UKPOL.CO.UK

Tag: Boris Johnson

  • Boris Johnson – 2016 Statement on Libya

    borisjohnson

    Below is the text of the statement made by Boris Johnson, the Foreign Secretary, at the UN Security Council on 22 July 2016.

    Thank you very much Mr President.

    This is my first visit to the United Nations as Foreign Secretary and I am delighted that it coincides with the unanimous adoption of a resolution that marks an important step forward for international peace and security.

    I recognise that this excellent work goes on day in, day out, and I’m delighted today to be a part of it.

    This resolution marks the beginning of the end of the Libyan chemical weapons programme. It grants the legal authorisation necessary for the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons to remove the chemical precursors of those weapons from Libya so that they can be destroyed in a third country. In doing so, we have reduced the risk of these weapons falling into the hands of terrorists and fanatics.

    I would like to thank Council members for their role in making this resolution possible. It’s a sign of the strength of international cooperation on Libya that we were able to come together so quickly to agree it.

    Together, we have shown our collective commitment to the people and authorities of Libya, and, ultimately, to all of us who want to live in a world free from chemical weapons. The UK is committed to making this world a reality, including through our permanent seat here in the UN Security Council.

    What we have done today is a good example of the role of the UN in tackling the global challenges. It is also an example of the United Kingdom’s continued determination to play a leading role through the UN, together with you, our partners in the Security Council.

    Thank you very much.

  • Boris Johnson – 2012 Conservative Party Conference Speech

    borisjohnson

    Below is the text of the speech made by the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, to the 2012 Conservative Party Conference on 9th October 2012.

    Thank you first for all you did to make sure that we Conservatives won in London this year and thanks to that intrepid expeditionary force of volunteers from around the country.

    The busloads from Herefordshire who crossed deep along the Ho Chi Minh trail into Hackney where they of course found people’s problems aren’t really so very different after all.

    You showed that we can overcome a Labour lead and win even in places Ed and co are so cocky as to think they own. And if we can win in the middle of a recession and wipe out a 17 point Labour poll lead then I know that David Cameron will win in 2015.

    When the economy has turned round and people are benefiting in jobs and growth from the firm leadership you have shown and the tough decisions you have taken.

    And I was pleased to see the other day that you have called me a blond haired mop. A mop. Well if I am a mop then you are a broom. A broom that is cleaning up the mess left by the Labour government and a fantastic job you are doing. I thank you and congratulate you and your colleagues – George Osborne the dustpan, Gove the J cloth etc

    Because for the last hundred years it has been the historic function of Conservatives to be the household implements after the Labour binge has got out of control.

    And it is thanks to Conservatives here in this hall that I was allowed to bask in the glory – often wholly undeserved, I am afraid, but never mind – of the greatest Olympic and Paralympic Games that have ever been held.

    I think anthropologists will look back with awe at the change that took place in our national mood – the sudden switcheroo from the gloom of the previous weeks.

    You remember what they were saying? When the buses were on strike and the taxi drivers were blockading the west end. And thousands of the security staff seemed mysteriously to have found better things to do. And the weather men were predicting truly cataclysmic inundations on the night of the opening ceremony. And then sometime in that first week it was as though a giant hormonal valve had been opened in the minds of the people. And the endorphins seemed to flow through the crowds. And down the tube trains like some benign contagion.

    Until everyone was suffused with a kind of reddibrek glow of happiness and from then on it was as if nothing could go wrong. And the G4s guys turned up after all. And five million people were showed to their seats without delay. And the volunteers revealed a kindness and a friendliness that we had almost forgotten. And the tube trains ran with metronomic efficiency. The Jubilee line going three miles an hour faster than they did when I was elected. And the sociologists will write learned papers on that sudden feeling that gripped us all. Was it eudaimonia, euphoria, eupepsia or some other Greek word beginning with eu? You name it

    Was it relief? It was surprise, wasn’t it? There we were, little old us, the country that made such a Horlicks of the Millennium Dome. Putting on a flawless performance of the most logistically difficult thing you can ask a country to do in peacetime. And some of us were frankly flabbergasted, gobsmacked.

