Tag: Speeches

  • Michael Ancram – 2002 Speech to the Scottish Conservative Party Conference

    Michael Ancram – 2002 Speech to the Scottish Conservative Party Conference

    The speech made by Michael Ancram in Perth, Scotland on 17 May 2002.

    It is a particular pleasure to be back among so many old friends addressing the Scottish Conservative Party Conference in Perth again.

    We meet at a time of growing frustration in Scotland. Not with the Parliament. Certainly not with our MSPs who under David McLetchie do such sterling work.

    But frustration with the failure of those who run the Scottish Executive, those Labour and Liberal political inadequates who are undermining Scotland with their incompetence, diminishing Scotland with their pettiness, and burying Scotland in their mediocrity.

    You have a vital duty to perform for Scotland next year. You must chuck them out. You must sweep them away. You must replace them with Conservatives who have the vision to take Scotland forward again. You must win.

    This motion today has been most ably moved by a real winner, my parliamentary colleague Peter Duncan. He is the shining proof that you can and will win.

    Today’s debate has been important and constructive. Constructive in the excellent contributions we have heard. Important because we live once again in a disturbingly unstable world.

    It is a world where the Cold War certainties and the ironic but real equilibrium of the great blocs are gone, replaced by invisible enemies, by unscrupulous regimes and by the threat of weapons of mass destruction and of terrorists capable of using them against us all.

    September 11 woke us up to this. It reminded us of our vulnerability and made us conscious of the need to build and strengthen friendships in the world again.

    I have always believed in loyalty, and trust and friendship.

    Loyalty to those who have stood and still stand by us; trust in those with whom we can do business; and friendship with those whose values we share.

    Immediately after 11 September Tony Blair understood this. I paid tribute to his role in building the international coalition against terrorism, and we gave him our support – as we continue to give support to our brave servicemen and women who he has deployed actively in that fight on our behalf. On this day of reported engagement in Afghanistan today we wish them well.

    But then power went to Tony Blair’s head.

    Building coalitions suddenly turned into his extraordinary vainglorious ‘I can heal the World’ speech to his conference last October.

    Heal the world! He can’t even heal the public services here at home.

    Far from bringing healing, his so-called ‘ethical foreign policy’ has been shot through by betrayal and surrender.

    Blair told his Conference he would heal the scars of Africa, that “if Rwanda happened again today … we would have a moral duty to act there”, and that he would “not tolerate … the behaviour of Mugabe’s henchmen”.

    Brave words which raised hopes in Zimbabwe. Black and white Zimbabweans alike believed that Blair would move to halt the excesses of Robert Mugabe and his thugs and to secure the fair elections which would have got rid if him.

    But as is so often the case, Blair’s promises were only words.

    He went to Africa in January, but he never went near Zimbabwe.

    When the illegal land grabs began, he wrung his hands and did nothing. The same when voter registration began to be rigged last November.

    When we called for real pressure on Mugabe, he and Jack Straw accused us of irresponsibility. Well, whatever happened to their responsibility?

    In the face of murder and torture in Zimbabwe and the stolen election whatever happened to Blair’s ‘moral duty to act’?

    And since the elections in March what has he done? The murders continue, the torture and the violation of human right grows, the land grabs become ever more vicious, and what do Blair and Straw do?

    Where is the active non-toleration he promised? As Zimbabwe bleeds, they dither and they still do nothing. The betrayal continues, and it shames us all.

    There is still just a chance to retrieve something.

    We must build on the targeted sanctions and bring together a wider international coalition including the US, the Commonwealth, the EU, and the neighbouring states in Southern Africa to exert real pressure on the Mugabe regime to hold new free and fair elections under international scrutiny. Only that way can true democracy be restored and the betrayal be ended.

    There is another great betrayal.

    This Government have spent the last six months seeking to betray our fellow British citizens in Gibraltar, to sell out their British sovereignty, just to curry a little favour with Spain. I have little against Spain, but I do mind about loyalty and friendship.

    Blair and Straw together have turned their backs on centuries of loyalty to Britain. They have used the tactics of the bully down the ages, bad mouthing the people of Gibraltar, and issuing veiled threats as to what will happen if the Government does not its way get.

    They have sought to stitch up a shabby backroom deal with Spain to share sovereignty over the rock.

    But sovereignty shared is sovereignty surrendered, and ends up as no sovereignty at all.

    This has from the outset been a misbegotten and dishonourable process. Gibraltarians will have no part of it. And, as I made clear in Gibraltar last Monday, neither will we.

    An incoming Conservative Government will not feel bound by any deal on sovereignty which has not received the freely and democratically expressed consent of the people of Gibraltar.

    The Government is now set on a course which can only end in tears, in confrontation with the Spanish Government or with the people of Gibraltar or with both. They should without delay suspend these wretched talks, turn back from this betrayal and think again.

    And then there is Surrender.

    Surrender to the growing forces of integration in Europe.

    Surrender to the concept of a common foreign policy, so that we no longer know today – for instance on the Middle East – whether there is such a thing as British Foreign policy any more.

    Undermining NATO by our ill advised and headlong rush into the European Rapid Reaction Force without any prospect of securing the resources to make it work.

    Surrendering ever more areas of decision making within Europe. Thirty-one national vetoes surrendered in the Nice Treaty alone.

    Surrender is a word which flows readily from New Labour lips. It will not flow from ours.

    Certainly the ‘ethical foreign policy’ is dead and buried, replaced by sell-out, betrayal and surrender.

    And in the middle of all this poor old Jack Straw. Chased by Hain and Hoon who both want his job, and ignored by Tony Blair who does it.

    Our foreign policies will be based on the world as we find it. We will stop the fantasising and return to the basic principle of building our foreign policy on our national interests and on doing what we do best.

    In the Middle East we have a role to play, particularly with the lessons we learned the hard way in Northern Ireland, in showing how out of the most violent and darkest of situations, dialogue can be restarted and a roadmap of a possible way through to a two state agreement can be produced. Not by military action, nor by international bullying. But through dialogue which must be home grown.

    And there are wider international objectives we must pursue. September 11 created a new bond of friendship and shared values between the US and the UK in the knowledge that we can do things better together than by ourselves.

    This historic relationship has always been one of partnership not subservience.

    That is what we must now work on.

    A renewed Atlantic Charter based on the reality that Europe and America work best in partnership rather than in rivalry, with the UK at the heart of it.

    There are however those in Europe today who believe that the EU will only meet its objectives when it becomes a rival to America with its own Foreign and Security policy.

    They set a false and dangerous choice, one which could drive the US away from us at a time when the US does not so much need us as we need the US. It would be bad for Europe and for us.

    We want to see not Europe or America but Europe and America with us as the natural bridge.

    Europe must change, and Europe knows it. For the first time Europe is actually talking about itself critically, looking to the shape and structure it should take to meet the challenges of the 21st century.

    The growing gulf between people and institutions in the EU underlines the need for change and calls for greater democratic accountability, and so do we. Recent votes in Europe make that process ever more relevant and ever more urgent.

    That process has begun, and we want to be constructively engaged in it. We want to see a fundamental review of Europe to ascertain what is working, what is not, what is out of date and what can be improved. We believe that as the EU prepares with our support for enlargement the time for such a review has come.

    We believe in conducting that review there should be no ‘no-go’ areas, no sealed vaults, no untouchable ‘acquis’. We must be rigorous.

    That which is working in the right direction and is valuable, such as the single market, we must improve and strengthen. That which is not working or is obsolete we should discard.

    The ways forward are there.

    They certainly do not include the ridiculous suggestion yesterday of creating a new powerful presidential position at the top of Europe to give Emperor Blair something to look forward to in his retirement.

    Nor are they the cynical ‘now we see you, now we don’t’ Euro-games being played by the Prime Minster and his favourite side-kick ‘Honest’ Steve Byers.

    Such suggestions and games only increase cynicism and alienation.

    We want to deal seriously with the future of Europe. We want to see an enlarged Europe, a partnership of sovereign nations, working together to strengthen the single market whilst retaining basic rights of national self-determination.

    We want a European Union built from the bottom up, an EU which derives its power from the national parliaments and which is accountable to them.

    We are part of the EU and intend to remain so.

    But we also occupy that unique position from which we can bring Europe and America closer together – and the Commonwealth too.

    We can return to our traditional role of bringing people together, of bringing democracy and free trade to other countries to their benefit and ours.

    And in doing so we can show that we still believe in the United Kingdom of which Scotland is such a crucial part.

    That as so often in the past we are the only party which has pride in our values, in our history and in our future too.

    People instinctively know that in Iain Duncan Smith we have a leader who will always hold that pride and those values high.

    They cannot say the same for Tony Blair.

    So let our message be loud clear. We are proud of our country. We are proud of what we stand for.

    We will stand up for loyalty, for trust and for friendship again.

    We will show that the days of losing are over. That the days of being driven back are behind us.

    We have come out from behind the shadow of our own fear and have found our confidence again. We are on our way back.

    Let us go out from here and win.

  • Michael Howard – 2002 Speech to the Scottish Conservative Party Conference

    Michael Howard – 2002 Speech to the Scottish Conservative Party Conference

    The speech made by Michael Howard on 17 May 2022.

    Introduction

    Creating the right climate for enterprise to flourish is one of the most important goals for any government.

    When enterprise is undermined, it is the weakest and most vulnerable who stand to suffer the most. It is the most vulnerable who lose their jobs first when business has to lay people off to pay the latest tax. It is the most vulnerable who get left behind in pay, or in training, because companies have to spend their resources coping with another batch of red tape instead.

    But a strong enterprise economy helps those in work and those looking for work. And it helps us to fund the public services on which patients, parents and passengers rely.

    Yet that enterprise economy, on which our public services depend, is being undermined. While headline economic indicators have seemed favourable, there are worrying signs beneath the surface. Imbalances are developing in the economy. Problems are being stored up for the future.

    It is the Government itself which must shoulder much of the blame for this.

    Of course, not everything Labour have done is wrong. And where we agree with what they have done, as in the reforms which have taken place in the setting of interest rates, we will not be afraid to say so. Conservatives will not oppose for the sake of opposition.

    Nor will we change things for the sake of change. We understand that it is not in the interests of business or anyone else for economic policy to lurch from one extreme to another, just for the sake of it, whenever a new government gets elected. Where continuity can be achieved it should be nurtured.

    But we won’t be afraid to criticise Labour, either, in Westminster and in Holyrood, when we think criticism is justified.

    Our criticism on the economy is not that Labour have destroyed it single-handedly, or that they have imposed 98 per cent tax rates as they did in the past, or that they are embarking on wholesale re-nationalization.

    Our criticism is that Labour simply don’t understand how business works.

    Criticism of Labour on Enterprise

    The pace of change in the business world has never been faster than it is today. The prizes go to those who respond quickly and flexibly.

    So creating the conditions for enterprise to flourish involves reducing the burdens on business. Which means governments getting out of the way. Interfering less. Limiting the burden of tax. Getting rid of unnecessary red tape. Above all, allowing business to do what it does best: win orders and create jobs.

