SPEECH TO SCOTTISH LABOUR SPRING CONFERENCE, GLASGOW SCIENCE CENTRE SATURDAY 27 MARCH 2010

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I want to start today with some words that mean a lot to me:
 
“We are fallible. We will make mistakes. But we will never lose sight of what brought us here: the striving to do right by the people; to respect their priorities; to better their lot; and to contribute to the commonweal.”
 
Not my words – but those of my cherished friend Donald Dewar at the opening of the Scottish Parliament.

Words typical of this man in their humility, their integrity, and their steely determination.

For they were the words of someone who knew that the work of change is never finished, that a future fair for all depends on unbreakable resolve to fight and fight – and never give in.
 
In that spirit I am here today to talk about the kind of future we believe in, and the Britain we will strive for and win if we carry the message to nation and country – if we make this coming election a choice – and never waver in standing up for ordinary people.

And our message is clear – on jobs, the NHS, schools, policing, the best start for children, security for the elderly: Labour is on your side. We are for the hard-working majority. And if you give us the chance, we will fight for your future – not just in this spring time of choice, but in every season of our country’s life.

That is our strategy now and our purpose always – not to pretend to be something we aren’t but to be who we really are.
As Donald Dewar said: we aren’t perfect. But let’s be proud and confident that our cause is the people’s cause – that we don’t want to be in power for its own sake, but for our country's sake.
 
Because we know what the alternative would mean.
The people in this room and across our country have long memories. You remember what 18 years of Tory misrule was like – you remember the closures and the lay offs, the injustice of the poll tax, the way communities were simply thrown on the scrap heap and told if it wasn’t hurting it wasn’t working. And nobody here will ever forget or forgive the way people lost not just their incomes but their identities as whole industries were decimated. Whole towns torn apart. Whole families split up – all because the free market fundamentalists had decided that unemployment was a price worth paying.
 
But I say to you today – unemployment wasn’t a price worth paying then and it isn’t a price worth paying now.
Not at any time in the future.
 
And let me pledge to you also; it’s a destruction of people’s hopes and dreams that will never ever be tolerated as long as I am Prime Minister.
 
And friends you know Labour’s record too - the new schools built, the jobs created, the hospitals renewed, the apprentices trained, the childcare expanded. You know about the smoking ban and the hand gun ban, and I say the people in this room should be very proud that you led great change not just in Scotland but all across Britain too.
 
And I say to you today – be proud, because we’ve done more to make Britain fairer in one decade than our Conservative opponents managed in two centuries.
 
And just think why people came from all over the world came to Scotland five years ago. They came to ask the G8 to deliver justice for the poor – to ask that people no longer die, simply because they were too poor to live.
 
And that too is a reason to be proud to be Labour – be proud that we have delivered the debt cancellation you marched for, be proud that we have trebled aid and kept our promises, be proud that just this week thanks to so many people in this room; we have banned the use of cluster bombs.
 
But our pride in our achievements calls us not simply to celebrate the progress of the past, but to build an even better fairer future.
 
And so here, today, Labour’s mission begins anew. I ask for only one thing – the chance to continue the work of change, to serve again the country I love.
 
Some have said I’m too tough with people. That I ask too much, fight too hard, work too long, smile too little.
 
I say there’s no such thing as battling too hard when your boss is the British people.

Some say the economic recession we’ve been through makes it impossible to achieve high ambitions for our country, and we know that every penny of public spending will have to be carefully managed and scrutinised in the next years.
 
But let me promise you that what has happened does not make us less ambitious but more certain of the need for change, not less determined but more sure of what needs to be done, not less committed but more convinced of the need to see change through.
 
From the ashes of the Second World War our country built a National Health Service that is the envy of the world, an NHS which is compassion in action and it was done by Labours driving power of social conscience.
 
Just this month President Obama has brought some of that promise to America – more than sixty years after a Labour government delivered a service that pools our compassion and our care in the most inspiring institutions of social solidarity the world has ever known.
 
And so never let anybody tell you that difficult times should mean diminished dreams.
 
Earlier today I launched Labour’s five pledges for the general election – and I say to you now that we are fighting for causes every bit as big and every bit as just as any we have faced as a Party before.
 
