Let me start by thanking a local hero.  A local teacher. Then a local head teacher. A community leader. A man who showed that it’s Labour that carries the hopes and aspirations of parents and families – that it’s Labour that is at the heart of the communities of Glenrothes, Fife and Scotland. Let me thank: Lindsay Roy.
 
Lindsay Roy was not just a great candidate, he is now a great mp. And we should be proud of every one of our 38 Labour mps, led by Jim Murphy, that represent Scotland in the House of Commons
 
And I am proud too of our 46 MSPs that represent us in the Scottish Parliament and our two MEPs we have in Europe.
 
And let me thank Iain Gray- not just the leader of the Scottish group of MSPs, but the next First Minister of Scotland.
 
And I’ll tell you why. He will succeed.
 
A few weeks ago I was visiting apprentices in Glasgow. And I saw the importance of the work the Labour council is doing to keep and expand the number of apprentices in Scotland.
 
I met a young apprentice – a woman of 22, who started her apprenticeship and then took time out to have a child and who has now returned to her apprenticeship, on the way to becoming a qualified builder who will be able to support her family as it grows. That hasn’t happened by accident, not by chance – but by the decisions made by a Labour City Council creating the biggest apprentice training scheme for the construction industry in Britain, giving people like that young woman chances they thought they’d never see.
 
In this economic crisis we need to keep faith with the young apprentices of Scotland. And in the recent budget negotiations that’s exactly what Iain and Scottish Labour did – fighting off the policies that would hit hardest those most in need of help and hope.
 
That’s Labour standing by the people hit by recession while the SNP would say “you’re on your own”. That’s Labour representing the future of Scotland, and the SNP the past.
 
And let me thank our councillors who work each day to expose the SNP’s vicious programme of cuts.
 
And let me thank Jim Murphy for his leadership of the Scottish group of MPs and his work as Secretary of State for Scotland and in particular his work with the STUC and the Scottish CBI on the economic challenges we face. And thanks to Jim too for all his work keeping the whole British government focused on the needs of Scotland. I can tell you today that he truly is Scotland’s man in the Cabinet, not the Cabinet’s man in Scotland.

And it’s because of that that he is the man who will bring the Cabinet to Scotland before the summer – the first time in one hundred years that the Cabinet has met north of the border.

And so I say have confidence that our Labour leadership here in Scotland is not just leading our party, but leading the debate. Have confidence that Iain and Jim, all our MSPs and MPs and MEPs and Councillors together form the first and last line of defence for the interests of hard-working hard-pressed Scotland.
 
And let me say thank you too to our Scottish Labour party staff. I never see them in the same place twice. If there’s an election to be fought from the Borders to the Hebrides, you know their bag is already packed. Service station and B and B owners the country over are very grateful.
 
And how important it is that Labour Dundee City Council, led by Kevin Keenan, is taking on more apprentices this year than any other.
 
Organisation in the area. You know my first phone call to President Obama to congratulate him on his inauguration was made from a great community project in the Gorbals in Glasgow. He appreciated that – because he knows that from the south side of Glasgow to the south side of Chicago, the challenges we face in our economies are the same.
 
And I’m sorry I couldn’t bring Barack Obama back with me to Dundee – though he will be with me and the other G20 leaders in London next month.
 
But I did bring something else back: the complete and absolute certainty that he and I share, that present times and the future require progressive policies, and require markets that are free but never values free.
 
And I understand, like President Obama, that the answers to this current crisis cannot come from the old orthodoxies or the tired conventional thinking. Only new and progressive ideas can meet the challenges of the age.
 
And I find this again and again when i speak to other world leaders, from all different countries and sides of the spectrum. There is now nobody serious who believes in do nothing politics, nobody except the British Conservative Party who think the recession should run its course with people left to sink or swim alone.
 
And the kinds of conversations people will be having on their sofas tonight are different now – conversations that reflect the fear and anxieties of people worried about losing their jobs or their homes and with them their dreams.
 
This evening people will put the kids to bed and then talk of whether they can afford a summer holiday this year or how far their savings will stretch if they need to get a new mortgage.
 
I know from my travels around the country and you will know from your campaigning, just how difficult it is for many families and businesses in Scotland right now. That people worry not just about their own lives but what will happen to their sons and daughters when they leave school.
 
Every time I meet somebody newly made redundant, it reminds me why I came into politics in the first place. To join the fight for jobs. And that’s why we are putting in place the biggest ever job creation programme to keep people in their jobs, and to help them find new jobs if we can’t.
 