    And crucially, which firm wins the order and creates the jobs is decided at the margin. It is at the margin that the extra tax or new regulation can determine whether a company takes on an extra worker or lays one off – and, ultimately, whether that company succeeds or fails.

    That is why each additional business tax and each new piece of red tape from Labour is so damaging. On its own each measure may not seem much. But taken together Labour have imposed £6 billion a year of extra business tax, and another £6 billion a year costs in red tape.

    So for all the rhetoric about enterprise, the Government have been slowly undermining Britain’s enterprise culture. Month by month. Measure by measure. Step by step.

    Budget: General Effect on Business

    And the Budget which Gordon Brown announced last month was one such step. One more step in the undermining of Britain’s enterprise culture.

    No Chancellor who understood the needs of business would have introduced that Budget.

    Last year, Labour were elected on a Scottish Manifesto which said: `We must make Britain the best place to do business in Europe…. That means… the right competitive framework to support enterprise, small and large, manufacturing and services’.

    Then, after that promise, in his very first Budget after that election Gordon Brown lumbers business with a £4 billion tax on jobs and another £1.1 billion in business taxes on top.

    It is no good Labour talking the language of enterprise and business and then bringing in a Budget which will do as much to damage the future of enterprise and business as anything else they have done.

    And the timing for Scotland – and for the UK as a whole – could not have been worse.

    Just two days before the Budget, Strathclyde University’s Fraser of Allander Institute published the latest Scottish Chambers of Commerce Business Survey. It showed that the ‘prospects in manufacturing appear to be improving slowly, but there is still some way to go before growth returns’ (15 April 2002).

    In fact, over the last year manufacturing output in the UK has fallen at its sharpest rate for a decade. But just at the time when manufacturing is struggling to emerge from recession, the Government’s reward is a new tax on jobs. This tax is not a tax on profits. It is not a tax on turnover. It is, quite simply, a tax on jobs. A tax which now gives every firm in the land a direct incentive to hire as few staff as possible – and for larger firms to shift employment abroad.

    It is little wonder that the reaction from business has been so hostile. The Director of CBI Scotland said members were `very disappointed’ at the further burdens on business. The Deputy Director of the Scottish Chambers of Commerce said: `This increase in national insurance is likely to become an employment tax’.

    Even before the Budget, CBI figures showed that, of our five trading partners, only one had higher taxes on business. Now the ability of British companies to compete in world markets will be further undermined.

    Month by month. Measure by measure. Step by step. Undermining the enterprise culture in Britain.

    Oil Tax and Scotland

    And as one who represents a Scottish constituency, Gordon Brown of all people should have known the damage which another of his measures in particular will inflict.

    Across the UK, almost 300,000 people work in the oil and gas industry. Many more depend on it for their livelihoods. In fact oil-industry-related employment accounts for around 6 per cent of the total workforce in Scotland, and a much higher proportion in North East Scotland.

    The Government’s oil tax – the 10 per cent supplementary charge on profits – has been condemned by all in the industry, many of whom regard it as a fundamental breach of faith.

    In fact only a year and a half ago the Chancellor said this: `It has been put to me that North sea oil companies earning higher profits from higher oil prices should be subject to special taxes, but… I am determined not to make short-term decisions based on short-term factors. The key issue is the level of long-term investment in the North sea. This will be the approach that will guide Budget decisions in future’ (Hansard, 8 Nov 2000, column 317).

    So much for that pledge. So much for basing decisions on long-term perspectives rather than short-term factors. That is precisely what the Chancellor did not do with his oil tax.

    Chancellors come and chancellors go. But investment decisions last for decades. A Chancellor on the look out for new taxes to fill a back hole in his finances should recognise that this decision will have an effect for years to come. The industry has warned that some new fields, on the margin, may not now proceed, and that the tax could deter long-term investment.

    To remove an amount eventually totalling, on some estimates, £1 billion a year from the industry is bound to have an effect on investment decisions and on jobs, especially at a time of uncertainty in oil prices worldwide.

    Not only that but, despite all the Government’s talk about the importance of consultation, there was no consultation with the oil companies at all.

    Until a couple of years ago, Gordon Brown thought users of fuel were a soft target for his stealth taxes. He was proved wrong. Now he is trying to tax the producers as well. Once again he needs to be sent a clear message: hands off our fuel.

    Other Taxes

    The oil tax is not the only Labour tax rise to hit business in Scotland. The aggregates tax may have a disproportionately negative effect on the Scottish economy.

    And it is as a result of Labour’s policies north of the border that Scottish businesses are now expected to pay nine per cent more in business rates than their English counterparts.

    Public Services

    The great tragedy is that none of these tax increases, whether from Edinburgh or from Westminster, is likely to lead to the real improvement in public services everyone – including business – wants to see.

    Every year the Government promise us better public services in return for higher taxes. But every year we just get the higher taxes.

    Now, as in previous years, the Government claims the extra money is for the NHS. Of course the NHS needs more resources. But it also needs change and modernization. And without both, the Government wont be any more successful this year in keeping its promises to improve the NHS than it was last year or the year before or the year before that. And, more importantly, patients won’t get the standard of health care which they are entitled to expect.

    Anyone in England who doubts this just needs to ask the people of Scotland. Here, spending on health rose by 28 per cent ahead of inflation between 1996-7 and 2001-2. Yet the average waiting time for an outpatient appointment has risen by more than 25 per cent since September 1997.

    What’s more, public sector employers across the UK – nurses, doctors, teachers, police and fire officers – will themselves bear much of the brunt of the rise in National Insurance Contributions.

    This just goes to show the sheer absurdity of the Government’s position. First they refuse to change and reform the public services, so we will not see the improvements that we all want. Next they increase employee contribution rates for many of the very public sector workers that we are relying on to try to improve these services. And, finally, they hit the services themselves with a £1.2 billion tax bill, in the name of raising more resources for those very same services. The British people deserve better.

    Regulations

    Higher taxes are not the only ways in which the enterprise culture is being undermined. Last year 4,642 new regulations were introduced in the UK. Not only is that a record. It is an increase of nearly 50 per cent on the number introduced in 1997. That number includes 494 Scottish regulations – up from 203 in 1999, an increase of more than 140 per cent.

    I defy anyone to claim that introducing 4,642 regulations in one year is justified. Whether or not a valid reason can be found for each one, the cumulative total is undermining the enterprise culture. Measure by measure. Month by month. Step by step.

    Conclusion

    And so the Conservative Party north and south of the border needs to put the case for enterprise. In doing so, our themes will often be the same. So are many of our opponents.

    But the emerging success story for the Conservative Party in Scotland since devolution is how our shared Conservative themes and principles are being applied to the distinct circumstances of this nation. Our parties north and south are working together for success in the contests each of us face.

    The most immediate Parliamentary contest comes next year. This Conference is an important spring board for the Scottish Parliamentary Elections. We are showing how we can apply our Conservative principles to the development of fresh and distinct policies.

    Above all, this Conference is helping to demonstrate how Iain Duncan Smith is changing the Conservative Party, and we are getting back in touch with people’s priorities. That means providing better hospitals, better schools, better transport. It means extending a voice to the vulnerable, and opportunity to those who have been left behind. It means making a real and practical difference to the lives of everyone in our communities.

    Your task and mine, and the task of everyone who speaks for our Party, is to show how we are getting back in touch with the people of Scotland and England alike.

    So that north and south of the border we will have the opportunity to put our policies into effect. And to make a real difference to the lives of the people we serve.

  • Mark Webster – 2022 Statement on Behaviour of PC Amelia Shearer

    Mark Webster – 2022 Statement on Behaviour of PC Amelia Shearer

    The statement made by Mark Webster, the Chief Constable of Cleveland Police, on 25 August 2022.

    Officers must adhere to the highest standards of behaviour and exemplify our values, whether on or off duty. The actions of this officer [Amelia Shearer] are incompatible with my expectations for those who serve in Cleveland and out of keeping with their role, which other officers uphold with pride and integrity.

    Cleveland police’s department of standards and ethics prepare evidence for misconduct hearings. Evidence is heard and a determination made by a panel chaired by an independent, legally qualified chair.

    The misconduct process is in place to protect our standards and ensure public confidence in policing so we are concerned by the outcome determined at yesterday’s hearing. We are now considering the legal options available to us.

  • Iain Duncan Smith – 2002 Speech to Scottish Conservative Conference

    Iain Duncan Smith – 2002 Speech to Scottish Conservative Conference

    The speech made by Iain Duncan Smith, the then Leader of the Opposition, on 18 May 2002.

    Next year a new Scottish Parliament will be elected. Elections that will be a referendum, not just on the performance of the first Scottish Executive, but also on the performance of the Scottish Parliament itself.

    Three years ago, 129 MSPs were elected with the goodwill and enthusiasm of the Scottish people. And together they carried the high hopes of a proud nation into Holyrood.

    But three years of bickering, pettiness and politically correct trivia have dashed those hopes. Nothing illustrates this better than the way Tony Blair seeks to play games over the European issue. To have Stephen Byers brief the press that they are going to hold a referendum and then to deny it is cynical politics of the worst kind. Instead of trying to jump on the Euro issue he should be spending his time sorting out our failing health service, the rising levels of violent crime and the poor quality of our schools.

    Scotland, like Britain as a whole, faces deep-seated social problems and failing public services.

    The Scottish people looked to the Scottish Parliament for solutions but they have looked in vain.

    The Labour-Liberal Democrat Executive does not share the Scottish people’s priorities.

    As drugs continue to claim the lives of our young people, the only smack that the Scottish Executive seek to protect children from is the discipline of their parents.

    As rising crime drives decent people from the streets, the Scottish Executive seem more interested in making the fields safe for foxes.

    And as vulnerable people in our hard-pressed communities cry out for decent housing, Labour and Liberal Democrat politicians are spending £300m on a monument to their egos.

    For those of us that opposed the Scottish Parliament, the temptation is to say ‘I told you so’.

    But that is a temptation we must resist.

    In the overwhelming result of the 1997 referendum, the settled will of the Scottish people was made clear. And despite all the disappointments of the last few years, that will remains unchanged.

    The Conservative task is to make the Scottish Parliament work by ensuring that it rises to the challenge of serving every person and every community in Scotland.

    The Scottish parliament needs more MSPs with new ideas on how to improve our schools and cut hospital waiting times.

    The Scottish Parliament needs more Conservative MSPs who want to spend money on fighting crime rather than on expensive pet-projects.

    The Scottish Parliament needs more Conservative MSPs who will deliver effective help for the vulnerable.

    The Scottish Parliament needs more Conservative MSPs who will speak up for rural Scotland as well as urban Scotland.

    The Scottish Parliament needs more Conservative MSPs who aren’t going to spend all of their time campaigning for independence.

    It needs more Conservative MSPs to join a team so ably led by David McLetchie.

    Last week David set out the five key themes that will guide the Scottish Conservative Party as it prepares for next year’s Parliamentary Elections: economic security; safe streets; first class public services for all; support for stronger families and communities; and a real safety-net for the vulnerable.

