Change The World

Posted on September 17, 2007
Filed Under Images, Web Publishing, Non Sequitur, Politics, News | Leave a Comment


When did you give up on your teenage dreams of changing the world?

When did you give up your dreams?

When did you give up?

Don’t give up.

Do something.


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LibDem Conference Speech: Vince Cable

Posted on September 17, 2007
Filed Under Quotations, Politics, News | 1 Comment


Brighton 2007: Cable, Deputy Leader’s Speech

17 September 2007

The last three elections were won by Labour for one major reason: The economy.  It remains Gordon Brown’s main weapon; and his Achilles Heel.

The British economy may have been reasonably successful but it is also highly fallible.  The House that Gordon Built may not be built on sand but it has certainly been built on a floodplain.  It has yet to be fully tested against rising economic sea levels, though the events of the last week suggest that it may be very soon.

The water is now pouring through the defences after the near collapse of Northern Rock; a product of greed and reckless gambling by overpaid executives; lax, indulgent bank regulation; and a complacent Government.  I warned Gordon Brown of a looming debt crisis four years ago.

The seductive narrative of Gordon Brown’s moralistic social democracy also bears little connection to the reality of modern Britain in which amoral and anti-social behaviour by the ‘super rich’ is given free rein; where the poor are hounded for small over payments of benefit and the super rich can pay no tax; where a city is refused a super casino but our country is turned into the world’s super casino for speculative investors.

The Treasury team has commissioned a YouGov poll into public attitudes.  Over 80% thought that the gap in earnings between rich and poor, and the gap in wealth and property were too large.  84% – and even 80% of Tory voters – thought Chief Execs of top companies were overpaid; the most common word used was ‘obscene’.

How sustainable is the Brown Economic Miracle?

This current boom does not depend on long term investment or on exports or on the cultivation of a more educated, skilled, labour force.  It is powered by debt financed consumer spending, some reckless lending and the optimism generated by a house price boom.  Household savings have virtually collapsed in the rush to spend. Personal debt has more than doubled in a decade to well over 1 trillion pounds.  Almost 20% of all household income is now set aside for debt service; as against 13% in 1997.  For first time buyers the figure is around 40%.  I have been warning of this for over three years.  But repeatedly, and complacently, Gordon Brown denied that there was a problem.  Now, those who are over borrowed, or suffer loss of income, job, illness or relationship breakdown, are increasingly unable to pay.  Every day nearly 300 people face insolvency and 75 family homes are repossessed; Gordon Brown must take personal responsibility.

The United States has already produced a lending crisis built on the back of high risk credit, such as NINJA loans; to people with ‘No Income, No Job and No Assets’.  Yet some of ours have done the same; and this is high street banks - not just the cowboys.  When I ask our banks why they are behaving recklessly, lending four, five, six times peoples’ income they say: ‘what is the problem?  80% of our loans are secured against borrowers’ houses.  And, as we all know, property prices can only go up?’  They say.

We can see the frenzied signs of collective madness which always accompany an economic bubble.  From Dutch tulips to dotcom shares to Japanese land prices, and now UK house prices, we see banks and individuals entrusting their money to a market which seems to offer a one-way bet.  Until it bursts the bubble has a logic of its own, inflated by uncontrolled credit expansion and rampant speculative demand.

Symptoms include not just the buy-to-let market but the buy-to-leave market.  Every village in Cornwall, the Lake District or Wales, knows what happens when outsiders buy up local cottages and leave them empty.  Speculative investors have been doing the same across the South East.  Developers sit on land banks.  There are three quarters of a million empty houses, roughly the same number as the alleged shortage.  Many others are under-occupied.  Yet the Government’s answer is to blame local councils and planning rules and it threatens to destroy the delicate balance between development and overdevelopment.

My qualities do not include clairvoyance.  There is no Mystic Vince.  The press can’t foresee the future either. But I deeply distrust the professional optimists – the banks, estate agents, government ministers – who seem to believe in an economic version of levitation.  History tells us that bubbles burst; and every housing boom is followed by a crash whatever the papers say. This is something Gordon Brown understood ten years ago when he said in his first budget: “I will not allow house prices to get out of control and put at risk the sustainability of recovery”.  But that is exactly what he did.  Why?