    And I want you to hold that thought, remember that feeling of surprise – because, that surprise is revealing of our chronic tendency in this country to underestimate what we can do. And we need now to learn the lessons of the Olympics and Paralympics. The moment when we collectively rediscovered that we are a can-do country. A creative, confident, can-do country.

    The Olympics succeeded because we planned for years and we worked together. Public sector and private sector. And we put aside party differences. And yes this is the right moment to say thank you to Tony Blair and Gordon Brown and Tessa Jowell. And yes, Ken Livingstone. Ken old chum there is no coming back from that one. You have just been clapped at Tory party conference. As well as to Seb Coe and Paul Deighton and Hugh Robertson and David Higgins and John Armitt

    But for the success of these Olympics there is one Conservative we need to thank today. One Prime Minister who loves sport and who to this day is championing cricket in inner London. Oh yes. It is thanks to John Major, who put in the Lottery that we have gone from one gold medal in 1996 to the sporting superpower we are today.

    And we created the conditions in training and infrastructure that allowed our young people to take on the best of the rest of the world and do better than them. We gave them the stages to perform on. The stadia in which they could show their competitive genius. And that is exactly what we have to do with the economy today.

    I am a Conservative. I believe in a low-tax and low-regulation economy and I believe that as far as possible government needs to make life easy. For those who get up at 5 to get their shops or businesses ready – the strivers, the strugglers – whatever the vogue word is for them today. We know who they are, and there are many in this room. The backbone of the UK economy as Napoleon almost said.

    Britain is a nation of small and medium-sized enterprises and they make up 75 per cent of the London economy. And it is these businesses that have the capacity to grow. To take on young people, to expand and become world-beaters. And we need to think, every day, what we can do to create the right conditions for them to flourish. And to become more than medium-sized. To become the gold medalists of the global economy

    For the last four years my team in City Hall has been working – as you have been working, in Government – to fight the recession and to create the conditions for a dynamic recovery. And yes, we One Nation Conservatives are well aware that in a society where the gap between rich and poor has been growing – as it did under Labour – that we have to look first to the poorest and the neediest and those who cannot easily compete and that is why I am so proud that we have expanded the London Living Wage. Now paid – entirely voluntarily – by about 250 of the swankiest banks, law and accountancy firms in London putting about £60m into the pockets of some of the lowest paid people in London.

    We have protected or expanded every travel concession for young people, for people in search of work, for the disabled and we have taken Londoners off the age escalator and restored the 24 hour Freedom Pass. And I apologise to the people of Labour-run Birmingham as I generally and periodically apologise to so many other cities but that is a privilege that older people have only in Tory-run London. And we are delivering it on November 1 as I promised because we have been able so to manage the budget that we have cut £3bn in waste and have not only frozen council tax over the last four years but are now cutting our share by ten per cent.

    But when times have been toughand when the city has been afflicted by riots barely one year ago then we need to remember that there is one virtually all-purpose cure for want and squalor and anger and deprivation, better than more benefits, better than police crackdowns and that is a job. The self-esteem, the excitement, the fun, the human interaction and competition that a job can offer. Before you even talk about the money.

    London is an amazing creator of new jobs. But they don’t always go to kids who grow up in London and we need to work out why and we need to look at what is happening in our schools. I am a passionate supporter of Michael Gove’s free schools revolution parents, teachers, charities are coming together to create wonderful new places of learning, like Toby Young’s West London Free school in Hammersmith or the East London Science school, led by a formidable physics teacher called Dave Perks who wants all his pupils to learn triple sciences so that they can apply for top universities and the kind of high skill jobs created by the London economy.

    And I don’t want a handful of these schools. I want dozens of them, right across the capital. So I can announce today that I am setting up New Schools for London to help find the sites that they need. And we are opening up the GLA’s property portfolio to find the site.