    I spoke about helping the vulnerable during last summer’s Conservative Party leadership election. I spoke of “the caring hearts and practical agendas of men such as Wilberforce and Shaftesbury”.

    Wilberforce and Shaftesbury embody the Conservative approach to vulnerability: blending compassion with practical effectiveness.

    They championed great causes: freedom for the slave, help for the mentally ill, and education for all.

    And today is a time for championing great causes, too.

    People are switched off by politicians who would rather get a good newspaper headline than get something done.

    But they respond to people who hold strong beliefs that are matched by effective policies.

    The Labour and Liberal Democrat Scottish Executive is beginning to lose the battle of newspaper headlines but it has already lost the battle on public services and it has failed to help the vulnerable.

    Nearly three months ago David McLetchie and I visited the Easterhouse estate in Glasgow. Today I visited there again to learn about how beyond the reach of Government they are able to help those in difficulty and need.

    These visits are part of a number of visits that I and other Conservatives have been making to poverty-fighting projects all over Britain. But Easterhouse summed up the challenge that vulnerable people and vulnerable neighbourhoods face.

    All of the major signs of vulnerability were present: crime; drugs; inadequate housing; failing public services; too many people without rewarding work; and too many children who never see their fathers.

    But there were sources of hope, too: neighbours helping each other out; single mothers dedicating their lives to their children; and community and churchleaders providing constant care and support.

    People in Easterhouse have been failed by politicians. But they don’t want government to give up and run away – they want government to do things differently.

    I believe in a government that devolves power and responsibility to local communities. While Labour trusts the state, Conservatives trust people.

    When Labour thinks of community – it thinks of politicians, committees and taskforces. When Conservatives think of community we think of the family, local schools, charities, and places of worship. These are the people-sized institutions that operate on a human scale. In them we find friendship, identity and belonging. They are the building blocks of a neighbourly society.

    Government cannot solve every social challenge but government can support these institutions and the values that energise them.

    That is why the Conservative manifesto for the next Scottish Parliamentary elections will contain practical ideas to support families, charities, social entrepreneurs and other people in the frontline against poverty.

    The manifesto will also focus on schools, hospitals and crime-fighting. When I talk about failing schools, patients on waiting lists and street crime Tony Blair says that I’m exaggerating.

    When I read the relentlessly optimistic spinning put out by the present government, I am tempted to quote Groucho Marx: “What are you going to believe? Me? Or your own eyes?”

    For whatever Labour might want us to think, you do not need me to tell you that our schools and hospitals are getting worse. Our great public services desperately need reform.

    But not Labour’s kind of reform. Suffocating schools and hospitals under even more layers of bureaucracy, while leaving the underlying problems untouched.

    No, that kind of reform is all about helping Labour throw a cloak of lies over the evidence of their failure.

    It’s the sort of sleight of hand that keeps Tony Blair out of trouble, but leaves vulnerable people more exposed than ever.

    And it costs. Hard working families pay more in tax to fund these fake reforms. But as we know in Scotland, Labour can raise spending on schools and hospitals and still fail pupils and patients, teachers and nurses.

    Labour tax more and deliver less. The burden grows on rich and poor alike. But, the rich at least have a choice. They can pay again. They can buy their way out of the public sector and into private schools and hospitals.

    Most people don’t have that choice. Most people have nowhere else to go. Labour’s failure to reform the public services makes millions of people vulnerable – when illness strikes, when classrooms are disrupted, when crime brings fear to the streets.

    Labour’s fake reforms increase vulnerability. Conservatives are committed to real reforms that increase security.

    Conservative reforms that are straightforward and easy to understand. Conservative reforms that are built around familiar and trusted institutions and values.

    Conservative reforms that respect the public service professionals and strengthen the neighbourly society. What does that mean for the National Health Service?

    Its means an NHS that is responsive to local needs, local patients and local GPs. It means giving patients and their doctors a choice over their hospital treatment. It means freeing our hospitals from bureaucratic control and political interference. Hospitals will be part of the communities they serve.

    The same is true of our schools – which we will re-establish as local institutions. I want to stop that pitiless rain of central directives and clear the way for the leadership of head teachers and school governors.

    I am determined that teachers and school boards will have the respect not just of government, but, even more importantly, of their pupils too.

    We will not allow the disruptive few to damage the education of the many, we will give heads the authority to restore discipline in schools.

    And discipline will be the strength of schools that prepare their pupil not just for work, but also for life in all its fullness.

    Young people are under pressure as never before and parents want schools that help them to build character in their children, the strength to resist self-destructive behaviour and to achieve their hopes and dreams.

    We have failed our children for too long. And the evidence for that can be seen on the streets where young people are the victims of a culture of drugs and crime.

    We look to the police for protection and to the courts to stop the spiral of decline in both individuals and communities.

    But here too, the fake reformers are at work. Bureaucracy takes the place of action, central control the place of local accountability, political correctness the place of genuine care.

    Our police are pulled back from the fight against social disorder: and out of the petty crimes of vandalism, drug dealing and intimidation comes the threat and reality of mugging, rape and murder. None of us are completely safe, but again it is the vulnerable that suffer most of all.

    There is something seriously wrong with a society that leaves the poor, the young and the old unprotected on the frontline against fear. Conservatives will bring about real reform. We will put police back on the streets.

    Neighbourhood police officers that everyone knows – especially the local yobs.

    We will back them up with the powers that brought security back to the streets of American cities like New York.

    We won’t just hold the line against fear, we will take back the ground lost to forces of disorder and hand it back to the vulnerable.

    I want Conservatives to be the party most associated with new thinking on the real problems facing people and their communities.

    Conservatives will put forward real solutions to the problems of poverty, crime, hospital waiting times and poor discipline in schools.

    Only by focusing on real issues and effective solutions will politics be rescued from its current unpopularity.

    But politicians must also set a better example.

    Last week another terrible tragedy occurred on the railways. Every person who uses the railways sought reassurance that the government was serious about understanding what went wrong and that everything was being done to put things right for the future.

    Frankly, Stephen Byers was in no position to offer that reassurance.

    I simply do not understand why the Prime Minister keeps him in his Cabinet.

    Mr Byers is not only doing damage to the reputation of the Labour Party – my concern is that he is doing much greater damage to the whole reputation of politics and public life.

    People watch a Cabinet minister who lies and misleads but is never punished or rebuked.

    Mr Byers has demeaned Parliament and the office he holds. The longer he stays the deeper the taint in Tony Blair’s government.

    Politics will never be free from the kinds of people who make mistakes or behave badly. That is sadly the reality of human conduct in every walk of life.

    But politics needs leaders who will not excuse misconduct.

    I will not tolerate unacceptable attitudes or dishonesty from any Conservative politician.

    It is time that Tony Blair ended his weakness over his Transport Secretary.

    Mr Byers should go and he should go now.

    Labour in Scotland have had their own share of problems.

    David McLetchie properly exposed the office expenses scandal when the SNP opposition was either asleep or, perhaps, planning a photo opportunity at a TV studio.

    But the scandal of Scottish politics is as much about its scale as it is about its nature.

    There are simply too many politicians in Scotland.

    I began my speech by urging Scotland to elect more Conservative MSPs.

    But the Scottish Parliament needs fewer MSPs overall.

    Money being spent on extra politicians and their accommodation, spindoctors and bureaucracy can be much better used by the Scottish people themselves or by Scotland’s public services.

    Scotland’s voters reject the SNP because the SNP only have the one big, bad idea of smashing the United Kingdom.

    Scotland’s voters reject the Liberal Democrats because they surrendered their principles in return for a little power and must now share the blame for Labour’s terrible record on schools, hospitals and crime.

    For a long time Conservatives have been on the back foot in Scotland.

    In recent times there has been strong evidence that the tide is turning.

    For a start, there are more elected Conservatives across Scotland and for that I pay tribute to all of your hard work and to the leadership of Jacqui Lait and David McLetchie’s team.

    But even more significantly Scotland’s Conservatives are the party of new ideas. The party with the determination to find new solutions to the problems facing our schools, hospitals and other public services.

    In the 1980s and 1990s Conservatives focused upon the economy and by releasing the creativity of the British people the country was saved from economic meltdown.

    But we were not rejected without reason in 1997.

    People had not only become bored with us. Scotland’s people, in particular, felt we didn’t share their concerns and their values.

    The introduction of the poll tax in Scotland – one year ahead of the rest of Britain – encapsulated the problem.

    Things are changing.

    A difficult chapter of the recent Conservative Party history may be most associated with Scotland but it is a closed chapter.

    I urge Scotland’s people to look forward because the renewal of the Conservative vision was declared in Easterhouse and my commitment to helping the vulnerable is not a passing phase.

    We will deliver on the Conservative commitment to fight crime and improve Scotland’s schools and hospitals. No stone is being left unturned as we search for practical solutions in America, France, Sweden, Holland and Germany to improve peoples lives.

    Next year’s local and Parliamentary elections are vital for Scotland.

    Scotland’s voters will have a chance to endorse the terrible record of Labour and the Liberal Democrats or they can vote for real change.

    The SNP will never deliver real change because they never have any new ideas.
    David McLetchie and I are united as Conservatives but we are also united in our love for this country.
    Scottish Conservatives are from Scotland, of Scotland and for Scotland. We are the only alternative to the socialists, the separatists and the cynical Liberal Democrats.

    Only Scotland’s Conservatives will deliver action against crime. Action to improve our schools and cut waiting times. Action to cut the cost of politics – real solutions to the problems of vulnerable communities.

    Now is our opportunity to show the Scottish people that the Conservative and Unionist party deserves their trust again. It is a challenge for all of us and a challenge we must rise to.

  • Jacqui Lait – 2002 Speech at Scottish Conservative Party Conference

    Jacqui Lait – 2002 Speech at Scottish Conservative Party Conference

    The speech made by Jacqui Lait, the then Shadow Secretary of State for Scotland, on 18 May 2002.

    Ladies and Gentleman, before I begin, I have to make an announcement.

    A diary has been found, and it is clearly the property of someone who probably wants it back as soon as possible. It is a big – rather grand affair – BUT looking through it, it is pretty empty. It might help identify the owner if I read out a couple of the entries, in fact given how little of substance there is in the diary, I’m tempted to read out a whole week. – But I won’t!

    Whilst there is little real work listed, there does seem to be a lot of travelling, a lot of party meetings, and plenty of social events. There is even a reference to mid-week, mid afternoon French Lessons!!! It sounds just like Helen Liddell’s week and, so if she is watching, and lets me know, I will be happy to pass it to her.

    Since I accepted the Leader’s invitation to shadow Helen Liddell, I have been sad to see how the great office of Secretary of State for Scotland has been reduced. We now have a Cabinet Minister paid a salary of almost £120,000 who has so little to do that she spends an hour in the middle of the working week learning French. If she worked a 40 hour week, and took these lessons every week for a year, that would mean you and I paying £3000 to her to learn French. Now I know that we Scots have always had an affinity with the French, but I wonder how many of you think the Auld Alliance is worth paying for like this.

    Having a French surname as I do, you won’t be surprised to learn that I’m not anti French, in fact, I like them – but I don’t expect the taxpayer to fund me to learn their language!