Because just think of what we can achieve if we fight.
If we had said twelve years ago there would be, even after a global recession, 2.5 million more jobs than in 1997 nobody would have believed us.
 
In Scotland there are 230,000 more people in work than in 1997 – 230,000 more people with dignity, with hope, with the chance of a better life for themselves and their families.
Now to overcome the impact of the recession and build for the future our target for the next five years is to create one million new skilled jobs so that people can get on in life and not simply get by.
 
And no matter what our opponents try to do we will work hard to secure the apprenticeships, the university and college graduates, the technicians that will make sure we achieve here in Scotland 100,000 additional skilled jobs, the Scottish jobs of the future.
 
And just as we looked to the horizon even when indebted by war and built a National Health Service to take the fear of destitution out of illness, so we need to build a national care service to take the fear and unfairness out of old age.
 
And just as we have done so much for family finances with the minimum wage, the child tax credit and the pension credit, we will maintain living standards by giving new help to first time buyers, by raising the minimum wage this October. And today I am proud to confirm that from 2012 the state pension will rise with earnings.
 
And friends you know in the last twelve years we've started a transformation of the provision for under fives – with, better maternity leave, paternity leave and high quality child care for the kids that need it most.
 
But now I believe the whole of the country has got to take this to the next stage with personal tuition for every school child, and greater choice of leave for Mums and Dads. We need to complete the transformation of services for the greatest asset our country has - not only developing some of the potential of some of our children, but to develop all of the potential of all of our children.
 
So let us be clear that what is at stake is not simply an election, but the future of our country. And the decisive question is: who will offer a plan for our country's renewal - who has the policies that will enable our country to lead and succeed in the second decade of this new century?
 
And so in this coming election I ask you to focus on the future – the future on offer with a Labour government, and the future at risk with a Conservative government.
Because let us be in no doubt – that is the choice for Britain . On every major question facing our country there are only two answers – the Tory answer and the Labour answer.
There is no middle way, no risk-free way of voting for another Party, and still being sure that you prevent a Conservative Government.
 
There are only two ways this campaign will turn out – with a Labour Government, or a Conservative Government.   
 
And so people must decide: who, in good times and testing times, will always be on your side? Who do you believe will invest in new industries and future jobs? Who will protect the frontline services we all rely on?
 
In the weeks ahead and at the launch of our full manifesto I will do more to detail the choice between a Labour government committed to shared prosperity and a Conservative Party whose policies would have turned a global recession into a British depression.
 
A Conservative Party that by cutting spending now would threaten our recovery and cut public services to the bone.
 
A Conservative Party with no new ideas and only one future - a future that they themselves describe as an age of austerity.
 
It’s a big choice between moving our country forwards and marching it back to the old days, the old politics and the old economics of division and decay. I say Britain must move forwards.
 
We face a big choice between strengthening front line services and starving them. And I say we must strengthen our front line services.
 
A choice between securing the recovery and putting it at risk. I say we must secure the recovery not put it at risk.
 
And it’s a choice between the many and the few. Because if we make the wrong choice then the consequences – just like everything with the Tories – are not fairly distributed throughout society. Most people would lose out under the Tories – but it’s the middle who’d be hit first and hardest.
 
I’m not talking about the wealthy or the powerful of the privileged.

I’m talking about teachers.
Builders.
Shop-owners.
Nurses.
Engineers.
Administrators.
Software developers.
Doctors.
 
I’m talking about the mainstream majority.
 
I’m talking about you.
 
And if you, like me, are from an ordinary family in an ordinary town, I have this to say to you today:
 
The Tories want you to be taken in by the their warm words – but take a long careful look at the cold reality.
 
The Tories want you to be seduced by their soft focus posters – buy you should take a long careful look at the very hard facts.
 
The Tories want you to think they are compassionate Conservatives - but take a long careful look at the cruel reality of what they propose.
 
And let me tell you.  
 
Take child tax credits. Today almost 20 million parents and children are benefiting from child tax credits. But if the Conservatives are to make the savings they claim, they would have to axe child tax credits for everybody with a household income of more than £31 thousand pounds. That’s not a cut that would hit the very rich. That’s a cut that would hurt a family where dad is a police officer and mum works in a lab. That’s a Tory cut – and that’s just the start.
 