    And I want to boost the teaching of the STEM subjects because it is an utter scandal that we are going through a golden age of engineering projects and yet this country is short of about 50,000 engineers and there are parts of London where A level physics or advanced Maths are hardly taught. And with so many school leavers failing to find a job we are seeing a tragic waste of talent 54,000 18-24 year olds on the dole.

    And that is why we are driving forward a massive programme of apprenticeships. We have done 76,000, and we are going to do 250,000 over this four year term and businesses won’t invest and shops won’t open unless they are confident that the place is safe. And so we have brought crime down by 12 per cent. And Bernard Hogan Howe has committed to reducing it by a further 20 per cent over the next four years. A further 20 per cent over the next four years. And in the last year the murder rate has fallen yet again to levels not seen since the 1960s. And it is no disrespect to my old friend Mike Bloomberg to say you are four times more likely to be murdered in New York as you are in London

    And for business to flourish they need employees who can afford to live within a reasonable commuting time from their place of work and so a job-creating economy needs good housing and good transport. And that is why we are not only building record numbers of affordable homes – 54,000 over the last four years – far more than Ken Livingstone

    But we have this week set out a new plan. To help the struggling middle to buy their homes. And if we invest in transport then we can not only drive the creation of thousands of new jobs in London – I am thinking of Battersea or Tottenham or Croydon – but we drive jobs across the country.

    I am pleased to inform you, Conference, that since we last spoke I have kept my promise to Londoners and introduced a new generation hop-on hop-off replacement for the Routemaster. They are the cleanest greenest new bus in Europe. They have conductors and unlike the hopeless broken-backed diplodocus of a bendy bus which was made in Germany, they are made in the United Kingdom. Aand that Ballymena factory has just received the biggest single order in its history. 608 of these great big dome-browed scarlet beasts. And unlike the hopeless broken-backed diplodocus of a bendy bus which was made in Germany, they are made in the United Kingdom.

    And when we buy new trains we drive jobs in Derby. Conductor rail from Chard. CCTV from Warwick. Railway sleepers from Boston. And if we build that platform for growth – with better education, with safer street, with more housing and better transport infrastructure then the private sector will produce amazing and world-beating results.

    Go to tech city and see young Londoners devising apps so that teenagers in America can watch movies on their Xbox. Go to soho and see them doing the special effects for so called Hollywood movies When they eat cake on the champs elysees, they eat cake made in London. When they watch Gangnam style on their TVs in Korea, they watch it on TV aerials made in London. The dutch ride bicycles made in London. The Brazilians use mosquito repellent made in London. Every single chocolate hobnob in the world is made in London. We export everything from badger shaving brushes to ballet shoes. And as I look ahead I am filled with confidence about the capital

    We will sort out our aviation capacity problem. We will create new river crossings. We will regenerate East London and we will put in air conditioned and driverless trains. Wven if Bob Crow says his RMT drivers won’t test drive the driverless trains. We will continue to expand cycle hire and plant thousands of trees.

    We have the right time zone the right language and we have the right government in Westminster and I will fight to keep it there.

    We fought to keep London from lurching back into the grip of a Marxist cabal of taxpayer-funded chateauneuf du pape swilling tax minimisers and bendy bus fetishist.

    I will fight to keep this country from lurching back into the grip of the two Eds. Unreformed, unpunished, unrepentant about what they did to the economy and the deficit they racked up.

    We need to go forward now from the age of Excess under Labour. Through the age of austerity to a new age of Enterprise in which we do what we did in the Olympics and build a world-beating platform for Britain for British people and businesses to compete and win and we need to do it now under the Conservatives and we will and it begins here.

  • Boris Johnson – 2012 Speech at City Hall

    borisjohnson

    Below is the text of the speech made by the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, at City Hall in London on 10th May 2012.

    Good morning everyone and thanks for coming.

