Euro-army is not about more or better defence, but more structures, more headquarters, more offices, more committees.

    (Do we really want our defence run like EU fishing or agriculture?)

    It is just a platform for the vanity of Old Europe.

    It’s Nato that won the cold war, not the EU.

    It’s Nato, not the EU, that brought peace to the Balkans.

    It’s Nato now peacekeeping in Kabul and supporting European troops in Iraq.

    Nato guarantees national sovereignty.

    The EU Constitution would destroy it.

    That’s why the people need a say.

    We demand that referendum!

    Mr Chairman, fellow Conservatives, we ask the men and women of the armed forces to risk their lives, to protect our country, to safeguard our future.

    Let this Party pay tribute to them.

    They are a benchmark of excellence.

    The pride of our nation: the envy of others.

    Right now, at this moment, they serve.

    And they know, sooner or later, there are sacrifices.

    Surely they deserve a fair deal.

    And under the Conservatives, I promise you this.

    They will get that fair deal.

  • Michael Ancram – 2003 Speech to Conservative Party Conference

    Michael Ancram – 2003 Speech to Conservative Party Conference

    The speech made by Michael Ancram, the then Shadow Foreign Secretary, at the Conservative Party conference on 8 October 2003.

    I don’t know about you, but I am tired of this Government trying to make me feel ashamed of being British.

    I am fed up with seeing our history rewritten, of Labour Ministers apologising for our past.

    I have one burning ambition.

    I want to be proud of my country again.

    I came into politics because I believe in public service.

    But, over these last six years we have seen it mocked, diminished and destroyed.

    There is today a stench at the heart of Government that corrodes our democracy and undermines our standing abroad.

    The stench of spin. Of deceit, of half-truths and distortions, of cronyism and of downright lies.

    And at the centre, as we saw again last week, the high priest of spin – Tony Blair.

    Everything that threatens him ruthlessly swept aside.

    The reputation of those who dare to criticise him vilified.

    Loyal public servants pilloried and even destroyed on the anvil of this Prime Minister’s survival.

    Those who question his judgement, written off as ‘rogue elements’.

    Is this really the Prime Minister who preached only two years ago of ‘a moral duty’ and ‘healing the scars on the conscience of the world’?

    That was the spin.

    The reality is very different.

    A shameful catalogue of abandonment, betrayal, sell-out, dishonesty and total breach of trust.

    One thing is clear. You cannot trust a word this Prime Minister says.

    Two years ago he promised Zimbabweans that Mugabe’s vile behaviour would ‘not be tolerated’.

    And then he abandoned them.

    Zimbabwe’s scars haven’t healed, Mr. Blair. They’re festering. And you just walk by on the other side.

    This Prime Minister promised the people of Burma that the ‘international community will not stand idly by’.

    And then he abandoned them.

    Abuses in Burma are soaring Mr. Blair, and you just stand idly by.

    This Prime Minister has tried to betray the people of Gibraltar. By a secret deal to share sovereignty with Spain.

    If you had any honour, Mr. Blair, you would accept the clear verdict of the people of Gibraltar last November and ditch this unworthy agreement forever.

    We won’t abandon the people of Gibraltar.

    Let me say again, we will not be bound by any constitutional agreement between the Government of Britain and Spain which does not have the full democratic consent of the people of Gibraltar.

    I make no apology for talking about the Prime Minister rather than Jack Straw.

    The day was when a Foreign Secretary stood tall in any Cabinet – but not Jack Straw. He is now nothing more than Blair’s errand boy.

    A recent scurrilous report suggested that Jack had a mind of his own! It was swiftly and categorically denied by – Jack Straw.

    So back to Mr Blair.

    He told us the proposed European Constitution represented ‘no significant change’ in our relations with the EU.

    Not for his fellow European leaders. For them it is an historic and fundamental change.

    Mr. Blair promised that he would defend the ‘Europe of nations’. But, last month’s White Paper wasn’t a White Paper. It was a White Flag.