Why did he exclude housing from the measure of inflation?  Why did he not give the Bank of England responsibility for this, the most important and destabilising element in inflation?  Why has he taken 10 years to produce a housing policy?  Why was council and other social housing drastically curtailed forcing families into owneroccupation they cannot afford?  Why was he so frightened of tackling the banks over debt promotion, unfair charges and irresponsible lending?  As long as the boom has gone on, he has been able to avoid answering these questions but his day of reckoning cannot be far off. 

Some of Gordon’s other chickens have already come home to roost, like the use of public private partnerships to disguise public borrowing.  The collapse of Metronet was an accident waiting to happen.  There was a basic design flaw.  And Gordon Brown was the chief architect.  Such was the complexity of his design that £500m was paid out to consultants and advisers to launch the company – which then failed after four years.  Worse: far from transferring risk, tax payers have been landed with almost all of the debt: at least £2 billion.  The accountants, consultants, and contractors are laughing all the way to the bank.

A similar costly fiasco is emerging from another brainwave: tax credits.  The concept is fine: a system to cushion the working poor from the impact of low and fluctuating incomes.  Yet Gordon Brown’s overcomplicated design has brought the Inland Revenue to breaking point.  £9 billion has been lost on overpayment, error and fraud.  Every year 2 million families are being pressed for rapid repayment of money which was received and spent in good faith.  It occurred to no one that complexity breeds error and fraud.  Even now, they are in denial.  The system needs radically simplifying.

These failures cannot just be dismissed as incompetence.  These are, after all, highly intelligent people.  The problem is philosophical as much as administrative.  There is a gulf between socialists and liberals.  Gordon Brown has a deeply ingrained belief in the capacity of the State to achieve both massive and subtle social transformation; and in the capacity of armies of civil servants to improve lives and change behaviour.  Liberals, rightly, are more sceptical. 

In one respect, however, we share the same philosophical ground: a commitment to social justice.  And here we have a paradox.  No British prime minister since Lloyd George has preached about social justice with such fervour.  But, Mrs Thatcher’s legacy of income inequality has been respectfully left alone.  Wealth inequality has actually widened considerably since the Tories left office, on the back of inflation in land, housing and financial assets.  The voters have noticed.  Our poll shows that two-thirds of voters believe the earnings gap between rich and poor has widened in the last decade; three-quarters that the wealth and property gap has widened.

Last year we debated with some passion the issue of whether those on high incomes should pay 40 or 50p top rate tax.  Yet the reality is that the super rich pay virtually no tax at all.  Private equity operators pay as little as 10p in the £ - not 40 or 50.  And not just them: thanks to a capital gains tax relief granted by Gordon Brown the outgoing chairman of British Land has recently pocketed £18 million from his property dealings.

Another expensive gift to the wealthy is non-domicile resident status.  Beneficiaries pay no UK tax on their global income including pay and capital gains earned here and shipped out via off-shore trusts.  In 2002 Gordon Brown initiated a Treasury enquiry into the abuses of non-dom status.  The report never appeared.  The Treasury now uses a waiver under Freedom of Information to suppress its findings.  What we do know is that the number of non-doms has shot up from 80,000 to 200,000 in five years, while the average amount of tax they pay has plummeted. Billions of tax revenue is disappearing while low paid workers and the middle class are being taxed to the hilt.  We would curb this abuse.  Our poll shows that the vast majority of the public want such a crack down.

So much for social justice.  St Francis of Assisi was the patron saint of the meek; St Vincent of the poor; St Gordon is the patron saint of the super rich

Now you might say: ‘well, at least there is none of the obsequious grovelling to the rich and powerful that was Tony Blair’s stock in trade.’  This is the hopeful patter of Labour activists.  But it begs the obvious question: What was he doing for the last ten years.  Take Iraq.  He signed the cheques.  We know now that the cost was £6.6 billion, and is still rising.