    I want to clear up some myths about the recent elections. They were not decided on the basis of who said what  to whom in the lift. It wasn’t a question of tax returns or Cornish pasties or bus advertisements.The reality is that the people of London would not have given me a second term if they had not looked at the record of the GLA over the last four years and decided that it was respectable.

    In fact it was more than respectable.

    It was excellent.

    And so I want to thank the people in this chamber for everything you did:

    – crime is down

    – homes built

    – tube delays improved

    – air quality improved

    – green spaces created

    – bicycles across the city

    People were willing to give my administration a second term because they had seen that we kept our promises to London on everything from Oyster cards, to getting rid of the bendies and inventing a beautiful new bus for London.

    We had a mandate and we delivered!

    Now we have a new mandate and so we must deliver again, therefore I want to repeat my priorities. In fact there is only one:

    To do everything we can to create jobs and growth to help Londoners into work in tough times.

    Everything else flows from that. We will continue to keep police numbers high because a safe city is not just an end in itself; It is a vital prerequisite for economic confidence and investment.

    We will continue to fight for the funding London needs for transport, housing and regeneration because those projects will not only create the platform for future growth and prosperity, they will generate 200,000 jobs now when Londoners need them.

    I want us to look at all the steps we can take to make sure Londoners get those jobs.That’s why we have set up the education inquiry and we will be pushing for more of a role in education and that’s why we are rapidly expanding the apprenticeship scheme. We will continue to improve the environment and the quality of life because a city that is clean and green and full of bikes is more likely to attract investment.

    In making the case to government for London I will point out that a strong London economy is the key to growth in the country as a whole and it is essential that we frame and focus the vision for the city.

    So I am now asking you all to help me produce a 2020 vision for the city, encompassing everything from spatial and transport developments, opportunity areas and river crossings to air quality, cycling and health outcomes. Of course this should include projects that will not only be complete by 2020 but which must be underway.

    The need is urgent because the population is growing and we can so easily slip behind, we must not repeat the mistakes of the 50s 60s and 70s. One thing that the Crossrail argument has taught me is that if we can build a consensus around the future, then we are much more likely to make it happen and to help us all see what is happening and what we are doing right and wrong.

    We are going to be much more pro-active about statistics. I want this building (City Hall) somewhere to contain a physical resource where we can see – and members of the public can see what is happening on gun crime or affordable home starts or educational outcomes or air quality and we can use that clarity to drive performance.

    One thing the last four years has taught me is that four years is a very short time. The elections have slowed us all down so now is the time to put the pedal to the metal. We have 78 days to produce the greatest Olympic and Paralympic Games that have ever been held, but I see no reason why the GLA’s 2020 vision for London should not be ready well before Christmas.

    We know what it is – it’s there in the London plan and It’s there in the manifesto, but we need to articulate it and sell it to the treasury and to the rest of the country.

    Thanks very much everyone and back to work.

  • Boris Johnson – 2012 Speech to the London Assembly over the Budget

    borisjohnson

    Below is the text of the speech made by the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, on the draft budget.

    Value for money and freezing the precept

    Good morning. This administration has been dedicated to delivering value for Londoners’ money, and to leading the city to a strong economic recovery. You must remember that in the last four years we have not only been dealing with the deepest recession for 50 years.We have had to overturn and reform a culture of waste in City Hall.I might mention the £37000 spent on first class tickets to Havana, the £10,000 spent on a subscription to the Morning Star.These were the just the symptoms of a regime that could casually spend £34 m on architects drawings and consultancy for a west London tram that had no chance of happening. A regime that was happy to squander tens if not hundreds of millions on LDA projects, some of which verged on the dodgy.

    We have delivered sound finance to London government, with a 25 per cent reduction in managers at TFL, which now has 3500 fewer staff and which will have vacated 23 buildings by March.We have secured £2bn in savings already, and those savings would have been unthinkable under the previous administration. This budget delivers a further £1.5 bn of savings. And it is those savings that have allowed us to concentrate scarcer resources on the priorities of Londoners.