    I believe that Scotland has a right to see the position of Secretary of State made to work properly. Scotland deserves a Secretary of State who does a full time job.

    Helen Liddell has my sympathy; after all, it cannot be easy sitting in a Cabinet with Gordon Brown and Tony Blair, who both think they own Scotland. Where every political event is interpreted as a power play between them with Robin Cook as a bit player in the wings. BUT if neither will back off and Tony Blair won’t give her the authority to do her job properly, she should resign. Wining, dining and learning French may be a nice way to spend her time. But what would serve Scotland better, some more nurses or a continuation of her part-time tenure? I know which I would vote for!

    Now it may of course be the case that our Secretary of State is actually far more active than we perceive. But she does little to make me believe it, for example, every time I ask her in the Commons to detail the action she is taking for Scotland she attempts to fob me off with empty and meaningless answers. Personally, I don’t doubt for a minute that there is a real job to do. However, the clear perception of many of those I talk to is that the once proud position of Secretary of State has become a part time job. Scotland needs and deserves a strong voice in the Cabinet, and to borrow a couple of well worn political slogans – Scotland deserves better, or to put it another way – Helen, it’s time for a change.

    But she need not go, if she is prepared to fight Scotland’s corner. To do this properly would mean standing up to the Prime Minister and the Chancellor of the Exchequer. I doubt she will ever be able to do this, but I live in hope that she will. TIME WILL TELL. Scotland needs and deserves someone at Westminster to fight our corner in Cabinet. What we do not need is an expensive ceremonial position.

    At last year’s Conference, despite our great success in Galloway and Upper Nithsdale, we were rather low but I think that as we look ahead now we can draw strength from the new realism that has gripped the Party – both North and South of the Border in the last 6 months. Yesterday, we heard from Murdo Fraser, Brain Monteith, David Mundell, Bill Aitken, Lord James Douglas Hamilton and, of course, David McLetchie, about the future that faces us. What is clear to me and will, I am sure, be clear to you is the fact that as a Party we are now prepared to recognise that the world has moved on from when we last won power.

    Here in Scotland, we now have a new approach with a new team. We have elected representatives at every level, from local councils, to the Scottish Parliament, Westminster and the European Parliament and I am delighted as I look around the Hall today to see so many of you representing the Conservative Party in all our democratic forums. Whilst everyone has been returned by the will of the Scottish people, I feel that I should especially congratulate Councillor Alasdair Hutton, who took a Liberal seat in a by-election in Kelso. Now, the Liberals are always saying that by-elections show the way ahead. In Kelso this certainly seems to be true.

    Since the Scottish elections in 1999 we have been winning seats from the other parties; in all the council by-elections since then our vote has gone up more than the other main parties.

    In my time as Shadow Secretary of State, I have come to realise the depth of talent we have in our team. I must briefly thank a number of people for the support they have given me, and for the work they have put in fighting for Conservative commonsense in Scotland. This battle is fought on a daily basis by our MEPs, John Purvis and Struan Stevenson who has the crucially important portfolio of chairman of the EP fisheries Committee, our MP Peter Duncan who is a true support to me and in the short time he has been in Westminster has shown himself to be both a great fighter for Galloway and Upper Nithsdale and an effective performer in the Commons. In the Lords, the Duke of Montrose and his team are able to hold this overweening government to account and do so on your behalf on a daily basis. And could anyone forget Tom Strathclyde, Leader of the Conservatives in the Lords, architect of many government defeats!

    In Holyrood, David McLetchie and the MSPs he leads deserve special praise for the extremely effective way they are working as a group in the Scottish Parliament. They are the real opposition to the leftwing hegemony of Labour, Lib-Dem and SNP. I am particularly impressed by the way David is preparing our Party for next year’s elections. I look forward to the battle to win more first past the post seats as well as more list places.

    Increasingly in Council Chambers around Scotland, our councillors have flown the flag and they and our candidates will be a crucial part of the election battle next May. At all levels our elected representatives have been supported very effectively by the team in Central Office in Princes Street. They in turn have worked closely with our small but dedicated team of professional agents and I thank them all for all they do. They are often the unsung heroes.

    This leaves one group, our volunteers and members. Since my appointment I have visited about a third of our Scottish constituencies and already there are many more visits booked. I am always pleased to receive invitations to support the vital work you do. You, above all, deserve our thanks, for it is you who make our party work, and work it will do – once again.

    The recent past has not been kind, but the future offers us the opportunity to re-establish ourselves as the party that represents Scotland’s interests. Most people I know in Scotland are increasingly fed up being told what is good for them. They are not convinced that the only way to sort out issues like the NHS is to throw vast sums at it, they see the need for real reform, not more central directives. Especially when it is their money that the Government is throwing at the problem.

    As I have visited different parts of Scotland, from Easterhouse to the high technology businesses of British Aerospace and Scottish Power, I have found a wish amongst many of those I have spoken to to see a real challenge to Labour in Scotland. Whatever they may claim, the Lib Dems will never offer this. – And the SNP are now more interested in the return of their former leader than in the people of Scotland. As I have talked to people – both on my own, and with Iain, and with David McLetchie it has become crystal clear that when Labour came to power with the slogan “things can only get better” they misled huge parts of Scotland.

    Time after time, Labour and the Liberals seek to imply that as Conservatives, we don’t care about those in need, and that we have no right to be involved with the vulnerable. Well, ladies and gentlemen, I am fed up being told by a bunch of left wing politicians that they have cornered the market in caring. Throughout my political life, I have fought to improve the lot of those less fortunate than myself. I have worked with drug and alcohol projects, mental health charities and the families of missing people. In fact only yesterday, in my position as a trustee of the National Missing Persons Helpline, I started the Missing Miles Walk in Glasgow.

    I have done my bit for charity, because I believe in the important role charities play in our society. AND you know what, it never ceases to amaze me how often those I meet when visiting charities in the daytime turn out to be the same people I meet in the evenings when I visit Conservative Association events. Time and again, I find charities staffed by the same people who keep our party going, So let’s not take lectures from our opponents about caring!

    And let us put an end to the fantasy that our opponents are business friendly. The businesses I talk to are increasingly fed up with a Government that talks about delivery, and yet is really only interested in headlines and spin. They are frustrated by a Government that claims to be business friendly but that ties their businesses up in red tape and bureaucracy. And they are fed up with higher business taxes than in England. After all, a country that gave the world many of its greatest inventors and engineers suffers more than most when it is ruled by a Party that has an innate hatred and mistrust of initiative and enterprise. Can anyone imagine Andrew Carnegie, Alexander Graham Bell or John Logie Baird supporting a Government that cares so little about business it chooses to raise National Insurance on both employees and employers in the budget.

    In many areas of Scotland, we have seen the equivalent of a one party state ruling in local government. And what exactly has this one party state delivered? Housing schemes like Easterhouse, Wester Hailes and Ferguslie Park.

    As a journalist remarked to Iain during the historic visit to Easterhouse, ‘this is Labour territory, what are you doing here?’ And our Leader, very reasonably replied ‘yes, look at it.’

    The Lib-Lab pact running the Scottish Executive is equally prone to one party state thinking – perhaps Jack McConnell should not be called First Minister, but, more accurately, Third Minister.

    However, let us not fall into the trap of assuming that because the Scottish Executive is not popular, this is also true of our new Parliament. The Parliament is here to stay, and as Conservatives we need to recognise that it is our responsibility to return enough MSPs to have a real say in how it affects peoples lives, as David McLetchie put it so eloquently yesterday. That means we must vote and use all the votes we will have to vote Conservative every time. As I go around, the complaints and concerns I hear relate not to the Parliament but to the Lib-Lab Pact running the Scottish Executive. They are the real culprits.

    We must be clear what we want for the future.

    Labour have backtracked over their legal commitment to reduce the number of MSPs in the face of resistance from those who fear losing their jobs. We however want to see fewer of them and we will not back down on this. Scotland needs a smaller Parliament. The Scotland Act specifies a reduction in the number of MSPs. We want to see the numbers fall from 129 to 108. Let those who oppose the reduction explain just what extra benefit the 21 extra MSPs bring to the average taxpayer. Each one draws a salary, expenses and the cost of staff and offices. Surely, if Labour wanted to put the voters first, it would direct this money to delivering services, not simply keeping its favourites in jobs. And, it is not just the Back Benchers who need culling. Scotland has 20 Ministers. We do not need more than 10! This would still be twice as many as the old Scottish Office.

    But don’t expect action just yet. It’s amazing those who used to despise the trappings of power become attached to those very trappings: once they settle down in the comfy back seat of their Ministerial cars.

    Politics is about people, and good politics is about making peoples’ lives better. Sadly, for the people of Scotland the Prime Minister, his Ministers and his MSPs only seem to care about staying in office. Come the next election Scotland will, I am confident, be choosing between a Conservative Party that has looked, listened and adapted, and a Labour Party that has failed to deliver at almost every level!

    It is there for us to win.

  • Damian Green – 2002 Speech on Labour Party and Education

    Damian Green – 2002 Speech on Labour Party and Education

    The speech made by Damian Green, the then Shadow Secretary of State for Education, in the House of Commons on 21 May 2002.

    As we pass the fifth anniversary of this Government’s arrival in power, the threadbare nature of their claim to have made improvements in education is increasingly apparent. Today, the Opposition will pay particular attention to their failures on truancy and discipline because they lie at the heart of so many other failures.

    Without effective discipline, there can be no effective teaching. Without regular and willing attendance, there can be no effective learning. If the Government cannot solve this crisis, they will be doomed to fail to solve the other crises in our school system, such as demoralised teachers, the widening gap in standards between the best and worst schools and, in particular, the Government’s complete failure to give effective support to schools in our inner cities.

    It is clear that the Liberal Democrats are not in a position to take anything away from today’s debate, but I hope that the Government will take away one message: the underlying, basic problems of truancy and discipline will not be solved by the usual gimmicks that the Department for Education and Skills loves so much. Grabbing the headlines for a morning may delude Ministers into thinking that they have done something effective, but it does not delude teachers, parents and pupils.

    Let us take this morning’s headline-grabber by the Government, which is on drugs in schools. I do not suppose that there is anyone in the House who does not want tough measures to eliminate drugs from schools and to warn children about the dangers of drugs, but the Government are sending very mixed messages about their attitude to drugs in our society.

    This morning, the Department for Education and Skills announced a crackdown and that it would be tougher on drugs, yet for months the Home Office has been espousing a softer line on drugs. That is a mixed message; nobody can know what the Government really want.

    Quite apart from the mixed message on drugs, the Government are sending a mixed message about exclusions. Today, the Secretary of State and her colleagues have been talking tough. They are to insist that head teachers exclude pupils who are caught drug dealing. There will be no appeal; such pupils will be straight out on their first offence.

    That is a very tough message, but I seem to remember that four years ago the Government sent out exactly the opposite message. They were instructing head teachers to exclude fewer pupils.

    The confusion does not only date back four years. If the Secretary of State had made an honest U-turn, we would have applauded it, because today’s policy is better than yesterday’s policy. Unfortunately for the Government, I have taken the trouble to read the amendment that they have tabled to our motion.