Or take another example of Gordon Brown’s amnesia:  New Labour’s role in perpetuating the agreements, lubricated – allegedly – by massive bribes for the sale of armaments to Saudi Arabia.  The Liberal Democrats have been trying, in the face of unrelenting hostility from both the Government and the Tories, to get to the bottom of the scandal and to ensure that the law on overseas corruption is enforced.  One might have thought the then Chancellor would know that a billion pound in backhanders had passed through the Government’s accounts.  But not that Chancellor.   He wasn’t there.  He didn’t know.  Nobody told him.

For anyone tempted to apply to enter Gordon Brown’s Big Tent you will be required to answer two questions.  First, who was responsible for the economic successes of last decade?  Answer: Gordon Brown.  Second, who was responsible for the failures: costly PFIs; tax credit overpayments, fraud and error; collapsing occupational pensions; the failure of Individual Learning Accounts and Film Tax Credits; growing tax complexity; U-turns over company incorporation and Operating Financial Reviews; widening wealth inequality; housing unaffordability; IT systems failures; and Railtrack.  Answer: Someone Else.

Let me now sketch out my priorities.

First, the emphasis on economic stability and steady growth has been right.  Our policy of making the Bank of England operationally independent has been broadly successful.  But the world has moved on in the last decade.  Improvements are needed.  Appointments should be independently assessed.  Inflation measures must include housing.  There must be more attention by, financial regulators, to reckless lending.  The Governor of the Bank of England is absolutely right to send packing those whingeing billionaires in the City demanding a government bail-out from their bad investments and to protect their bloated bonuses.

Second, fiscal policy needs reform.  Independent scrutiny is necessary.  Few people believe that the government is meeting its own fiscal rules. The key flaw is that the Chancellor is the judge and jury of his own policy.  In effect, he marks his own exam papers.  Unsurprisingly he always awards himself 10 out of 10.  The assessment of fiscal policy must be independent of government.

Third, tomorrow we shall debate our proposals for a simpler, fairer and greener tax system, so I shall not dwell on the detail today.  Suffice it to say that unlike the Tories, we have a fully costed, independently assessed, alternative package – leading to a 4p cut in national income tax, financed by green taxes and higher taxes on the wealthy – we’re honest about it.

And fourth, the rules governing public debt are now in danger of doing more harm than good.  They have encouraged the Government to conceal debt via PFI.  PFI has a role but it has been used to excess.  There is also a danger now that investment in public transport or social housing will be blocked.  A better way is to ease or scrap the debt limit while requiring public investment projects to be independently assessed for viability.  The private sector can do so much.  But if we are to see the scale of investment demanded by the country’s climate change objectives there will be a need for new non tax revenue sources like a surcharge on road freight and auctioning airport landing slots, currently a gift to the pampered airlines.

If borrowing for public investment can be freed up we do not believe higher levels of taxation are needed.  Our spending priorities will be met by cutting lower priority spending.  We undertook to identify £15 billion a year of spending cuts to this end.  When the government spending review is completed, Julia Goldsworthy and I will announce our proposals.  I can tell you that there will be no uncosted promises.  But the electorate will see the point of spending money on the police rather than compulsory ID cards; treating the mentally ill rather than locking them in jail; investing in rail rather than roads; decentralised renewables rather than new nuclear power; supporting front line troops rather than expensive toys for generals and arms manufacturers; investing in smaller class sizes today rather than baby bonds maturing in 18 years time.  We shall combine financial prudence with greater fairness: public spending with a purpose rather than more spending for spending’s sake.


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Gordon Brown’s TUC Speech In Full

Posted on September 10, 2007
Filed Under Politics, News | 1 Comment


Can I, first of all, at this the 139th Congress of the TUC, thank you, Alison, as President of the Congress, and Brendan and the General Council for your leadership week in and week out of the trade union Movement of this country. I will never forget that the trade union Movement of this country was built over two centuries by hard work and by the struggles and sacrifices of men and women who had a vision of a better and fairer future, free of poverty and free of injustice. Today the work of the trades unions of this country is possible only because of men and women who year in, year out, give their energy, devotion and commitment to sustain and in every generation to revitalise the trade union Movement.