And whenever I speak to the people worried about whether their business will make it through the next quarter, I redouble my efforts to do more. And that’s why we have put in measures to help businesses, from the smallest corner shop to the largest manufacturer, with the largest flow of guarantees and of credit a government has ever made.
 
Because what’s making me angry is that good people, hardworking people are getting squeezed because of banking mistakes, and so I have ordered an urgent clear out and clean up of our banks.
 
Times are tough – that much I know. But I also know that fear of the future is best met with faith in the future – with the confidence born of knowing you have the strength of a community around you.
 
I grew up in Kirkcaldy a mining area that, like all mining areas, struggled with the closure of the pits. And as those brave men left their jobs on the final day, I learnt a lesson that stays with me to this day: that struggle didn’t bring forth selfishness - it summoned up solidarity. And it showed that deep in the Scottish character is the sense that we are each and all our brother and sister’s keeper.
 
These are the lessons I learned from my parents, lessons re-enforced by neighbours and at school, and lessons made real when I marched with Donald Dewar and John Smith and Jimmy Airlie to make the case for jobs. Let us today remember their lives.
 
And I remember the unemployment march in Glasgow where hundreds of thousands rose like lions, and the poll tax campaign where an entire nation rose up in rebellion not because it was a new tax, but because it was so unfair.
 
When the going gets hard we don’t divide one against another, we stand together and refuse to pass by on the other side.
 
So when people ask me, ask you, ask us; what is it that runs deep in the Labour bloodstream, what is it that drives you on, I say it is these lessons we have learned that mean we keep on fighting for justice, inch by inch, week by week, life by life.
 
These are the values which have inspired us as we form policies to get us through the downturn. It’s why we have taken action to raise public investment, why we have raised the pension £60, it’s why child benefit for the first child is now £20, why we cut vat by 2.5%. This is the action that will give every household an extra £20 in their pockets at the end of the month, each and every month.
 
It’s why we’ve taken action to ensure no ordinary borrower who is doing their best need fear or face the loss of their home and why we are investing in a low carbon recovery out of the downturn with wind power, solar power, renewables and as I’ve seen today in Dundee we can create the new green jobs that will give people security for the future.
 
The biggest employment programme the country has seen, the biggest small business support scheme the country has ever had, the biggest investment in apprenticeships for our future, the biggest investment in science to build for the times ahead,
 
We have acted, because action this day is our responsibility.   
 
We know that in times of great change the people with great wealth or power are generally able to take care of themselves. So our job must be to stand by the side of those who rely on the strength that comes from standing together. And it’s more than that: I believe you judge a society not by what it does for the powerful, but by what it does for the powerless, not by how it aids the wealthy, but by how it protects the not so wealthy, not how it helps the privileged, but by how it looks after the hard-working and hard-pressed.
 
We will and should be judged not just on how fast and far we allow the strong the travel, but on what we do to help the weak catch up.  
 
And we will do whatever it takes – because we believe that markets need not just money-men but morals, that being fair matters far more than being laissez faire and that banks must always serve the public, not just serve themselves.

And let me tell you what we have to do now to deal with the causes of our problems – for if we don’t get the correct diagnosis, we will end with the wrong prescription.

The global recession we face is not the old British problem of inflation or high interest rates. No, it is a worldwide banking failure so fundamental that it has impacted on every country of the world – a global banking crisis that has seen hundreds of banks go bankrupt and that has forced governments to nationalise some banks and buy into others with billions of dollars of shares.
 
This is a global crisis in the banking system that has led governments round the world to have to underwrite the banks by 7 trillion dollars. And so now we need to get banks back to doing what they are there for – keeping safe the deposits of people who have saved for a rainy day and giving credit to people who want to buy a house or expand their business. Our banks should be there to help people get on with ordinary life in the midst of these extraordinary times.
 
In Scotland you and I were brought to value hard work and effort, enterprise and honesty, integrity and taking responsibility, and these are the values we live by in our families and our working lives. They are the values of the good society – and they must become now the values of the good economy.
 
They are the values we must spread throughout our banks and our financial system – we have to clean up for good an irresponsibility and excess that has been exposed in every continent of the world. What has happened in our financial system has made us see we are all linked one to another – that each financial institution is linked to every other financial institution, that a bad bank in one country can affect a good bank in any country – that the financial institutions designed to spread risk across the banking system in fact spread contagion throughout it.
 