    Before the Minister for Lifelong Learning becomes too excited, I shall quote it. It is fascinating. I assume that it was written yesterday, presumably at the same time as the Department was writing its press releases on how exclusions need to be increased.

    The amendment boasts: “exclusions have fallen by approximately 28 per cent.” since 1996-97. At the press conference this morning, the Government said that a rise in exclusions is a good thing; yesterday, as their amendment shows, they said that a fall in exclusions is a good thing. There is a central confusion. The Government cannot know what they are talking about. It is clear that head teachers across Britain do not know which message the Government are trying to send. The reason is that the Government do not know. All they know is that they must say something tough about drugs.

    The Department for Education and Skills is always one of the most willing Departments to say, “You want an announcement, we’ll make it. Never mind the policy, coherence or implementation, we’ll write the press release for you.”

    Not even the Secretary of State for Transport, Local Government and the Regions would have the gall to say that that central confusion over the attitude to exclusion shows consistency of purpose. I pay tribute to the Secretary of State for Education and Skills by saying that she is a considerably more honest and straightforward politician than her right hon. Friend.

    Everyone in the House and outside it and everyone connected with education hopes that the Government’s new policy on drugs in schools will work, but we are right to be suspicious and sceptical that a Government who rely on spin and announcements rather than substance will not drive through an effective anti-drugs policy.

    Let me turn to truancy. Again, there is no difference between the two sides of the House. We all agree that truancy deprives children of their best chance in life and that the Government have a duty—which they share, most notably with parents but also with schools—to ensure that children attend school. Let us look at the facts of what has happened since the Government came to power.

    In the 1998 comprehensive spending review, the Government promised to cut school truancy drastically. They said that they would reduce the percentage of half-days missed a year through unauthorised absence from 0.7 per cent. to 0.5 per cent. That was a clear and unambiguous promise, but the result is complete failure. There has been no reduction in the percentage of half-days missed through unauthorised absence, which remains 0.7 per cent. In secondary schools, where the problem is most serious, it has risen since 1997 from 1 per cent. to 1.1 per cent.

    I have taken those figures from the Department’s own survey of pupil absence and truancy, but Ofsted too revealed growing problems.

    Unsatisfactory attendance is up from 22 to 30 per cent. in primary schools, and from 29 to 37 per cent. in inspected secondary schools. Those are not abstract figures on the number of children missing school. Truancy Call, a charity that tries to deal with the problem of truancy, estimates that, on a typical school day, 50,000 children are truanting, their life chances disappearing. Most schools, it says, do not have the time or resources to undertake first-day contact with those children. [Interruption.] The Minister for Lifelong Learning says that she does not believe it. I do not know who else she is going to try to call a liar. Stephen Clarke, the director of Truancy Call, is extremely respected in the field.

    Perhaps the hon. Lady will believe the previous head of Ofsted, who was appointed by the Government. Mike Tomlinson said:

    “Statistics suggest that there are 10,000 children who should be in school but are not.”

    Does the hon. Lady want to disagree with Mike Tomlinson as well? He found that statistic worrying and continued:

    “I wonder about what they are up to when they are not in school.”

    He is right to worry, as we know what too many of those children are doing when they are not in school; they are climbing on the conveyor belt of crime, which will damage their lives and communities, particularly in the inner cities.

    I shall cite someone whom even the hon. Lady will believe—the Secretary of State, who said that official figures showed that 40 per cent. of street crime, 25 per cent. of burglaries, 20 per cent. of criminal damage and a third of car thefts are carried out by 10 to 16-year-olds at times when they should be in school. By any standard, that is a catalogue of failure by the Government, who have not met promises that they made in their early, happier days in office.

    The Government have noticed that they have got a problem and have recently introduced a series of measures to reduce truancy. They announced that they want to put policemen in schools; they have half-announced that they are thinking of taking away child benefit from parents of persistent truants; and they announced £66 million to tackle truancy in the recent Budget.

    Having policemen in schools is a sensible idea, and I welcome the Government’s initiative. If head teachers want that, it is perfectly reasonable. I would be fascinated to know what the Secretary of State has to say about taking child benefit away from the parents of persistent truants, as the initiative appeared to emanate from the Prime Minister and No. 10, and volunteers in the Cabinet were called on to support it.

    It was notable that every other Cabinet Minister took a smart step backwards, leaving the right hon. Lady out at the front to defend the policy. I therefore hope that she will tell us later whether she still thinks that it is a good idea and, if so, when the Government propose to introduce it. I am afraid that if she cannot give us a date by which the Government are willing to do so, we will conclude once again that the announcement was made just to grab the headlines.

    The third issue is the £66 million to tackle truancy in schools across Britain. What the Government have not told us is that the means by which they are funding that—the increase in national insurance contributions—will take £150 million out of school budgets, year after year. The Budget therefore did not put money into schools but took it away.

    The Government are coming up with tough-sounding gimmicks. They know as well as everyone now—notably Mrs. Patricia Amos, who has been sent to jail—that an extremely tough range of measures is already available in the criminal law to stop truanting. It is clear that when Governments and courts have powers that can end up with a parent being jailed for allowing children to truant persistently, even tougher new measures are not necessarily needed. The Government already have all the tough measures that they could want to deter parents from allowing their children to truant.

    The Government are trying to pretend that those tough measures are not available, but their cover has been blown by the jailing of Mrs. Amos. That shows how tough the measures already on the statute book are. I hope that they work, and that every parent with a child who persistently truants looks at Mrs. Amos being sent to jail and thinks, “I don’t want to go that way. I’m going to do something about my child now.”

    The underlying problem is that the children who are let down most badly by the Government’s failure on truancy are those who are most vulnerable and least able to defend themselves. Many of those children, as we know, live in our inner cities and therefore attend inner-city schools. The figures are terrifying. Between 2000 and 2001, in several inner-city areas, truancy rose by as much as 16 times the national average.

    At the same time, GCSE standards—a strongly related issue—are far below the national average in such areas. Growth in truancy has persisted throughout England, where it has increased by an average of 1.7 per cent. in recent times, and the average proportion of pupils achieving the good GCSE score of five grades of A* to C is 50 per cent.

    It is terrifying to compare with those averages the figures for some of our inner-city areas. In Hackney, truancy is up 27 per cent. and the average GCSE score—the proportion achieving five or more A* to C grades—is 33.5 per cent. In Liverpool, truancy is up 26.2 per cent. and the average GCSE score is 35.1 per cent. In Sheffield, which was run until so recently by the Liberal Democrats, truancy is up 24 per cent. and the average GCSE score is 41.9 per cent. In Leicester, truancy is up 21.7 per cent. and the average GCSE score is 36.9 per cent.

    Those figures tell a stark story. The Government are failing our inner-city children; their rhetoric is not matched by action. They are tough on truants and on the parents of truants, but they are soft on the causes of truancy. Let us consider what they could be doing. The basic challenge on which they have failed is that of making every day at school relevant to every pupil.

    If pupils think that nothing that they do at school will be relevant, useful or interesting, they will start bunking off. Clearly, the long-term policy must be to reduce the number of regular truants to the hard core. There will always be a hard core, but we need to reduce truancy so that only that hard core remains. I am glad that Government Front Benchers agree; perhaps they will adopt the policy that I am about to put to them.

    The first and most widespread thing that the Government should do is make a radical improvement in the provision of vocational education in our education system. The first and most important radical change that should be made is that of rewriting the Green Paper in English, instead of the current jargon. The Green Paper is not remotely adequate to cope with the crisis in vocational education.

    The Government do not need Green Papers; they need to do what we do and learn from some other countries. Let me tell them about the experience in Holland and Germany. In Holland, for example, I visited classes in which 13-year-olds were rewiring rooms and plastering real brick walls.

    They were non-academic children in a non-academic stream—the sort of children who are failed by the school system far too often in this country and go out truanting. They were doing something at school that they could see was relevant, which they enjoyed and which they were good at. That was what got them into school, made them do the other lessons and allowed them to leave school having worked on a balanced curriculum and learned something useful, instead of taking the path of truancy and then crime to which far too many of our young people are condemned by the inaction and complacency of the Government.

    The problem is not new and is not even one of the past 20 years; it a problem of the past 140 years. Let me break the habit of a lifetime and quote Lord Callaghan, who rejected 25 years ago the idea that we should fit “a so-called inferior group of children with just enough learning to earn their living in the factory”. He was right that children who need a vocational education need more than that. That is pure common sense, and I am surprised that Government Front Benchers are so exercised by it.

    If those children are looking to the world of work, that is what we should prepare them for, by providing both the basic academic tools and proper vocational training when they are still willing to learn. Too often, the tragedy is that we wait too long, and by the time we seek to engage children who would benefit from a vocational education in proper vocational training, it is too late—they have got out of the habit of learning and into the habit of truanting. In five years, the Government have done nothing to help that dangerous lost generation.

    Whatever the situation that they inherited, what they have done has been relatively worst in its effects on inner cities. They have let down all children, but they have particularly let down those in the inner cities. I hope that she will reflect on that in her calmer moments. If she wants to talk about initiatives, I remember that education action zones were one of the great initiatives launched by the Secretary of State’s predecessor and junked by the right hon. Lady as soon as she had the chance.

    Let me move on to the wider problem of discipline.

    One reason why disciplinary problems in schools have increased under this Government is precisely that the authority has been taken away from head teachers to exclude those whom they want to exclude. Teachers, not only heads, are unhappy with the situation. The Government always get cross when I quote the National Union of Teachers at them, so let me quote the Association of Teachers and Lecturers instead. It says that in the past year it received 120 complaints from teachers about physical abuse at school and that assaults on teachers rose fivefold between 1998 and 2001. That is terrible.

    If the ATL is another trade union to which the Government do not want to listen, perhaps they will listen to Ofsted. It points out that the poor behaviour of a minority of pupils is cited as the major reason for teachers leaving the profession. If that is true, it is a great shame that the Government have spent much of their first five years in office encouraging the undermining of head teachers’ authority and therefore encouraging the increase in violence in schools.

    It is extraordinary that, although the Government have so much information at their disposal, they do not bother to collect facts about the scale of violence in schools.

    My colleagues and I have asked the Government for some weeks for the number of teachers who are assaulted each year, the number who are assaulted by pupils and the number of assaults on pupils by pupils. The Government do not know the answer.

    The Secretary of State says, “Oh no”. I refer her to written answers from her colleagues that state that they do not collect that information. Why do not the Government collect it? They know that matters are getting worse and are trying to disguise the fact rather than dealing with it.
    We propose giving power over exclusions back where it belongs — with heads and governors. If they have the power to discipline children, discipline in schools will improve. That would send clear signals to unruly pupils and irresponsible and potentially violent parents that they cannot get away with their behaviour any longer. The Government have spent too long undermining heads and teachers; it is about time that they got behind them.

    The Government’s never-ending stream of initiatives has failed to tackle the two fundamental crises in our schools. Until they use something more substantial than summits, press conferences and initiatives, our most vulnerable children will never receive the education that they deserve. That stands as an indictment against the Government for five wasted years. They are betraying the hopes of a generation of children. They will not be forgiven and they do not deserve to be forgiven.