As they step down from service to the General Council this year, let me this morning on your behalf and on behalf of unions around the country thank all those who have served the General Council and who are now stepping down: Paul Mackney, Sofi Taylor, Pauline Foulkes, Barry Camfield and Jimmy Kelly. Thank you for the work you have done not just for the trade union Movement but for our country.

Let me thank Ed Sweeney, who is also stepping down from the General Council, and congratulate him on his appointment, which I believe will be warmly welcomed around the Movement and across industry when it is announced today, as the new Chair of ACAS. I know you will want to wish Ed the best in his new role.

Before I had this job and actually before I was a Member of Parliament, I worked in education. I was for some time part-time as a Workers Education Association tutor, and with the Open University and as a tutor in trade union learning. When I and others taught trades union education at Loader College in Scotland and when, as a result of numbers signing up, the Department of Employment under Norman Tebbit cut back the trade union learning budget, I do not think he had any idea of the unstoppable momentum of trade union learning in Britain which has grown from strength to strength. So you will understand why I am pleased to offer my personal congratulations to all those TUC award winners today for their work in trade union learning and in trade union organisation - Lorene, Patrick, Irene, Lisa, Linda, Peter and Russell - and the struggles that they have had and their aspirations and commitment show how graphically we in Britain can respond and are responding to all the new challenges of the restructuring of today’s global economy. Thousands of people are now obtaining new skills needed to succeed in the future.

For all its two centuries, the trade union Movement of this country has been about enhancing the dignity and the work of labour. Today we are finding a new role which makes the task we undertake more relevant, more urgent and more demanding than ever. To enhance the dignity and value of labour in the 21st Century it is undeniable that we need to enhance the skills of every worker in this country.

So the new role for trade unions is to bargain for skills, to campaign for skills, to invest for skills and for the fair rewards of skills. It is this challenge how all of us in Britain raise our game, to meet and master the new forces of globalisation in the interests of working people in this country, and that is what I want to speak about this morning: the task of the future.

As I have believed all my life, from part-time trades union tutor to MP, by enhancing the dignity and value of labour we will make Britain the best educated, best trained and best skilled country in the world and the most prosperous as a result.

This is my central message today. All of us must prepare and equip ourselves for this global era. We must maximise its opportunities for working people and seek to minimise its insecurities. Nothing should stand in the way of us building jobs and prosperity not just for some but for all British working people. If we do so and mobilise the talents of all our people, then I believe that Great Britain can be the great success story of this new global age.

When the Leader of the Labour Party comes to the TUC he always brings with him the greetings of the Labour Party and of Labour Members of Parliament. This year I have a particularly joyous task additional to that, which is to offer not just the good wishes of Labour MPs but to pass on to you the words of the man whose statute I had the privilege of unveiling a few days ago in Parliament Square - Nelson Mandela. He asked to send his heartfelt thanks to the labour Movement in Britain as a whole, for the ceaseless commitment and the shared support sustained over many years in the struggle that defeated the evil of apartheid. I hope from here that we can send him our best wishes as he prepares for his 90th birthday next year.

I said at that ceremony in Parliament Square, and I know many of you here were there that day, that Nelson Mandela’s statue is not a monument to the past but a beacon of hope for the future. It sends a signal that no injustice can last for ever, that suffering in the cause of liberty is never in vain, that there is nothing that those in the cause of justice cannot achieve if they stand together and work for common purposes. I say to you today, from the Make Poverty History Campaign internationally to campaigning for justice as you have been talking about in the last debate on child poverty at home, that as long as there is poverty and unfairness, wherever discrimination and injustice exists, there we must be also working for change.

Of the great struggles of the last century, against the dark night of fascism, Nazi-ism and anti-semitism, against the shame of apartheid and for the victory of democracy and equal rights at home and abroad, British working people have always played a decisive role. In this century, the 21st Century, we have injustice to fight, too. I promise you that our voice as a Labour Government will be heard, demanding an end to the denial of democracy and human rights in Burma, supporting a ceasefire with justice for the two million displaced in Darfur and supporting peace with justice in the Middle East.