    We promised a 24 hour freedom pass – and we delivered it and will protect it.We promised a booze ban on public transport. We delivered it and with the help of hundreds of extra crime fighters we have made the tube network the safest in Europe and brought bus crime down by 30 per cent.I scrapped the vindictive £25 charge on family cars, and I kept my promise and listened to what Londoners really thought of the western extension zone of the C charge. I promised the world’s best cycle hire scheme, and it has been so successful that there are demands for it to be extended to other areas.

    We didn’t rage pointlessly at the Train Operating Companies – we persuaded them to take oyster on the overground, with the result that millions of Londoners not only have that convenience but cheaper oyster fares.It is under this administration that the east London line was completed, on time and on budget – and it was this administration that drove forward its second phase, to Clapham junction, to finish London’s first orbital railway. We were the first administration to introduce a roadworks permit scheme, which now has 27 of the 33 boroughs signed up to and the rest shortly to come on board. This is now beginning to control the number of roadworks. They are now down a quarter on the TLRN from their peak. And when we get lane rental the war on roadworks will have a new and formidable weapon.

    Transport investment

    This budget builds on our success in securing – despite the tightest spending round in generations – funding to deliver in full Crossrail and the Tube upgrades. When we arrived in City Hall we found a creaking public transport system that had suffered from decades of under-investment. It was obvious that the PPP contracts were not delivering upgrades and were wasting hundreds of millions of pounds. It was this administration that ended that madness – and will allow us to ensure that we save Londoners hundreds of millions of pounds, and deliver the upgrades on time and on budget and in a way that suits the needs of the London travelling public.

    We know that TFL staff are dealing with antiquated assets – and that when a 1920s signal box goes wrong at Edgware road it can disrupt 250,000 journeys. The hole punch signalling technology at Earl’s Court and the 40 percent of the Tube’s rolling stock past its expected lifespan. If the upgrades didn’t happen these assets would fail more frequently, resulting in a 30 percent reduction in capacity. Londoners will be asking as they make their decision what will be cut by those who call for a £1.2 billion reduction in TfL’s revenue. Perhaps it’s the Bank station congestion relief work, or the upgrades on the Piccadilly and Bakerloo lines. Or perhaps the sub-surface lines. Or congestion relief works at Victoria, Tottenham Court Road and Bond Street stations. Or cutting the Safer Transport Teams and the bus network. Which would it be? I know we will be rehearsing these arguments over and over again and I understand the politics of it. As has my predecessor who has made the same promise in 2000, 2004 and 2008 and yet has never actually delivered on that promise.

    Policing and Crime

    Turning now to the MPS budget. It is the first priority of the Mayor to keep Londoners safe and I believe in keeping numbers high. That is why I am re-balancing the precept towards the police to maintain those numbers. And of course again I understand the politically motivated but frankly false claims made by some about “police cuts”. There will be around 1,000 more fully warranted police officers on London’s streets at the end of this term than I inherited. That along with more than doubling the number of specials from 2,500 to over 5,000 and single patrolling has meant that there will be one million more visible police patrols at the end of this term than at the beginning. All of this has meant an overall reduction in crime over this Mayoral term of over 10 percent.

    Youth violence is down over 15 percent, robberies down almost 17 percent. Remember back in 2007 the numbers of teenage homicides. Just one is one too many but programmes like Operation Blunt 2, which has taken 11,000 knives off the streets and Time for Action has had a genuine effect with the number of violent teenage deaths, with the number halved. This budget builds on the successes of this term and there will be NO police cuts while I am Mayor. We will keep numbers at what I believe to be a safe level, which is around 32,000. Safer Neighbourhood Teams are sacrosanct under me. They will all retain their structure of at least 2 PCs and 3 PCSOs overseen by a sergeant.I would like to take this opportunity to pay tribute to all of those who served on the MPA the past 12 years. And to Kit Malthouse for his excellent chairing of that body and now leading the MOPC through difficult negotiations to deliver this excellent budget for the Met.

