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Conservative Party Conference Speech 1994
Mr. President, the political landscape has changed in the last few years, and it's changed again in the last few months. The language of politics is now Conservative language. With every speech and every copied aspiration, the Labour Party finally admit how wrong they have been for so long, and how right we have been.
So forget the hype. It's we who've changed the whole thrust of politics and moved it in our direction. We have won the battle of ideas, and it is an astonishing triumph.
When the Labour Party consider what has happened, they may realise what they've done, because what they've done is to study our instincts and our attitudes and then go away and market test them. And when they've done that they've discovered what we told them long ago: that they are the hopes and dreams of the typical Briton. It's a huge compliment to this party and we should accept it gratefully.
But it's one thing for the Labour Party to commit grand larceny on our language. It's one thing for them to say what market research has told them that people would like to hear. But it's quite another to deliver it. They have some hard questions to answer.
If you talk of full employment, then you should say what you mean. And then you should explain how that could possibly square with the minimum wage and the Social Chapter, which sound comforting but are deadly to jobs. And if you talk of low tax and low spending, does that mean supporting Tory tax cuts and Tory expenditure reductions? As to that we shall see before the writ of this parliament is run.
If you preach about community, then you shouldn't grow politically fat on the politics of envy - and didn't Blackpool reek of it last week? And if you're going to attack over-mighty government and bureacracy, then you shouldn't promise Scottish and Welsh parliaments with more bureaucrats and more taxation.
And if you do, you should answer the question: Will Scottish Members of Parliament be permitted to vote on matters in England that English Members of Parliament would not be permitted to vote on in Scotland? And if Labour plan a Scottish Parliament, will they plan also to reduce the number of Scottish MPs in the House of Commons at Westminster, or will they gerrymander the Commons to boost their own political chances?
Mr. President, these are deep waters. So let Labour be the party of devolution. We are the party of Union, the party of the United Kingdom.
Mr. President, I've relished this debate. These are great issues, but they are our issues, this is our ground, and upon this there is a battle to be fought that this party will undoubtedly win. So I have this advice for you: don't waste time on the past - it's gone. Out there, up and down the country, people are concerned about the future, not the past. That is where the political debate should be, and that is where I intend to take it in the months and years ahead.
In politics, if you expect the unbelievable, then you'll never be surprised. It is probable that at the next election, the government and the alternative government will both be talking Tory language. But there is a difference: only one will mean it. Buying Tory policies from Labour is like buying the Rolex on the street corner. It may bear the name, but you know that it isn't real. Our task is to promote the real thing, and expose the counterfeit. We hear talk of a new Labour Party. A new Labour Party. These aren't people without a past, lovable little extra-terrestrials beamed down for the duration.
Mr. President, since 1979, we've beaten the old Labour Party, the very old Labour Party, the redesigned Labour Party and the new model Labour Party. And as for this new, "biologically improved" Labour Party, it may wash blander, but I would give it a shelf life of under three years.
Mr. President, at Blackpool, Labour filched two of the principles on which we fought the last general election: opportunity and responsibility. But wasn't it interesting that they left out two others: personal choice and private ownership. They're vital to us.
So socialism may be a bit out in Islington just now, but Conservatism isn't off my agenda. As they so often invent what we think, let me tell them clearly what we stand for: we believe in free markets, we believe in private ownership. It doesn't go against the grain for us to say so. It's not a new Conservatism that we've just discovered, it's one of the oldest principles of our party and we believe in it passionately.
And because we've believed in it, millions of families up and down the land now have savings of their own: Granny bonds, TESSAs, PEPs, the hundreds of billions of pounds in the banks and building societies. It is our philosophy that has given people that choice and that security. That is the message that we must carry forward. Our opponents present ownership as if it was something selfish, self-centred, perhaps even greedy. Some people are all of these things, but most are not. People who have earned well, people who have saved, people who have inherited the fruits of a parent's lifetime's work are not the "undeserving rich".