    It was Tony Blair’s capitulation to those who wish to build a single European state.

    ‘Ah, but’ we’re told, ‘look at the ‘redlines’ which defend British interests’.

    Well I’ve looked. There are no red lines. Only red herrings.

    Tony Blair has already thrown in the towel. And now we hear he is selling-out our rebate.

    We will fight this damaging Constitution with everything we’ve got.

    For a start the British people have the right to say yes or no in a referendum.

    Other EU countries are having referendums to decide.

    Mr Blair what is wrong with the British people that we cannot be trusted to decide?

    We will promote a Petition to Parliament requiring a referendum, because even this Prime Minister cannot ignore forever the collective voice of the British people.

    The British people demand a referendum. They must have a referendum.

    There is now an endemic dishonesty attached to everything this Prime Minister says and does.

    Even when he’s right.

    I believe that action in Iraq was right.

    I pay unreserved tribute to the professionalism and dedication of our brave servicemen and women. In toppling Saddam Hussein they have removed a dangerous and recognised threat to international peace and security.

    And they did more.

    I’ve just been to Baghdad. A woman there said this to me “You’ve never known the fear of the knock on the door in the night”. “You haven’t wept as your loved ones were taken away, never to be seen alive again.”

    It was the day after Saddam Hussein’s two sons were killed.

    “I danced in the night when I heard”, she said, “because I knew that they could never do it to me again”.

    That too is why it was right.

    What was wrong was the way this Prime Minister approached the war.

    We pressed him to make a case that the British people could trust.

    He failed to do so. Instead he bent and twisted the truth for his own ends.

    Mr. Blair. The case was sound. There was no need to lie.

    You didn’t need to stretch the truth. You didn’t need to manipulate the intelligence material.

    You didn’t need to claim that your dodgy dossier was intelligence-based when it was not. You did not need to claim personal knowledge of WMD that evidently you did not have.

    This Prime Minister should have trusted the British people. But the culture of spin in Downing Street was just too strong.

    The government should now end the confidence sapping drip-drip of accusation and counter-accusation.

    They should – as we have long asked – set up a comprehensive independent judicial inquiry into the events leading up to the war and its aftermath.

    But this Prime Minister contemptuously turns his back.

    We shouldn’t be surprised. He always turns his back.

    Well it’s time to give him a stark message.

    Prime Minister. The British people don’t like you anymore,

    The British people don’t trust you anymore,

    They don’t believe you anymore,

    You have let them down, and for that they will not forgive you.

    What Britain needs now are realistic goals in line with our resources.

    We need a foreign policy that people can trust.

    You certainly won’t get that from the Liberal Democrats.

    Still the dirtiest fighters in British politics. No principles, no ethics and no beliefs. All things to all men.

    What time is it, Mr. Kennedy? What time would you like it to be?

    What are your policies, Mr. Kennedy? What would you like them to be?

    Which way is the wind blowing, Mr. Kennedy? Just watch the way I’m pointing today!

    They have a foreign policy. A very simple one. As long as it’s made in Brussels it’s alright.

    Well it’s not alright by us.

    We understand today’s world

    The menace of terrorism. The peril of rogue states. The challenges of poverty and starvation.

    And we know our role.

    As Iain Duncan Smith has made clear, the core of our Foreign Policy is the national interest.

    Not selfish, but necessary.

    Our security, our economic well-being and our potential as a force for good.

    We have listened to the British people and to our friends abroad.

    The common theme is trust. An end to the to the lies and the letdowns and the broken promises.

    They want a policy they can rely on. A policy we will deliver.

    A policy for Britain.

    No promises we cannot keep; no expectations we cannot meet.

    We will be true to our friends and to our word.

    In today’s increasingly fluid world we need to build stronger alliances, particularly within the Commonwealth.

    We need agreements that can expand free trade and create new opportunities for British business and British skills.

    Our ‘special relationship’ with the US has rarely been stronger.

    I want to make it even healthier.

    A friendship strengthened by genuine debate. Where honest disagreement can stand comfortably alongside our shared values and principles.