    LFEPA

    LFEPA has had real success over the last 4 years with the fire brigade engaging much more with the community, increasing the number of home fire safety visits by over 80 percent and the incidences of arsons has halved. This budget builds on the success delivering more savings to a total of £48 million during this Mayoral term. This year saw some of the busiest nights in the Fire Brigade’s recent history and I pay tribute to all of London’s firefighters for managing the situation with their usual professionalism and incredible bravery. The London Fire Brigade has been an exemplar of the public sector doing more for less and sensible investment for long-term savings. In this budget we are using £4.469 million in ear-marked reserves to buy-out outdated terms and conditions, which will save £1.362 million every year hereafter. Under this Mayor there will be absolutely no reduction in fire cover and we will continue to make London a safer city.

    City Hall (LDA + HCA)

    The last year has seen the LDA and the HCA successfully integrated into the GLA. My budget cements that ensuring full delivery of their programmes. I promised that I would deliver 50,000 new affordable homes – the most in any single Mayoral term. And despite the terrible economic conditions of the past few years by May they be. And during the next investment round, over 2011 – 2015, we will deliver a record breaking 55,000 affordable homes, which will not only house London’s workers but will also create 100,000 jobs.

    The apprenticeships programme has succeeded well beyond our expectations, surpassing our original targets with 40,000 already underway. The budget gives us the means to deliver our new target of 100,000 by the end of this year. This budget allows us to complete the delivery of £216 million to regenerate the capital coming from my Regeneration and Outer London Funds and the Growing Places Fund. Together, these are helping to give our high streets a real boost. Some traders in Orpington and Bromley have seen a significant increase in footfall and sales following investment from round one of the Outer London Fund. And I know we all look forward to the delivery of round 2, which will see 23 projects across 18 boroughs. This budget allows these investments without any extra borrowing – again showing how this administration’s careful stewardship of the public finances will not burden future generations in debt – in stark contrast to the former Labour government.

    Olympics

    Last but not least this budget delivers, through the new Mayoral Development Corporation, a true legacy for the Olympic and Paralympic Games, on time and on budget.And this budget delivers the legacy that had been promised. There will be 10,000 new homes – 40 percent of them family sized – and 10,000 permanent jobs in addition to all those already created by Westfield and other regenerated parts of east London. We are carrying forward a £30m programme in grass roots sport – with more to come – to deliver a sporting and health legacy. For young and older Londoners ; and I thank Kate Hoey for everything she is doing on this.

    Growing the economy

    This is a budget that builds on this administration’s achievements over the last 45 months. It delivers the promises I made four years ago and is a budget to grow London’s economy. London has a fantastic future. We are in the right time zone, speak the right language, and unlike virtually any other city in western Europe we have a young and growing population. But that dynamic and growing city needs investment if it is to compete. We need new river crossings. We need to extend and improve the tube network. We need to continue to improve reliability, and to end the scandal of overcrowding on a scale that would not be tolerated for the carriage of livestock.

    We have a choice. We could go for a short-term political swindle that will cut more than a billion from our investments – and which would simply drive fares even higher in the future. Or we can keep going with our programme of driving down crime, investing in transport, and growing the London economy.We can go back to the politics of waste and division and posturing. Or we can get on with the work of improving the lives of Londoners. I want to get on with that work, and I commend this budget to the assembly.

  • Boris Johnson – 2007 Conservative Party Conference Speech

    borisjohnson

    Below is the text of the speech made by Boris Johnson at the 2007 Conservative Party Conference in Blackpool on 30th September 2007.

    I stand before you proud to be your candidate, proud to be given the chance to represent the greatest city on earth, but what gives me the greatest pride of all is that from day one I have provoked such gibbering squeals of denunciation from King Newt and his allies that I know they are scared and they can see all too clearly that we Conservatives are launching a fightback in London that will recapture the capital for common sense government for the first time in a generation.