No, Mr. Brown, they are deserving workers. How does Clause IV put it - "by hand or by brain". So let me hammer the point home ever more clearly: we are the party of savings, of ownership, of property, of personal independence. We offer people choice: the liberty to grow, and yes, the liberty to make their own mistakes. We admire success in life, and we will never, never, never resent it in other people.
We try to remove government from the everyday lives of people. We believe that every family should be entitled to enrich their own private corner of life, and then pass it on to their children without over-mighty taxation. That, Mr. President, is what Conservatism is about, and there is only one party in this land that truly believes it.
Mr. President, I know when people hear the word "economy", the spirits droop. They think they're in for a lecture on the PSBR, GDP, and all the rest of it. Well, you're normally right, but not today. I just want to say today that the word "economy" should lift the spirits and not depress them, because the great cries of lasting growth with low inflation, which we have sought for the whole of my adult lifetime, is now within our grasp. Whisper it gently, but we are now doing well as a country.
For most people, it isn't their everyday experience, not yet. But it will be, and I'll tell you why. Britain is making more, selling more, exporting more. This time we have built a recovery to last, built on firm foundations, on export and investment. Month after month after month, exports from Britain have broken the record set the month before, and they did so again just last week.
These islands of ours are exporting cameras to Japan - you did hear me right, cameras to Japan; computers to Germany; cars to America; clothing to Hong Kong, and Cosmetics to France. We know what we were told. We were told unemployment would go on rising to five million. It's been falling for the best part of two years, and Michael Portillo announced another fall earlier this week.
We were told we wouldn't get interest rates down, but we have; that we couldn't hit low inflation, but we have. These are the very things that bring security, make jobs safe, improve living standards and strengthen this country's influence right across the world.
What is the prize that lies ahead? Let me tell you what it could be. In 1954, in Blackpool, "Rab" Butler was speaking to this conference. Suddenly he said something quite extraordinary. He said that living standards could double in this country in 25 years. People scoffed, but he was right. For the country as a whole they did double in 25 years.
So let us have the courage to look forward once again. If we are able to keep inflation down, as we must, and control public spending, as we must, what does that mean for our people? It means stronger growth, improving the services we care about - education, health, the police service; it means more money in people's pockets and more free choice for those people.
Britain has changed. It may not have been noticed but it has changed. Not for 30 years has this economy grown so much faster than prices. So let us bang the drum and say so. It's time to put the marker down, but as Ken Clarke told you yesterday, we need to stick at it, and for this reason neither Ken nor I, ever again, want to go through the boom-bust cycle that causes so much pain and so many lost hopes for so many people up and down this country.
And that is why in some ways we are a bit puritanical. That's why we are so determined to control public spending, improve competitiveness, cut regulation, and let private enterprise build public wealth. That's why we'll be prudent about what we spend, cut taxes where we can, and above all build up the long-term health and strength of our industry and of our economy.
Mr. President, it's time for this country to set our sights high again. What "Rab" Butler saw was prophetic and positive. Let me echo it today. Because of what has been achieved, with the right determination, with the right policies, we have the chance once again to double our living standards in the next 25 years, and that is something that everyone in this country can feel good about and feel good today.
Mr. President, I want to talk about education. How many people in this world are fulfilled, really fulfilled? How many do the jobs that they might do? How many have had their minds stretched and extended? "Not enough" is the answer. Not as many by hundreds of thousands as should have. That's why education matters so much to me. I'm just burned enough to know a little about that. I left my chance late, so I did a lot of my schooling while off for a year with a shattered leg, in the company of Trollope, and Jane Austen, and Adam Smith, and a lot of dull but terribly useful books on banking. Better companions one never had, until now.
But I was lucky. Not everyone is. It's my personal ambition that everyone should have the same chance to rise to the top on merit. Never mind where they come from, what their parents income is, what their religion is, or what their colour is. These are irrelevant, and please God they will always remain irrelevant to the people of this country. What matters to me is that they have the same chance.
Good schools can be a lifeline out of poverty, the ladder to a better life. That's what our changes are all about: the curriculum, the testing, the league tables, the inspection, the new parental choice, the challenge to the old council school monopoly, the emphasis on better vocational education, and the creation of new universities. Mr. President, it is not reform for its' own sake, it is reform to deliver higher standards for all our children.