We have terrorist extremism to fight whether in Afghanistan or in the twenty countries, including Iraq, in which Al Qaeda have bombed and maimed innocent people. It is important to say today that we will do our duty and keep our promises and honour and discharge our obligations to the international community and to the new democracy of peoples in Iraq.

Also we have just to build in Africa, so just as we stood side by side with Nelson Mandela to defeat apartheid, I now join Nelson Mandela in asking you to be part of the Education for All Campaign so that the day will dawn soon when 80 million children who do not go to school today because there are no schools for them to go to, will have the basic human right of education. Like people here, I have been in Africa. I have met children who, if given the chance, could be the next Mandela, or the doctor who saves lives, or a teacher who inspires children or a public service worker who cares for people in need. Let us by raising international development aid and by mobilising the world’s resources work together not only to eradicate illiteracy in the coming decade but use the medical knowledge and science that we have to eradicate the killer diseases.

And even as we together face the forces of globalisation, let us make it our mission to ensure that in rich and poor countries alike, all children and all families are not the victims but the beneficiaries of globalisation, not the losers but the winners from global change.

In the last 20 years with a trebling of world trade, with two billion workers joining the industrial economy in Asia, this global economy has been transformed as everybody here knows at a speed and on a scale which has not been seen since the industrial revolution.

Let us face the facts: soon 25% of the world’s output could come from just two countries – China and India. Europe is now exporting less manufactured goods than Asia. In Britain famous household names from GEC to BTR have virtually disappeared. Already an Indian company has bought British Steel, an Egyptian company has taken over the third largest Italian telecommunications firm and a Brazilian company is now the second largest mining enterprise in the world.

We cannot dismiss these changes, as it is sometimes said as China and India take over the low tech industries, as a race to the bottom where the answer is simply protecting home industries, shutting foreign goods out and sheltering from change. Already India’s biggest export earnings are not tea or clothing but computer software and management services. China is today producing half the world’s textiles, half the world’s computers, 60% of all mobile phones, 60% of digital cameras and 80% of some of the most sophisticated electronic goods that we use every day. Already China and India are turning out more engineers, more computer scientists and more university graduates than the whole of Europe and America combined.

When it comes to our members’ jobs, the most important fact is that the world has seen a 400% rise in the numbers of unskilled workers. Just think about what that means about our need for our workers to acquire skills. In Asia a worker is doing a week’s unskilled work for £20 a week rather than the average £300 here. So the answer is clear. It is a new role for trade unionism in Britain and in the world – our workers given the power to acquire the skills that give us the bargaining power, the higher wages and then the prosperity.

It is a point of principle for me as it will be for you: the answer is not to compete on low skills with ever lowering standards but to compete on ever higher skills – most of all ensuring that our children and our young people have the training, the skills and the qualifications to get secure, well paid, high quality jobs in Britain in the future.

So the sheer scale, scope and size of the global change is a wake-up call to all of us. We all must rise to the challenges of global change: businesses, teachers, politicians, trade unionists, all of us. We will only meet the new challenges ahead which are to finance education for all our children, provide the best work life balance with more child care for all, ensuring dignity and security for all in retirement, creating the best of standards for people in the workplace, if we can meet and master the huge global challenges ahead.

Some people think that the 21st Century will be China’s century. But I think that if we show the skills, the inventiveness, the creativity and the spirit of enterprise, we can make it a British century. Some people argue that in this fast moving world of change we have to sacrifice our enduring values and give up on full employment and universal public services. But when people ask me about this world of fast moving change, of greater opportunity and yet greater unsecurity, and they ask: can we, the British people, in this generation, meet and master the new challenges and still achieve our goals of full employment, defending and strengthening public services, ensuring hard working people in Britain are better off in living standards, in pensions and in services, my answer is that if we work together and raise our game, if we do not resist change but embrace it as a force for progress and if we equip ourselves with investment, science, enterprise and flexibility, and most of all if we upgrade our education and skills, then we can not only meet and master these realities of global change but also ensure more British jobs, higher standards of living, and better public services, including an NHS that improves every year, free at the point of need.