    And when people ask me are you serious about this I can tell them that I can think of nothing more serious than the security and prosperity of the powerhouse of the British economy and whose booming service industries are the best possible vindication of the revolutions brought in by Conservative governments.

    That’s why in the last weeks and months I have been travelling through all 32 boroughs, sometimes in a Routemaster bus, sometimes at the wheel of that bus.

    And in the hundreds of miles I travelled, I marvelled at the diversity of this city and I met hundreds of people who offered me all sorts of opinions not all of them fit to be repeated; and of all the conversations I had, there is one that sticks in my mind with a 14 year old young offender in Wandsworth who looked me in the eye and said in the tones of one who knows all there is to know about growing up in 21st century London: “The trouble is these days that adults are scared of kids”.

    I have to tell you conference that I felt a certain challenge in his gaze and we both knew that he was saying something that was both sad and true about Britain today, and one of the reasons I want to be Mayor is that I want to help change that feeling on the streets of London.

    Believe you me, the Mayor of London does have the power to end the climate of intimidation on too many bus routes and take away free travel from the minority of young people who are abusing their privilege and turning buses into glorified getaway cars and when they are caught we want to give the Community Support Officers real powers to make a difference. Because I have been out with the Safer Neighbourhood teams and I have seen how they do not even have an incentive to detain a shoplifter because that means summoning a Police Constable who then has to spend 4 and a half hours processing the case when he should be out on the beat deterring more serious crimes. And that, conference, is criminal.

    Above all I want to work with the people in London who are tackling the most fundamental problem of all the tragedy that these kids are themselves afraid, afraid that THEY will be stabbed, and who see the gang and the gang culture as the only real source in their lives of authority and community and esteem.

    That is why I want to support the work of people like Ray Lewis of Eastside Young Leaders Academy and Camila Batmangeligh of Kids Company who in a completely non-ideological way are helping our most disadvantaged young people to see that there is another future and to raise their aspirations and to give them hope because I believe Conservatives win when we enable people to fulfil their aspirations.

    As Mayor I want to give hope to the tens of thousands of people in London who do not have a place they can call home. There is so much scope for more imaginative shared ownership schemes and backing David Cameron’s plans to lift the stamp duty threshold for first time buyers and using mayoral power to encourage more social housing and more rented housing; but not in the counter-productive and anti-democratic way of Gordon Brown’s new friend the Labour candidate who seeks to wreck the skyline of London’s boroughs, by going against the wishes of local communities and their leaders.

    With rabbit-hutch tower blocks containing some of the smallest rooms in Europe and a blind repetition of the mistakes of the 1960s Conference, let’s stop this ego-fuelled civil war in London and let’s build homes that will still be loved and valued and conserved in 100 years time so that future generations will look back on our generation with admiration and respect for our foresight, and not blame us for the ghettoes of tomorrow.

    I want to give hope to all those who feel they have lost the basic right to get to work on time by building Crossrail now, getting the Underground repaired and improved, bringing an end to the jack-knifing, traffic-blocking, self-combusting, cyclist-crushing bendy buses, and yes, I want a greener London; a London where more trees are being planted than are being cut down and I want us all to have the confidence to cycle.

    My friends, people say the mayor has no power. They say he is just a figurehead. Well I say nonsense. They have not studied the enormous budgets he wields. Ken Livingstone and Gordon Brown have got to realise that they can’t keep taxing and bullying and delivering so little in return.

    It’s time to build on the record of Conservative councils across London who have found savings and shown there is another way.

    They have kept council tax low while they have created safer, cleaner and greener streets. If they can do it, so can I, and over the next few months, that will mean a policy lockdown and crunching the numbers so that when the election begins in 2008 we will have a winning manifesto that is based on Conservative principles of freedom and democracy and taxpayer value.

    On May 1st join me in winning back London not for you and me but because our nation’s capital deserves more.