Bad teaching fails children. They may get through if they come from families with a social edge, a sophisticated home and the good books that go with it, but bad schooling falls most heavily on pupils who have none of these things - children from homes without a book in the house, from blaring day-long television homes.
Mr. President, we are a national party, and these children are as much our responsibilities as are the higher climbers. If the school ladder's all abstract theory and holds out no rungs of letters, facts and numbers, who loses? The children lose. The people who need our protection lose. The people easily defeated lose. The people who live at the bottom of the heap who deserve a chance to get off it lose, and it's just plain wrong.
And that is why I want teaching in the weaker schools to be levered up, because if it is, someone will get off the bottom of the heap, and if it isn't that is where they will stay, probably for the rest of their lives. I will never accept that. I've no time for those who are complacent and oppose improvement, and all too often they are the high priests of the politically correct.
They are the people who can afford the good things in life, who chortle away about our emphasis on basic standards and the three 'R's, and then move to a different catchment area, with better schools for their own children. They're people who have in their own homes the books that they say other people's children aren't up to reading. They are the people I cannot take, the kind of people who have clambered up the ladder and then seem ever ready to kick it away from other people.
Education's there to lift the eyes, broaden the horizon, distinguish between the great and the trite, the right and the wrong. It's there to unlock the gate to a better life, and by and large teachers deliver this. They have a hell of a job, but they can make the difference for children between apathy and despair, and seeing the remote but inviting light upwards and out.
Teachers that do their work well, for heaven's sake, teachers that do their work well, are the prime route out of the class trap. I care enough about teachers to give bad teachers a bad time, and I care about children enough to oppose sloppy, experimental teaching that ignores common sense.
Up and down the country, dedicated teachers have worked hard to put our reforms in place. They haven't always liked every aspect of them; so we've listened. Sometimes they have been right and we have changed our minds. Many teachers feel there's been too much paperwork. I agree with them, and there still is.
That's why we've been working with them on slimming down the National Curriculum. We've now finished that job, and it's been dramatically cut, and we're now out to reduce much of the other paperwork that schools have to deal with. Teachers should be marking homework, they shouldn't be doing it, and we're determined that is how it will be. After the curriculum changes of recent years, teachers deserve stability, to be able to get on with their jobs without any more upheavals. So today I promise them this: there will be no further significant changes for the next five years.
And there's another area in which we must give teachers our full support. I'm disturbed by some of the stories I hear - too many stories to ignore - about violent attacks on teachers and false allegations against them. The teachers' unions are concerned about these issues and so are we. In this area, the unions deserve our support and the unions will get our support. But education involves fun as well as facts. Schools are friendlier, less forbidding places than once they used to be, and I think that's good. But they seem to have lost something. I don't regard sport, especially team sport, as a trivial add-on to education. It's part of the British instinct, it's part of our character. Sport is fun, and it deserves a proper place in the lives of all our children.
Of course it can't supersede Maths and English, though how I longed for it to do so when I was at school! But it must take its proper place alongside them. We are therefore changing the National Curriculum to put competitive games back at the heart of school life. Sport will be played by children in every school, from five to sixteen, and more time must be devoted to team games. Many schools already offer at least two hours a week for sport and physical education. That should be the minimum, and I hope schools will offer more.
Schools should establish links with local clubs and national sports bodies to help do this. They must open up their facilities outside school hours, and harness the willing help that I know is out there. There are sports coaches, parents and other volunteers by the hundreds and hundreds and hundreds who will willingly come in outside school hours to help our youngsters have a better grounding in sport, and all it means, for the rest of their lives. So while we're about it, I don't want councils selling off school playing fields they may need. I want those playing fields kept, and I want those playing fields used.
Mr. President, there are many views about nursery education. My view is quite clear: I am in favour of it. The picture's improving. Over half our three and four-year-olds go to nursery school. Nine out of ten have been to a playgroup or nursery school before they're five. I think it's time to accelerate this trend. So I've asked Gillian Shephard to work up proposals to provide places for all four-year-olds whose parents wish them to take it up.