That means to achieve it we must embrace a new mission for this generation: to unlock all the talent of all the people of this country of Britain.

In the next few days as a Government we will announce plans to make us world class in science, in innovation and in the creative industries, and we want to make sure that inventions created here are developed here, produced and manufactured here and provide jobs to men and women in Britain.

In the next two weeks, too, we will show with our announcements in the Spending Review that we will invest in the infrastructure, the transport of the future, and we will show how the issue for the British economy moving forward is not manufacturing giving way to services, but building modern manufacturing strength and service strength in all regions of our country.

I tell all those who, like me, have faith in the future of British manufacturing from aerospace and vehicles, to IT and pharmaceuticals, that Britain can and we will lead in the high technology, high value, high quality, manufacturing and services of the future.

And while demanding a level playing field in Europe and demanding also right through the negotiations on the amended European Treaty that the red lines that we have set are guaranteed, we will at all times continue to stand up for British interests in Europe.

In the next few days we will also show how as we prepare for a low carbon future for our environment thousands of jobs will come for investing in energy efficiency and in environmental technology products and processes, from carbon capture to innovative low-carbon fuels, where Britain can be a world leader creating new jobs for the future, and with the conclusion of our spending review in the Autumn we will show British people how we will expand the National Health Service, free when you need it, access founded not on wealth but on need, and with the same ethic of public services that is important to all of us, we will also build more houses to buy and to let with a 50% increase in social housing.

Now today I want to show you how we can respond to globalisation by creating more jobs for British men and women and young people throughout our economy. After I took over this job a few months ago I asked for a study to be done on where the jobs are going to come from in future years. I found that while in the next decade we will need less unskilled jobs, we will need 5 million more skilled jobs.

I want us to be ready and prepared for what is the biggest economic transformation in employment our country will have seen for a 100 years.

Even now today there are greater opportunities. In addition to 29 million jobs in our economy, which is already the highest level of employment in our history, there are even today two-thirds of a million vacancies waiting to be filled, 654,000 in all. Because the vacancies go right across the board in manufacturing, finance, hospitality, healthcare, because the vacancies exist in every region and nation of the country, and because they range across all our skills, our task in the coming months and years is to rapidly match workers needing jobs to the jobs that need workers.

One of the benefits of globalisation is, of course, the benefits we receive in many industries from the skills of workers from around the world, but it is absolutely essential also that British workers receive all the support, the training, and the skills, so that they can share in the benefits of globalisation too.

The new jobs that are coming and the vacancies that exist represent a great new opportunity for not just British adults but for British young people as never before. It is a huge opportunity for British trades unions to recruit, to expand union membership, expand union learning, and grow your numbers in the years to come.

Now, I want to thank all of you because I was there with you as you campaigned in the 1980s and the 1990s for jobs, when you lobbied for jobs, demonstrated for jobs, petitioned for jobs on these marches for jobs, and as a result of what was achieved by your campaigns the number of jobs in our economy has risen by almost 3 million in the last 10 years, that is 3 million men and women who otherwise would have been without work, who thanks to the campaigns that have been mounted are in work today.

We are now ready to take the next big step forward as a country. There are jobs available today for in total 30 million men and women for the first time in our history. If we make the right decisions, we can advance even further and faster to full employment than ever before, with a British job on offer for every British worker.

Today I am proposing, and I have written to Brendan, the General Secretary, about this, that we work together to fast-track British workers into jobs we know exist and we work together to implement radically five practical changes that between them will yield half a million jobs.

The first is for decades, as you know, the barrier to work was the lack of jobs. Today with two-thirds of a million vacancies the biggest barrier is not lack of jobs but lack of skills and lack of links between employers who need workers and workers who need jobs.