    That is the mark of a true relationship.

    Central to this is NATO.

    I totally reject the anti-American machinations of the French to undermine NATO.

    We will strengthen NATO as the foundation of European collective defence and security.

    And we will use where appropriate its new flexibility to deliver security ‘out of area’ as it is doing today in Afghanistan.

    We are also well placed to help encourage dialogue in potentially world-threatening conflicts.

    Northern Ireland taught us the hard way how to turn terror and bloodshed into dialogue and relative peace.

    We can share that lesson. We can help build confidence and dispel mistrust.

    For instance in the Middle East where mutual mistrust has once again tragically bred violence and counter-violence.

    And derailed the roadmap towards the two-state solution of a secure Israel and a viable Palestine which is the only credible way forward.

    The outlook for both sides in the face of a spiral of violence is bleak. Restraint on both sides is very necessary.

    It will need the patient rebuilding of confidence and trust to restart the process.

    And we will also keep faith with those who legitimately look to us for help.

    I have seen the horrors of Mugabe’s Zimbabwe.

    We will not go down the appeasement road of ‘quiet diplomacy’.

    We will not shut up as Zimbabwe’s free press is shut down.

    We will not let up until Mugabe, his financial backers and his whole brutal regime are gone, and gone forever.

    And we believe in Britain.

    And that means fighting for Britain.

    And that means opposing the European Constitution.

    We don’t want and we don’t need a written constitution for Europe with its own President, its own Foreign Secretary, its own diplomatic service and even its own army.

    We don’t want to lose our right to decide our own asylum policy.

    We don’t want and we don’t need a single European state.

    Over the next few months we will campaign against the Constitution, fiercely and unremittingly, the length and breadth of the land.

    We will fight it tooth and nail.

    And if this Prime Minister ever tries to chance his arm with the single currency we will with equal ferocity fight that menace too.
    Iain Duncan Smith has made our position very clear.

    We want to make the European Union work.

    We don’t want a tired old Europe, a prisoner of its own bureaucracy, living in a haze of ingrained anti-Americanism.

    We want a new Europe of democracies, ready to serve the ideals of a new generation, working together in a spirit of new enterprise.

    We want a Europe where power flows upwards from nation states and their peoples, and not downwards from Brussels and its remote elites.

    I pay special tribute to Jonathan Evans and his MEPs for their tireless work in fighting fraud, in supporting businesses and farmers, and encouraging deregulation in the European Union.

    We know who we can trust in Europe, and next June we want them all re-elected, and more. Jonathan, our best wishes go with you and your colleagues.

    We want to build a European Union founded on cooperative partnership rather than coercive integration, with the Commission the servant and not the master, properly accountable to national parliaments.

    And in which legislative initiatives emerge from the national parliaments and not from an increasingly centralised bureaucracy.
    A European Union within which the national aspiration of all its members, new and old, are not suffocated but supported.

    One of this Prime Minister’s most outrageous lies is that diversity in Europe is impossible, and that political integration is inevitable.

    Nothing in politics is inevitable, not if you fight it hard enough.

    Last month the Swedes fought hard and proved that the Euro is not inevitable.

    In doing so they have opened the door to a new diverse Europe.

    We must follow Sweden’s example and carry forward the torch of freedom and democracy.

    We have a unique opportunity. In Europe, in the Commonwealth, in our partnership with America. We can play a vital role in the modern world.

    It is in our national interest to do so.

    Because in doing so we will give Britain back its pride.

    I share the rising public anger at a government that sneers at integrity and trust.

    I am sick and tired of a government that mocks our traditions, our culture, our currency and even our very Britishness.

    I want a Britain where freedom means what it says, rather than what this Government tells me it should mean.

    No one trusts this government any more.

    This rotten bunch are past their sell-by date.

    They must go.

    We must sweep them, stench and all, into the dustbin of political history.

    Our challenge is clear.

    To be true to ourselves. To have confidence. And to work as one.

    Together we can go out from here and win.