  • Iain Duncan Smith – 2002 Speech at Hackney Community College

    Iain Duncan Smith – 2002 Speech at Hackney Community College

    The speech made by Iain Duncan Smith, the then Leader of the Opposition, on 21 May 2002.

    I am delighted to be here at the Hackney Community College. Your mission statement talks of ‘working in partnership, widening participation, raising standards and achievement, to meet the needs of the communities we serve’. The hard work of students and staff here have made that statement a reality. Today I want to talk about how that reality can be spread to other inner city areas up and down the country.

    Three months ago I visited Glasgow’s Easterhouse estate.

    This weekend I went back and spent some more time with the residents there who help their own neighbours.

    A breakfast club run by church volunteers provides more than nourishment before school. One of the children who uses the club never knows if his mum or dad are even going to be at home.

    But in a life where nothing else is reliable he does know that every morning the same person who provides him with breakfast will also listen to his worries and encourage him.

    A positive role model has entered his life for the first time and has offered him the hope of escape from a life of deprivation.

    Yet he is not a target that someone was asked to hit nor is he a statistic that will show up in an Annual Report.

    He is just one child among many who someone took responsibility for and made a difference.

    That is why at Harrogate I rededicated my party to look more deeply into the social challenges facing our country’s most vulnerable communities and particularly the young in those communities.

    How can we involve more fathers in the lives of their children?

    How can we crack down on youth crime and the problems of drugs, to salvage young lives and to improve the communities they live in?

    And most of all, how can we create schools that teach basic standards, and respect for themselves and for other people?

    I remember when I finally decided I wanted to enter politics. I was on active service overseeing Rhodesia’s transition to a democracy.

    We visited a village after the guerrilla fighters had been brought in from the bush.

    A little boy was digging a hole in the riverbed looking for water to wash in. His friends were laughing and playing nearby.

    Their future was about to change for the better.

    It struck me that these simple things that gave those children such pleasure had been impossible during the war.

    Politicians gave them new opportunities, but twenty years later under a corrupt political process their country had slipped back into chaos.

    To understand the power of politics, you also have to understand its limitations.

    I entered politics to help make a difference, but that difference cannot be left in the hands of politicians alone.

    I joined the Conservative Party precisely because it understands these things.

    We have always worked to help people take back control of their own lives, we don’t try and live their lives for them.

    Because of that people too often think the Conservative Party only believes in money; that we are content for the most vulnerable in our society to sink or swim.

    That must change. And under my leadership the Conservative Party is changing.

    Learning from the voluntary sector

    To truly help the vulnerable, we must learn the lessons from those who are already doing the most to help them.

    They work in areas and with people who have been forgotten. Their local roots and independence allow them to get results that governments cannot even imagine.

    Because of the depth of their personal commitment they have the authority to help people who want to change, they don’t simply help people and hope they’ll change.

    You can call it ‘tough love’, but these groups are agents of change, not just another agency of the state.

    And often as not they are provoked into action by the failure of the state.

    I visited Faversham a couple of months ago and met two mothers who had set up a drug rehabilitation centre. One of them had turned her own son into the Police.

    He had become a one-man crime wave, stealing from her and her neighbours and dealing to other children to feed his own addiction.

    These two women had overcome the indifference of the police and the hostility of local officials to take control of their own situation.

    How can politics help people like this without undermining what they do?

    Voluntary groups want to be free to respond to the personal needs of local people rather than become enslaved by the artificial requirements of politicians.

    This Government offered the voluntary sector a partnership, but that partnership has turned into a takeover.

    Instead of forcing the voluntary sector to think and act like the state, politicians should have the humility to learn from what these groups do best.

    They help the vulnerable with care, commitment and innovation, virtues which we must allow to flourish in our public services too.

    The status quo

    The way we organise our public services belongs to a bygone era.

    In the 21st Century we are still running our public services and trying to make them accountable in the same ways we did after the Second World War.

    But since then we have lived through the Cold War, the development of nuclear weapons and the information revolution, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of the internet.

    Imagine what our living standards would be like today if we still ran our economy the way Clement Attlee did?

    Now imagine how much better our quality of life could be if we no longer ran our public services the way Clement Attlee did.

    At the beginning of a new century, no other major country runs their schools or their hospitals the way we do. That is why the quality of our public services is failing to keep pace with rising expectations and living standards.

    For the past five years Labour has spent its time centralising our public services with targets and ten-year plans. It has drowned individual initiative in directives and dogma.

    But central control is delivering neither fairness nor efficiency.

    It is going to fall to the Conservatives to address these issues. We will have to re-examine the entire relationship between central government and the people it is supposed to represent.

    We will have to challenge every principle except one: that people should be helped according to their needs.

    We should challenge the idea that uniformity is more important than quality. That nobody minds receiving a poor service as long as nobody else is getting a better one.

    But poor public services are not fair. They hit the vulnerable the hardest.

    A Health Service in crisis affects the elderly disproportionately.

    A society that turns a blind eye to violent crime and the drug culture condemns many council estates to fear and despair.

    Bad schools keep poor families poor.

    In some of our inner cities, as many as one in ten pupils leave schools without a single GCSE and truancy is rocketing. Compare this with places like Redbridge or Buckinghamshire where more than 90% of children gain five or more GCSEs.

    As our country grows richer those who can, seek to buy their way out of failure, but they cannot avoid the consequences of failure for those who are left behind.

    For generations too many experts have told us all it is unfair to expect children from inner cities to strive for the same standards as everybody else. I say it is unfair to expect anything less.

    The most important thing to me personally, my mission for the Conservative Party, is to provide equal opportunity in our schools for all children – particularly the most vulnerable – wherever they live, however much their parents earn.

    There is nothing compassionate about leaving the most vulnerable in our society to suffer simply because we decree that everybody should be treated the same regardless of their needs.

    Uniformity doesn’t lead to social cohesion it only breeds social division.

    When systems become more important than people and theory matters more than results, this country has lost its way.

    Everywhere else around us services are tailored to our individual needs. We have more choice and more access to information, we are used to our views being taken seriously.

    This is almost impossible in today’s public services.

    The second thing we need to challenge is the idea that centralised politics and centralised public services are what hold our nation together.

    In fact they are in danger of tearing it apart.

    Take the case of Rose Addis, the 94 year old mother of my constituent, who was left unattended in her local Accident and Emergency ward.

    All the family wanted was an apology. The hospital authorities dismissed their concerns. The family went to the press. The Health Secretary rubbished their story on national radio. The family came to me in despair and I raised the case in Prime Minister’s Questions.

    What followed was a 72-hour political row that dominated the national news. The entire political and NHS establishment came crashing down on Mrs Addis. She was even accused of being a racist all because she wanted a simple apology.

    This one case encapsulates most of what is wrong with the post-War welfare state.

    A vulnerable lady did not get the quality of care she deserved. The hospital was too rigid even to offer an apology.

    The lines of political accountability were so centralised that the Health Secretary, the Leader of the Opposition and the Prime Minister became involved to try and resolve a single case.

    Ultimately this degree of centralisation diminishes our democracy.

    Because Central Government is responsible for everything, it tries to run everything, and because it tries to run everything it ends up running most things badly.

    So it relies on spin to pretend that things are better than they are.

    Detailed target setting, leads to failure, this leads to lies and the setting of new detailed targets. The vicious circle is complete.

    As a result our political culture becomes debased and our public services become demoralised.

    People are crying out to be heard. They want to have a say in the direction their communities take, they want more control over their own lives.

    We must listen to them and we must learn to trust them by placing responsibility for results back where it belongs.

    Better schools and hospitals, more responsive local government, means giving teachers, doctors, nurses and councillors the power to do their jobs and making them accountable for what they do.

    That is what happens in every other walk of life, it is also what happens in every other country whose standards of public services exceed our own.

    Rudolph Giuliani turned crime around in New York because he had the authority to do so, because that is what the voters elected him as Mayor to do, and because he knew that that was how he would ultimately be judged.

    In Stockholm, the county government introduced a choice of family doctor and a choice of hospital for its citizens because Sweden gives different parts of the country the right to run healthcare differently.

    In Holland it takes as few as 50 parents to set up a new independent school, where the Government pays for children to be taught within a slimmed down national curriculum.

    Trusting people is the modern way, followed by countries across the world including those who are considered more egalitarian than Britain.

    What all these nations have in common is that they have put quality before uniformity, people before ideology. It is time for us to do the same.

    Conservatives are rightly suspicious of blueprints. It is that kind of approach that has taken so much power away from people in the past.

    The Government’s plans for regional assemblies will not drive power down from Whitehall they will strip power from local communities. They mean more centralisation, not less.

    And yet I have been struck by the diversity of solutions on offer as I and my Shadow Cabinet colleagues have travelled around Britain and Europe.

    Kent County Council is running a scheme it has initiated with the Treasury, where it is taking responsibility for getting people off welfare and back into work in return for a share of the benefit savings.

    We need to look at our benefit system as a whole. The entire impetus for welfare reform in the United States came from individual states and cities taking charge of welfare programmes from the Federal Government.

    People say that Britain is too small to have the laboratories of democracy that the United States has. But it isn’t a question of size, it is a matter of identity. Switzerland is a very small country. Yet it retains a vibrant and vital local tradition through its cantons.

    People who want a European superstate say that Britain is too small to be a country. With the fourth largest economy in the world, British people are entitled to treat this with derision.

    There will be areas where we want to decentralise directly to people who receive services and other areas where we want to make services more locally accountable. The two need not be incompatible.

    In the end if you want to spread best practice, you have to be prepared to allow best practice by encouraging people to do different things in different places in order to learn what works.

    Parties say they want to decentralise in Opposition, but too often they change their tune in Government. The present administration is more guilty of this than nearly all of its predecessors.

    That is because the way we conduct politics in this country has remained unchanged for more than fifty years. The buck always stops with central government.

    But central government is not delivering the goods any more, nor are nationalised, uniform public services. People in this country know that and we have to be honest enough to say it.

    Our nation is the natural level of allegiance, that is why we believe that control over our armed forces and the power to control our economy.

    But that does not mean the most appropriate level for organising and holding to account every last public service is national.

    If we are to strengthen our nation and our society we have to learn from the modern world and recognise that it is organisations operating on a human scale that succeed.

    The way to revive our politics, the way to improve our schools and hospitals, the way to make our streets safer is to trust the people who can really make a difference.

    It is not just about helping people and hoping they will change; it is about helping people who want to change.

    It is about supporting people who are trying to assert some control over their own lives, seeking help because they want a better life for themselves and their families.

    Education is the key to that opportunity.

    We want future generations to believe in our laws, we want them to contribute to our prosperity and to play their full part in our country’s future.

    But they need something from us: a passion and a commitment to equal opportunity in our schools for all our children.

    The path back to a stronger, more decent society begins in the classroom. It begins in places like this.

    In your example lies our nation’s future.