I want you to work with us as we talk to the 200 largest companies in Britain and 64 of the best known – from Sainsburys in retail, HBOS, and RBS in banking and finance, Travelodge, Compass in hospitality, Corillian, Mowlem, Diagio in manufacturing and construction - have already committed to take on, train up, and offer jobs opportunity to men and women who today are inactive or unemployed. Between now and 2010 by this measure alone a total of 250,000 extra job opportunities will come to British workers.

Just take one big national project, as we build the Olympic facilities we should train up local young people in our construction industry. Our plan is to start by helping 5,000 young people into jobs in London and ensure that jobs in the Olympics should and can go to local young men and women.

Let me say also that we can only create thousands more jobs and move faster to full employment if having defeated inflation in the last 10 years we continue to defeat inflation in the next 10.

This week will see the 15th anniversary of the most humiliating day for British economic policy in modern history, the Black Wednesday, of 15% interest rates, the exit from the ERM, the mortgage misery, the record repossessions, the negative equity, the 3 million unemployed, all the disasters that befell us 15 years ago.

The current Conservative leader was the principal economic adviser to the Chancellor of Black Wednesday and he stood alongside Norman Lamont as he announced the shame of the ERM exit and 15% interest rates.

If we were again to allow, as they did, inflation to get out of control by repeating as some would the same mistakes of 15 years ago, we would be back to Britain’s same old familiar Conservative pattern of spiralling prices, high unemployment, a mortgage crisis, and public spending cuts.

It is because we must never return again to those days when reckless promises that you could simultaneously cut taxes, raise spending, cut borrowing, were made and then inflation was allowed to get out of control causing 3 million unemployed, £16 billion public spending cuts, half a million repossessions, that we the Labour Government will always put stability first; no loss of discipline, no resort to the easy options, no unaffordable promises, no taking risks with inflation.

So let me be straightforward with you, pay discipline is essential to prevent inflation, to maintain growth and to create more jobs, so that we never return to the Conservative pattern of boom and bust ever again, and because this Government will take no risk with the economy we will only make promises we can afford.

For me it will be stability first, now and into the future, and that is stability not just yesterday but today, and tomorrow, and in my view that will bring us more jobs.

I can also announce further measures to fast-track thousands more into jobs that are vacant, to guarantee for the first time in our country’s history a job interview for every lone parent who is looking for work and ready for work, a new deal whereby prospective employees are invited into the workplace for onsite discussions, a new financial offer guaranteeing up to six weeks benefits during a work trial for lone parents, where training is required a training allowance of up to £400, for the lone parent taking a job for the first year £40 a week extra, £60 a week in London, ensuring that work always pays.

Let me add for those who come to Britain to do skilled work we will first require you to learn English, a requirement we are prepared to extend to lower skilled workers as well.

Fast-track means more jobs by offering better routes for young people. There are 85,000 more young people in college than in 1997, there are 340,000 more young people in work, but we know there are still too many teenagers after 16 who are not in education, training, or work at all.

Let me also announce a fast-track for out of work teenagers: all this summer’s school leavers guaranteed a place on a pre-apprenticeship course or at college, a pathway to jobs for hundreds and thousands of young men and women who too often in the past would have fallen through the net. Let all of us work together to improve what are the keys we know to our future, the apprenticeships.

I am announcing today also that we will create a new all round the country service that is to match the apprentices who need training to the companies and the organisations who want young people to train.

I say to our trades unions in the public sector, we are ready to work with you now to expand apprenticeships into local government, the NHS, the Civil Service itself, as well as into all sectors of the youth labour market.

Our target is to move apprenticeships in this country from today’s 250,000, which is more than three times the 70,000 it was in 1997, to expand from 250,000 to 500,000 over the next 10 years to 2020.

This is why your work in trade union learning becomes central. It is central to the future not just of your unions but to the country. You understand that to build for the future we must enhance the value of labour and skills.

Fifty unions are now engaged in what I believe is the biggest transformation since the growth of the shop steward movement, a total of 18,000 trades union learning representatives in workplaces all round the country. Today your learning representatives, and I have congratulated some of them here today, are working in 700 separate workplaces, and they are helping 100,000 of our fellow colleagues at work.