Take the Child Trust fund – because that’s something else they will take away. At the moment more than 4.8 million children have a nest egg that’s being lovingly built up by their parents and their grandparents, so that once they’re adults, they will have some savings when they get married or buy a house or study for a degree.
 
But under Conservative plans two thirds of Britain ’s families would lose their child trust fund in the months and years ahead. And again, that’s not a cut that would hit the very rich; it would hit the child not yet born in ochil whose parents could have saved up for uni, make the future harder for the young couple expecting their first baby in Chester, and block the help of the expectant grandparents in Cardiff who were hoping to help their grandchildren save up to own their first home.

But we shouldn’t be surprised – because the Tories have wanted to cut away support from the middle class the whole way through the recession too.
 
Labour gave a tax deferral to 16o000 businesses and rate relief this year to hundreds of thousands more and while Labour is giving support to the economy this year the Tories said let the recession take its course. And I say that anybody that ideologically rigid doesn’t have the good sense to govern – or any idea of how to turn the economic tide.
 
And while Labour gave 220,000 households support for mortgage interest so they could stay in the homes they’d worked so hard for, the Tories said we should simply let British families sink or swim. And I say anybody that hard-hearted doesn’t have the compassion to govern – or any right to say they are on the side of hard-working families.
 
And while Labour brought in a jobs guarantee for young people, the Tories said we could lose a generation to the dole. And I say that anybody that short-sighted doesn’t have the vision to govern – or any plan for jobs expect the ones they itch to hold in government.
 
I’m afraid the Tories have run out of steam before their train has even left the platform. While we are a Labour Party awash with new ideas, fired up about the future we can built, impatient to move forward with change, they don’t have a single idea about how to create the middle class jobs of tomorrow.
 
And let’s remember that the one fully guaranteed promise of the Conservatives is to cut inheritance tax not for people on modest incomes, not for people in middle incomes, not even for the moderately wealthy. No – they want to help the richest few estates – giving them a tax hand out of £200,000 each.
 
So, of Scotland ’s five million people there are about 300 of the wealthiest who would benefit from this £200,000 cut.   That’s the Conservative Party; when it comes to a choice between child tax credits for millions, and inheritance tax cuts for 300 people they make the choice not for the many but for the few.
 
300 people – only a slightly smaller number, than the active membership of the Scottish Conservative Party.
 
So as we move from recession to recovery only Labour has a plan for national renewal and a plan for new industries and future jobs.
 
Labour’s modern industrial activism is not about picking winners – it’s about investing in the high value sectors where we have a comparative advantage over the rest of the world.
 
I know that the opposition are determined to talk our country down. But let’s be proud of all the ways we lead the world – proud of beating the competition in advanced manufacturing, in green jobs, in the life sciences and the creative industries.
 
Let’s be proud of our inventiveness and drive – that the world’s first industrial nation is still the world’s most open nation.
 
And so I say to Mr Cameron and all the Conservatives who want Britain to pull up the drawbridge against Europe and turn their back on Europe – this is not a country that fears competition…. It’s one that relishes it.
 
And I don’t need to tell anybody here that our country was built on manufacturing – and that it’s manufacturing that will drive our renewal too. Nanotechnology, plastic electronics, aerospace, low carbon cars – that’s how we create a future where all young people can get jobs with decent pay and promotion and prospects.
 
But I warn you that future is at risk from a Tory Party determined to reward their friends in high finance at the expense of low carbon, hi-tech industries which create real jobs and will sustain our recovery. Because the Tories want to scrap the allowances on corporation tax that a business gets if it invests in growth, in order to lavish a massive tax break on big banks and corporations regardless of the quality or volume of jobs they create.
 
Their plans for corporation tax cuts would give the biggest handouts to the biggest companies and banks, whether they invest or not, and they would pay for this by taking most from the manufacturing companies that are critical to growth and jobs. It's a wonderfully Tory policy: reward the big banks that drove the recession and punish the industries that driving the recovery.
 
And it is small and medium sized businesses who would be hit hardest by their proposal to scrap the £50,000 annual investment allowance that's why the EEF - the manufacturers’ organisation - described the Conservative plans to reduce capital tax allowances as “a big problem for manufacturers” and then called the Tory policy of reducing general plant and machinery tax allowances a “disaster”.
 