  • Theresa May – 2002 Speech at Welsh Conservative Party Conference

    Theresa May – 2002 Speech at Welsh Conservative Party Conference

    The speech made by Theresa May on 25 May 2002.

    The theme of this conference is making life better for Wales.

    Today, I want to talk about why we are the Party fit for that purpose.

    We are the Party that recognises the value of community.

    We are the Party that wants to push power down to people, not take it away from them.

    We are the Party in politics today which knows that we need to change the way we think about public services if we are to give the public the schools, hospitals and railways they deserve.

    We are changing as a Party – not who we are or what we believe, but how we express what we believe.

    We stand by our Conservative principles – freedom, responsibility and choice.

    But we are looking at how we apply these to the 21st Century.

    And to do this, we are learning from local people.

    My Shadow Cabinet colleagues and I have been travelling throughout Britain to see how people are making a difference in their own communities.

    We all know that people no longer hold politicians in high regard. They have seen too many broken promises to believe much of what we say.

    So in many communities they are rejecting politics and finding different ways of improving their quality of life.

    They are building neighbourhoods.

    Our challenge now is to support these local neighbourhoods and to support local people who want to help themselves.

    Too often, politics acts as a barrier to community.

    For five years we have been governed by a party which sees community as a threat. Labour have been the most centralising government for decades.

    But they haven’t simply centralised power and decision-making in Whitehall – they’ve actually put it in the hands of just a few people.

    I know this better than anyone.

    I have the task of trying to root the truth out of anything Stephen Byers says.

    We all know that he has great difficulties in remembering quite what he’s said to whom and what people have said to him. It doesn’t matter whether it’s the Chairman of BMW, the rail regulator, the chairman of Railtrack or his own press officer.

    So it’s little wonder the Prime Minister has taken his responsibilities from him and given them to an unelected adviser – Lord Birt.

    He’s not elected. He’s not accountable. His only record on transport is running up a massive taxi bill at the BBC. Yet the Prime Minister would rather he decided transport policy than his own Transport Secretary.

    This is an example of how Labour works.

    They put power in the hands of the few – not the many.

    They take decisions behind closed doors. They dictate to people through centralised plans and national targets. They think they know best.

    They don’t trust you to take your own decisions.

    Here in Wales, they said that devolution would bring power closer to the people – but do people here in North Wales feel any better off because there’s an Assembly in Cardiff?

    For too long we have allowed Labour to claim the mantle of devolution.

    We need to reclaim that mantle. Today, it is we Conservatives who believe in a genuine devolution of power.

    It’s not about local politicians. It’s about local people.

    Because the Labour LibDem coalition has not delivered real devolution. But let’s be clear about why.

    It’s not because they couldn’t make life better in Wales if they wanted to. It’s not because they need greater powers or more money.

    It’s because Labour and Liberal Democrat politicians simply don’t know how to deliver better services to people in Wales.

    It’s because they think politicians and the state run things better than people and communities.

    They have increased centralised control over public services.

    On education, housing and social services they dictate policies from the centre.

    They cream off resources that are meant to go to schools.

    They offer councils financial incentives, but only if they sign-up to what they want.

    They believe uniform policies work better than local initiatives.

    Today, I have seen first-hand how this approach impacts upon vulnerable people.

    Earlier this morning, Nigel Evans and I visited a care home here in the town – in fact, as we speak Nigel is still there. We heard from elderly residents who thought they had found a long-term home. It is a community in itself. The residents know their neighbours; the residents know the staff; and the staff know the residents.

    But a politician somewhere has decided that it has to close. It may not have been the intention of the decision they took, but by imposing centrally decided standards on care homes while failing to back them up with resources, they have condemned the residents of plas-y-dre to an uncertain, and perhaps an unhappy future.

    This is the politics of last century.

    So what a relief that we have such a strong team of Conservative AMs in Cardiff.

    A group who have worked to try and make the Assembly deliver the better quality of life the people of Wales were promised.

    A group who are on their side.

    What would the Assembly be without a Conservative group who recognise that people want decent public services not decadent politicians’ palaces?

    And a group who are being straight-forward and honest with people about what they can achieve in Wales.

    I would of course love to see a Conservative victory at next year’s elections.

    A Conservative led Assembly would put to rest the myth that the only problem with it is that it doesn’t have enough power.

    And we will fight every seat vigorously to achieve that success.

    Half of our candidates are already chosen. Soon we will have our full team in place.

    But it’s not just about having the right team – it’s about having the right policies.

    Later this afternoon you will hear more about the policies our Conservative Assembly Members will be putting forward to the people of Wales next year. Nearer the time they will publish their full manifesto.

    But it is important that in building these policies we have been talking to the people who matter.

    On education, we’ve been talking to parents and teachers. We’ve been finding out about their concerns. We know what they want, and we know how to deliver it.

    They want local schools to have the freedom, the flexibility and the finance to deliver world-class education. So we need to stop politicians and bureaucrats dipping into their budgets by ring-fencing the money they are given.

    On health, we’ve spoken to doctors, nurses and patients. They think Jane Hutt’s plans to replace 5 health bodies with 37 different organisations are mad. 80 per cent of NHS managers have already said such a reorganisation won’t achieve better health care. So we should take the politicians out of the NHS and let doctors, nurses and patients decide the best way to organise themselves.

    On transport, we recognise that the best way to improve public transport is not to tax the motorist off the road. For many people in Wales the car isn’t a luxury – it’s a necessity. So we need to improve the road and rail links throughout Wales. Anyone trying to get here to Llandudno will testify to that.

    None of these things can be solved by money alone.

    You don’t improve schools, hospitals or the transport system by simply throwing more money at it. Unless you are also prepared to think about how you spend the money, unless you are prepared to consider changing the systems you are spending it on, then all the money in the world won’t deliver the world-class public services people want.

    And the tragedy is that when public services fail it is vulnerable people who suffer the most.

    It’s the vulnerable who are suffering most as a result of our failing health service. It’s ok if you can afford to buy your way out of it. If you can afford to travel to France or South Africa to receive treatment then the spiralling waiting lists need not affect you. But why should people have to spend their life savings to save their own life?

    It’s ok if you can afford to send your children to private schools. People should of course have that right. But what happens to the children whose parents can’t afford it? What happens to the community where one child is well educated while the next one isn’t?

    How do you build social cohesion when your quality of life depends more on what you have in your pocket than on what you bring to your community?

    That’s why this week Iain Duncan Smith said that his most important priority – and our Party’s most important priority – is to ensure equality of opportunity in our schools for all children, wherever they live, however much their parents earn.

    In the past, we have allowed ourselves to be portrayed as a Party which only cares about money. People felt we were prepared to let vulnerable people suffer.

    It was of course a caricature, but people believed it.

    But under Iain Duncan Smith the Party is changing.

    It’s changing to focus on improving public services; changing to be more representative in our constitution of the society we seek to represent in our politics; changing to give support to our communities and to their people.

    And people are responding to that change.

    That’s why here in Wales people are joining us from all areas of the political spectrum.

    That’s why former Liberal Democrat candidates and councillors now sit under the Conservative umbrella; and why a former organiser for Plaid Cymru is your Assembly candidate here in Conwy.

    And haven’t we seen Plaid’s true colours in the past week? At least people in Merthyr and elsewhere can now see through their false promises and platitudes and recognise the true nature of the party underneath.

    It is clear that we are the only credible opposition in Wales.

    In the Assembly, Nick Bourne and his team are the only Members standing up for the interests of all the people of Wales.

    Jonathan Evans is our strong voice in Europe. He has already shown that he can lead where Labour and Liberal Democrat politicians – to their shame – try not to follow.

    And you can take it from me – the Welsh Conservative voice is heard loud and clear around the Shadow Cabinet table from Nigel Evans.

    We are all united in one aim.

    We want to give power back to local people. We want to push power down; support community and voluntary groups who seek to help themselves; support local councils who want to be free to innovate and try new ways of doing things.

    That’s the message I’m giving to local councillors as I travel around England. Our commitment in Wales is no different.

    Conservatives believe in local people whoever, and wherever, they are.

    It is not always about winning votes for the Conservative Party.

    There are some areas of Wales where a Conservative is seen as an outsider. These are the areas we have to reach.

    It is often in these areas that people need help the most.

    It is often here that the schools, hospitals and transport systems are worst.

    But many of them have one very important thing – community spirit. We can harness this for the good, or dampen it to everyone’s detriment.

    We have made our choice, and Iain Duncan Smith is leading the way.

    So over the next year we have to go into these areas and reach out to these people. Show them that we are on their side. Tell them what a Conservative administration and a Conservative government will do for them.

    Tell them that we trust them to run their own lives, but that we are ready to help where we can.

    This is what devolution is really about.

    People not politicians.

    Communities not committees.

    Pushing power down, not pulling power up.

    We have listened and learned. We are changing. We know that people deserve better than they have had in the past, and much better than what they are getting now.

    It is as true in Wales as it is in Westminster.

    It is the message we shall pursue up until next year’s elections and beyond.

    It is how Conservatives will make life better in Wales.

     

     

  • Boris Johnson – 2022 Article in the Mail on Sunday on the Cost of Living

    Boris Johnson – 2022 Article in the Mail on Sunday on the Cost of Living

    The article written by Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, on 28 August 2022 which was published in the Mail on Sunday and released by Downing Street as a press release.

    The months ahead are going to be tough, perhaps very tough. Our energy bills are going to be eye-watering. For many of us, the cost of heating our homes is already frightening.

    And yet I have never been more certain that we will come through this well – and that Britain will emerge stronger and more prosperous the other side.

    Let us remember who caused this global surge in the cost of energy, and what is at stake.

    Yes, we were already seeing supply chain pressures last year, caused by the aftershocks of Covid, and that was causing a rise in some global prices.

    But by the end of last year we were fixing it. The world was finding the lorry drivers. The container ships were moving. We were sourcing the silicon chips.

    What no one had bargained for was the decision of Vladimir Putin – and it was his decision alone – to launch a vicious and irrational attack, on February 24, against an innocent European country.

    It was Putin’s barbaric invasion that spooked the energy markets.

    It is Putin’s war that is costing British consumers. That is why your energy bill is doubling. I am afraid Putin knows it. He likes it. And he wants us to buckle.

    He believes that soft European politicians will not have the stomach for the struggle – that this coming winter we will throw in the sponge, take off the sanctions and go begging for Russian oil and gas.

    He believes we will tire of backing Ukraine and begin discreetly to encourage the Ukrainians to do a deal, however nauseating, with the tyrant in the Kremlin.

    That would be utter madness. In this brutal arm-wrestle, the Ukrainian people can and will win. And so will Britain.

    With every month that goes by Putin’s position grows weaker. His ability to bully and blackmail is diminishing. And Britain’s position will grow stronger.

    We must and we will help people through the crisis. Colossal sums of taxpayers’ money are already committed to helping people pay their bills. That cash is flowing now – and will continue to flow in the months ahead.

    Another chunk of the £650 is already due to go to the eight million most vulnerable households this autumn. There is another £300 going to pensioners in November, £150 for the disabled and £400 for all energy bill payers.

    Next month – whoever takes over from me – the Government will announce another huge package of financial support. It is worth remembering why we are in a position to make these payments.