To expand union learning in the workplace and to meet our ambition, which is one million adults in learning, we are going to raise the money available from the Union Learning Fund from £12.5 million this year to £15.5 million next, and I call on all employers to join you in signing up to our skills pledge that every employee should have the right to gain basic skills, every employee the right, and I repeat, if we do not make sufficient progress over the next three years we will consider for employees in England who lack a good vocational qualification a legal entitlement to workplace training.

We want to stand with you not just to create jobs but to create good jobs, decent jobs, where employees are at all times fairly treated. I am today also talking to the General Secretary about how we work effectively to make sure that today’s vulnerable workers are tomorrow’s secure workers.

Let us be clear, no employer anywhere should be allowed to avoid the minimum wage. No employer should be allowed to impose unsafe or unacceptable conditions. I will stand with you to enforce all the conditions of the minimum wage.

Let me say also, it is wrong that in any place, at any time, pizza staff or farm workers could ever take home less than £5 a week because of deductions for their transport, or for loans, practices which I know anger the overwhelming and vast majority of the British people, and the price of a job should never be a substandard wage or a dangerous workplace.

We are taking new enforcement powers against people traffickers who buy and sell illegal migrant labour. We remember the tragedy of the cockle-pickers of Morecambe Bay and we have responded to your calls for controls on gangmasters. Let me say we are not only introducing the Gangmaster Licensing Authority, but this winter we will legislate to tighten agency regulation.

I applaud also the work that unions here have done to help migrant workers and to combat racism and any bigotry against those who are here perfectly legally but who live in fear from unscrupulous employers who profit from fear, and we will at all times stand up to and expose and seek to eliminate from every council hall in Britain the bigotry of the BNP.

We will also continue to support the Portuguese presidency of the European Union as they are pushing this month for an Agency Workers Directive in Europe. At the same time we in Britain will ensure four weeks annual holiday as of a right.

Thanks to your campaigning and the Warwick Agreement this will be in addition to bank holidays.

For parents of young children and carers there are new rights to seek flexible working hours and, of course, not only the right in law to be represented by your union but after years of campaigning and the dialogue, and after laying the foundation and tackling pensioner poverty, introducing the Pension Protection Fund, there is a new pensions settlement for the future where employers will now contribute by law to the pension of their employee and Britain is now on track to again link the basic pension to earnings.

We also want to work with you in every area where workers are vulnerable. We want to reach out to those who are too unaware or too intimidated to complain, we want to increase awareness of their rights among school leavers, and we will now examine with you how by bringing the power of all the enforcement agencies together they can be more effective in advancing basic rights.

Let me announce today that we will now increase the maximum penalties for violation of the minimum wage, we will raise the amount of compensation paid to workers who are owed arrears, and we will in future target resources to projects aimed at the safety and security of vulnerable workers who are at risk.

Congress, today I am issuing to you an invitation to work side-by-side in a national effort to raise our skills and raise the standards so that together we can meet and master the forces of globalisation.

Britain can succeed and lead in the new global economy and achieve full employment. I will settle for nothing less, neither will you, and neither will the British people.

Let us in conclusion remember what we can achieve by working together. Two hundred years ago it was the British people who came together and with the biggest mass petition that had ever been mounted in the history of our country the British people brought the trade in slavery to an end. Now in this century working internationally and at home this generation can record proud achievements too.

Following the leadership of Nelson Mandela, I strongly believe that we could be the first generation to ensure that every single child in every country in every continent has the basic right to go to school.

Let us also be the generation that ensures another fundamental right, that every mother and every child is protected and we eliminate the scourges of tuberculosis, polio, diphtheria, malaria, and then HIV/AIDS from this world.

Here at home let us also be the first generation able to show the world that instead of a globalisation which benefits just a few our country is a beacon for justice and fairness to all, the first country that can genuinely say that because of our efforts together we liberate not just some of the talents of some of the people but we liberate all of the talents of all of the people and so together we ensure the objective we all seek, dignity, security, and prosperity for all.

Thank you very much.


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