That an international banking system without international standards of supervision can quickly run out of control and then freeze up – denying people the security of their savings and the working capital they need.
 
And this is the new interdependent world in which we must work together with other countries to manage our global economy in the public interest. It has become ever clearer that you cannot privatise or deregulate your way out of a downturn: only government can make the markets work in the public interest and not their own interest. And you cannot retreat into a nationalist dogma – you cannot separate yourself off and opt out of the world.
 
You solve a global problem not by nationalist solutions but by us all working together.
 
I believe there is an emerging consensus on how we strengthen global regulation of our financial markets to prevent any recurrence of the collapse that has caused so much damage to economies around the world.

There is an agreement that we cannot allow the lowest common denominator approach when we need the highest standards of banking trust.

We cannot allow a race to the bottom in standards when we need to be at the best standards all round.

And I believe there is an emerging consensus that where capital flows are global we cannot just have national supervision, but need global supervision too.

We have to reform the system urgently and recognise that we have to do much more. Britain led the way we set up the FSA – for the first time a single, statutory regulator, but we must do more.

Britain led the way when we called for reform of the international institutions to oversee not just each bank but the global financial market and give us early warnings of emerging shocks to the system.

But what was outside the scope of any national regulator was that in global markets the failure of one bank acts like a power cut to the system as a whole.
 
So whilst we must retain the benefits that open financial markets bring to the world economy, international financial market regulation must be toughened.

So when I make proposals for change to the G20 they will be the result of conversations with our friends and partners in America, Europe and the rest of the world.

So I will make proposals to the G20 on four fronts: first to bring tax havens and the shadow banking system into the regulatory net; secondly, to agree international principles to end the short term bonus culture, building rewards on long term results, and i look forward to the world community’s report which will go to the G20 on the international principles which should ]influence pay; thirdly, to monitor not just individual firms but also ensure the whole financial system remains in good health; fourthly, to establish better a global framework for international financial supervision..
 
And let us remember that when Scottish banks collapsed the whole of the United Kingdom came together to stand by our banking system to prevent the banks from total collapse. With an investment bigger than the Scottish administration’s entire budget and giving guarantees that no country the size of Scotland could ever have been able to give.
 
Scotland does better when part of the United Kingdom and not outside it.
 
And there may be things we can do to enhance the successful devolution settlement we introduced in 1999, and we look forward to the Calman Commission’s recommendations this summer. I can assure you today that if there are measures in this report which help Scots, and strengthen the union, I will support them, as all responsible Scottish politicians will.
 
And I note that the Scottish parliament ahs decided not to have a Scottish referendum, because most of it’s members understand what the SNP do not: that the first priority for the people of Scotland is not separation but social justice
 
People know that what scars Scotland is not its border but its poverty.  That it isn’t flags that matter most to the people of Scotland – but fairness. That it’s not building embassies that count for the future – but building greater equality. That it’s not making a virtue of isolation – it’s making a reality of working together.
 
And so let us be clear about the SNP – first they said simply by virtue of our geography we would be part of an arc of prosperity with Iceland. And then they said that simply by virtue of our geology, we could float to prosperity on the back of ever-higher oil prices. And then they said we could base an independent Scottish economy simply on a financial services sector that could never be undermined. And now today we know that they were wrong, wrong and wrong.
 
When I see the SNP and the Tories colluding to make cuts in public services, I know another truth that’s more important as we face this crisis today.
 
Let us be clear that both SNP councils and Tory councils would cut the basic services people most need at their times of greatest need. And the Tory answer is to cut more spending now and then next year, the year after, and the year after that. Cutting vital services on which the people of our country depend. This is not the new Tory Party, this is the old Tory Party, a party that would do nothing because it is so out of touch.

And so that is our philosophy: when the strong help the weak it makes us all stronger. When the wealthy help the poor it enriches us all. When we give power to those without power, we are all empowered more.

Our Labour family is a movement inspired by a calling to which all people of good conscience can rally and a great responsibility rests on our shoulders not just as a government but as a party.

Because there’s no one there to help if we’re not there, no-one to stand up for millions of people if we fall down, no one to extend the hand of hope if we withdraw from the fight.

Let it be said of us we helped people in times of need, came to the aid of people in times of distress - built communities that were strong and fair

And that in times of trial we do not and never will walk by on the other side.