    We have the cash to support families across the country because we have already proved the pessimists wrong.

    I remember sitting in the Cabinet room for an economic briefing in 2020 as the waves of the pandemic broke over the world and we saw the biggest drop in output for 300 years. They told me UK unemployment would top 14 per cent.

    They said that millions would be thrown on to the economic scrapheap – with all the consequent costs to the Exchequer.

    They were wrong. After becoming the first country in the world to approve an effective vaccine, we staged the fastest vaccine roll-out in Europe, the fastest exit from Covid. As a result we had the fastest growth in the G7 last year and instead of mass unemployment we have about 640,000 MORE people in payrolled employment than before the pandemic began.

    Instead of being at 14 per cent, unemployment is at 3.8 per cent, nearly the lowest for almost 50 years. That is giving us the fundamental economic strength to endure this crisis – as the Russian economy continues to melt down.

    We are ending our dependency on Russian hydrocarbons. In June, for the first time in decades, we did not import any fuel from Russia. The UK has already stepped up production of domestic gas – 26 per cent more this year than last.

    With every new windfarm we build offshore, with every new nuclear project we approve, we strengthen our strategic position. We become less vulnerable to the vagaries of the global gas price and less vulnerable to Putin’s pressure.

    It is this Government that has reversed the apathy of decades and greenlighted new nuclear plants.

    For 13 wasted years Labour refused to approve a single new project, with the result that the nuclear industry was heading for near collapse.

    We are going to build a new reactor every year and will have a colossal 50 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2030 – almost half our total electricity consumption.

    This British Energy Security Strategy is just a part of a vast programme to make the economy more productive and competitive.

    In just three years we have increased the coverage of gigabit broadband from seven per cent of households to 70 per cent. We are strengthening the economic sinews of the country with the biggest investment in rail – three new high speed lines – for a century.

    We have invested massively in skills, so that people can improve their qualifications throughout their lives.

    We have taken decisive steps to make this the best place in the world to invest and start a business. We are axing dozens of burdensome EU laws – including Solvency 2 and MiFID, that acted as unnecessary deterrents to investment.

    We are creating eight new free- ports, cutting taxes on investment and lengthening our lead as a science superpower – with £22billion of investment in science and a new Advanced Research agency to crack the big problems of our time, from dementia to zero carbon aviation.

    All this is paying off in jobs and growth. In the first quarter of this year the UK attracted more venture capital investment in technology than China.

    We have more tech investment than France, Germany and Israel combined and we produce a new billion pound “unicorn” company roughly every two weeks.

    These new ideas are blooming not just in the golden triangle of Oxford, Cambridge and London but across the whole UK as we drive forward our levelling up agenda.

    We have laid the foundations for long-term gains in prosperity and productivity. We know we will bounce back from the crisis in the cost of energy as we rapidly build up our own UK supplies.

    That is why we will succeed and why we cannot flinch now.

    If Putin is allowed to get away with his murder and mayhem, and to change the borders of Europe by force, then he will simply do it again, elsewhere on the periphery of the former Soviet Union.

    Other countries will draw the lesson that violence and aggression can pay off and that will usher in a new cycle of political and economic instability.

    That is why we must continue to back the Ukrainians – and their military success continues to be remarkable. Volodymyr Zelenskyy has shown his country is fundamentally unconquerable.

    Now is the time for the West to double down our support, not to go wobbly.

    Now is the time to keep our nerve and ignore Labour and the union barons with their calls for endless fools’ gold – inflationary pay rises and taxpayer-funded support to some of the richest households.

    We have more than enough resilience to get through tough months ahead. We have shown that before.

    And we have made the long term decisions – including on domestic energy supply – to ensure that our bounceback can and should be remarkable and that our future will be golden.

  • David Willetts – 2002 “Our Commitment to the People” Speech

    David Willetts – 2002 “Our Commitment to the People” Speech

    The speech made by David Willetts on 29 May 2002.

    Two weeks ago, I spent the night on the streets of London listening to people who have slipped through the social safety net or who are being failed by public services. I heard at first hand the problems faced by the homeless from a group of people sleeping rough outside Westminster Cathedral.

    Engaging people, listening to their problems and learning how we might help them in the future lies at the heart of the Conservative Party’s One Nation Hearings. My Shadow Cabinet colleagues and I are visiting places and meeting people that politicians have too often forgotten about.

    Sometimes we have to overcome cynicism from the people we meet. They start by thinking we are just there for a good photo-opportunity. We can prove them wrong as we develop policies that tackle Britain’s social problems.

    But I also encounter cynicism from another quarter, from some Conservatives themselves.

    Some think the One Nation Hearings and helping the vulnerable are just a phase we have to go through until we can get back to issues such as the Euro and taxation.

    Others believe our emphasis on improving public services and reconnecting with people is some how selling out on everything we stood for in the 1980s.

    Well I don’t see it at that way. Helping the vulnerable is not a re-launch of the Party, nor is it a repudiation of our beliefs, it is a rediscovery of a Conservative tradition dating back some 200 years.

    It was Edmund Burke who first talked about having ‘a disposition to preserve and an ability to improve’. Helping people and making lives better has always been as important to Conservatives as defending traditions and institutions. One of the reasons why we won those heroic landslide victories throughout the 1980s was that people could see that above all we were going to make Britain a better place by transforming its economic performance. And one of the reasons why we lost so badly in 1997 and again in 2001 was that we failed to convey a compelling sense that we were going to tackle the new problems facing contemporary Britain.

    We left our country in 1997 in far better shape than we found it in 1979. We had to turn round one of Europe’s sickest economies and make it one of Europe’s most dynamic and successful ones. We achieved that, and we can feel proud of that achievement.

    But we have paid a price for that very success. It has left many reasonable, normal, middle-of-the-road, apolitical British men and women with a quite dreadful sense of what Conservatives are like. They think we are obsessed with economics. They think we are like Oscar Wilde’s cynic who knew the price of everything and the value of nothing. There is and always has been more to Conservatism than economics. That means above all showing we understand that there is such a thing as society.

    One way of tackling that perception of what Conservatives are like is to argue that it was unfair all along and does not do justice to our record in government. Labour would love us to adopt that approach. There is nothing they would like more than for us to be endlessly re-fighting the 1997 General Election. Because we did, after all lose it by a landslide.

    Nor will it do just to show that the Labour Government is turning out to be as bad as many people thought we were by the end. This is a Government that is mediocre in most things apart from winning elections. But just trying to show how bad it is won’t do on its own. Our central task is to show that we will make a better government than Labour when the next election comes in 2005 or 2006. And that means showing that we as a Party want to tackle the concerns that are at the top of the electorate’s agenda. This means talking and behaving in a way that makes sense to Britain in 2002. That is why helping the vulnerable is so important.

    Over the past few weeks, I have seen three different snapshots of Britain at three One Nation Hearings. One of the most striking things I saw was the extent to which helping vulnerable people must not be a passive, one-way, exercise. It has to be about helping people to achieve greater control over their own lives, as much as providing them with money and services.

    In Birmingham, for example, I saw the success of projects that help drug abusers to combat their addiction and to gain gradual control back over their own lives. Many charities are much more effective that the public sector in this area because they treat people as individuals. We need to learn from the strengths of such initiatives and make it possible for them to do more.

    In Kent, I saw how the local council is working hard to help the most vulnerable people escape from dependency on welfare. Through an innovative agreement with the Treasury, some of the savings can be passed back and the result could be improved local services. The result is less reliance on welfare, more independence for vulnerable people and better local services.

    In London, I learnt more about the causes of homelessness. One of the people that I met had been given a one-bedroom flat, but he had returned to the streets because he felt less isolated there. It is no good offering people one-bedroom flats if they have such a strong identity as a group that this does not help them escape homelessness.

    We’ve called these our One Nation Hearings because they rest on the Conservative belief that we have obligations to our fellow citizens in all corners of our country.

    Helping the vulnerable isn’t just a campaign, it’s what elected Conservatives do day in and day out. A fact acknowledged even by this Government which is about to give two London Tory Councils the only perfect scores in the country for the way the are dealing with social services.

    Our approach to helping people is a serious commitment. It has to be reflected in the way we Conservatives conduct our politics.

    We must talk to the electorate in a way that does not reinforce their worst fears about what Conservatives are like. When we were in government we did many things which were right but unpopular. It was easy to draw the extremely dangerous – and fallacious – conclusion that unless something was unpopular it couldn’t possibly be right. There is no special virtue in a modern democracy in being disliked. It is not a badge of honour somehow confirming that what you are saying must be true if uncomfortable.

    We need to talk more about ends and less about means. We all became policy wonks, lovingly analysing the details of our policies but failing to communicate what they were for. We would endlessly debate the internal market in the NHS for example, whilst failing to communicate that we did actually want patients to have better health care and that was the point of the whole exercise. That’s why we don’t need to rush into a host of detailed policies. No matter how good a policy we came up with it would be pointless unless first of all people had registered that the purpose of the whole exercise was to make their lives better. If they don’t think that, then, no matter how good the policy it won’t get a fair hearing.

    We are also recognising that economic change means social change as well. You can’t have one without the other. A dynamic, enterprising and mobile economy is incompatible with a society stuck in aspic. Our economic changes unleashed a whole set of social changes too. Some of them were good and some of them weren’t. Let me give you some examples.

    If there is one single group that benefited more from the transformation of Britain after 1979 it was women aged 20-40. Their opportunities in life have been transformed as education and employment opportunities were opened up to them on a far greater scale than ever before. That would not have happened in an old-style corporatist Britain dominated by heavy industry and even heavier unions. We should have been proud of that but for some reason the message never got through.

    Let me given you a second example – London. London has been transformed in the last 15 years. It is quite simply, once more, one of the world’s great cities. It is dynamic, enterprising and cosmopolitan and diverse. Without the Big Bang in the City or the transformation of docklands or even the cut in the top rate of income tax London would not have been such a magnet for people from around the world. But the Conservative Party fell to being the third Party in London because Londoners did not associate us with this at all and one of the most encouraging features of the local elections last month was that at last we saw the beginnings of a Conservative recovery in London.

    But just as our economic changes brought these social benefits they also had their downside. There were people left behind by the modern mobile economy. That’s why instead of trying to pretend there isn’t any poverty we are investigating more thoroughly than for many years how best we can help the poorest members of our society.

    There are also people who found the sheer creative destruction of the marketplace all too threatening and wanted order, community and security. At the heart of the Conservative tradition is a recognition that we need both the economic dynamism of the marketplace and also wider values that give life roots and shape and meaning. I am proud to be a Conservative because over the past two centuries Conservatives have more successfully reconciled these two principles than any other western political party.

    Our commitment to helping the vulnerable is a renewal of Conservatism, offering a vision of a stronger and better society. But the old caricatures live on in people’s minds and that’s why they will always be on the look-out for recidivism. It would be so convenient for the critics if they could claim that we were just the same old Tories. That’s why Iain Duncan Smith has been right to emphasise that the help the vulnerable campaign is central to the direction in which he wants to take the Party.