And so let’s be clear – the Tories might have a lot of warm words for the middle class. But the cold reality of their plans is to cut your benefits, cut your frontline services and cut your jobs.
 
The clocks go forward an hour tonight, but if the Conservatives win in the weeks to come the clocks will be going back to bygone times when people on middle and modest incomes were abandoned by a Conservative government who believed if it wasn’t hurting it wasn’t working.
 
The Conservatives are not alone in waging war on the mainstream majority. David Cameron has the support of his very own highland division – a Scottish national Party that talks left, but votes right, whose mps have followed the Tories through the lobby in 2 out of every 3 votes since 2005.
 
It’s hardly a surprise that they have clubbed together when both of them are still reeling from the confrontation between their fundamentalist dogmas and economic reality.
Just take the SNP: their case for independence was a three-legged stool – and each and every leg has buckled.
 
First they talked about the arc of prosperity – but what is it about Iceland and Ireland that’s made Mr. Salmond stop talking about that? The SNP are now just raiders of the lost ark.
 
Then they said that Scottish financial institutions could be trusted just because they were Scottish. He said if only Westminster would give them lighter touch regulation then we’d all grow rich on the proceeds of speculation.
 
We don’t hear much of that from him now. There seems to be a lot of that political laryngitis going round Bute house just now.
 
But perhaps the single biggest body blow to the nationalist case is what happened to Scotland ’s banks. Because nobody of any credibility claims that an independent Scotland could have achieved an independent bail out.
 
Everybody knows that it was as part of the union that Scottish banks were rescued and restructured/
 
That it is as part of the union Scottish businesses were saved and it is within the union that Scottish jobs, businesses and deposits were saved. Everybody knows that we are an in an interdependent world and
 
The old ways of separation and division are obsolete,
 
And when you also think that more than half Scots families have relatives in England . That we are stronger together than we could ever be divided and apart.
 
In the last 18 months every single piece of analysis and argument the nationalists have ever peddled about the best future for Scotland has turned out to be wrong, wrong and wrong.
 
And the SNP's secret sister Party haven’t fared any better. If being wrong was an Olympic event even Sir Chris Hoy wouldn’t get more medals than Alex Salmond and David Cameron.
 
Because at every major moment of judgement, the Tories have got it wrong.

Wrong on Northern Rock.
Wrong on short selling.
Wrong on mortgage support.
Wrong on tax deferral.
Wrong on the need for global coordination.
Wrong on absolutely every major question they would have faced in government and clearly therefore unfit to be in government.
 
Sometimes I don’t know whether it’s George Osborne or Ozzy Osbourne that’s writing their economic policies.

Who will forget the big freeze when everything came to a stand still, nothing moved?
 
No I’m not talking about the weather but the Conservative’s big freeze. We were faced with an unprecedented global economic storm and what did the Conservatives do?
 
They froze.

They are completely incapable of responding flexibly, pragmatically and decisively to changing facts.

Of course they talk about change.
But what sort of change is it to make re-instating fox hunting a priority at a time like this?

What sort of fairness is it when while your top priority is an inheritance tax give away for richest estates in Britain , you will do nothing to help the poor.
 
And what sort of modern Party says the response to the crisis of confidence in our democracy should be to defend and perpetuate the status quo, and in the year 2010 to keep hereditary peers in the House of Lords.
 
When it comes to big changes the Tories have made only one – not a change in policy but a change in their advertising agency, changing their appearance to give the appearance of change.
 
They’ve gone not for better policies but better posters
 
This isn’t change you can believe in – it’s the same old stories from the same old Tories.

And so the time has come for the country to weigh up the choice.
Who do you trust with our children’s tomorrow?
Who do you trust with our nation’s tomorrow?
Who do you trust to give us all a better tomorrow?
 
All through the good times and the bad times – through the years of growth and the months of recession – when things were easy and when they were hard, we always stood up for you – the   mainstream majority.
 
And so I ask this of Scotland and of Britain today: in the moment of decision that lies ahead remember one thing-- in all the moments of decision that have already tested us, we have never left you, we have always put you first.
 
And I ask you to stand with us now-- for your future and for our country’s future. Stand with us in the weeks ahead and know that in the years ahead we will right there where we have always been – on your side, backing your dreams, helping your family and serving the people.