Chair of the Labour Party National Policy Forum, Pat McFadden's speech to the 2009 Labour Party Annual Conference:

On Thursday of this week we will bring justice to service workers when we change the law to stop the use of tips to make up the minimum wage.

Campaigned for by you. Supported by the National Policy Forum last year.  And enacted by this Labour Government.

It’s the kind of change that helps to make Britain a better and fairer place.  It becomes part of our record.

And changes like this are not inevitable.  A different government would have made very different choices.

Just ask the new mum who now has the right to 39 weeks maternity pay when under the Tories it was 18 weeks at a much lower rate.

Ask the young apprentice learning a good skill or trade when under the Tories apprenticeships had almost disappeared;

Ask the patient who today can get a hip replacement in weeks because of the changes we have brought to the NHS when under the Tories they would have waited years.

And nothing shows better the difference between the parties than the debate over the National Health Service.

Just a few weeks ago it wasn’t a leading Labour politician who called the NHS a relic and a 60 year mistake.

And the survey of Tory party candidates on the same issue proved he was no lone eccentric

I know that every Labour candidate in every seat at the next election can say they support the principles of the National Health Service.

But after this summer, we also know that the Tories can’t say the same thing.

After all their image making, their two faces were exposed by this issue.  The contrast between what they want people to think of them and the reality of what many in their party believe was laid bare.


But it’s not enough for us to highlight the failings of the Opposition.

Our task is to help the country recover from the greatest worldwide economic crisis since the 1930s.

Banks, shaken to their foundations; companies gone to the wall, people losing their jobs.

And part of the reason was a culture of reward gone wrong.

Most people in financial services do a good job for the public and deserve their pay, but why is it that the nurse who treats the sick and the soldier who puts his life on the line in Afghanistan do their jobs without a bonus, yet we are told that to buy useless packages of dud mortgages some people need a bonus of millions?

The human cost of the recession has been high yet it would have been so much higher if we and other governments around the world had not done everything in our power to stem the tide.

So we stepped in to stop the failure of the banks with all that would have meant for savers and businesses; cut tax to put more money in people’s pockets; the scrappage scheme to get the car industry moving again; £1,000 to employers to hire young workers.

All of it a stark contrast to the 1980s and 90s when communities were abandoned and recessions were left to run their course.

It is tough for people right now but if we had listened to our opponents, telling us to pull back at every turn, more jobs would have been lost, more businesses gone bust, more homes repossessed.

The Tories instinct was to leave the market alone whatever its failings.  Labour’s determination was to ensure people weren’t left on their own because of those failings.

And the worst thing we could do now would be to ruin the recovery by following our opponents’ advice and withdrawing support too early.

To do it the Tory way would make it harder to get out of the downturn and reduce our ability to pay down the debt in years to come.

Theirs is not a plan for fiscal responsibility - it’s a plan for a longer deeper recession.

They talk about Broken Britain, but that’s not a description of the present; it’s a warning of what could happen if we let the Tories ruin our economic recovery now.

And we have learned over the past year the importance of governments acting together, of building coalitions between different nations.

What chance would there be of the Conservatives acting globally in Britain’s interests when they can’t even work with their own centre right colleagues in Europe?  If they believe the governing parties in France or Germany are beyond the pale, where would that leave Britain when countries had to come together for the common good?

This matters because our economic future is what it’s all about.

As we see the first fragile and uncertain signs of recovery, people want to know what comes next, what kind of future they and their families can look forward to.

That’s the task for our manifesto.  It’s not a time for a string of spending promises.  The public know that’s not the moment we are living through.

But it is a time for ambition for Britain, a time to say that as we come out of recession, we want Britain to lead in the changes the future brings.

Take just one vital issue of our times.  Climate change isn’t just an environmental challenge.  It’s an enormous industrial opportunity.  How we produce our energy, how we build and heat our homes, how we travel from A to B, all of these are going to undergo huge change.

It’s a new industrial revolution.  And as a country we have a simple choice.  We either buy the new technologies involved from elsewhere or vow to be part of their creation.

So when it comes to green energy, when it comes to low carbon vehicles, let our ambition be that the term “Made in Britain” is at the heart of our economic future.

It won’t happen by itself.  It needs us as a nation to want to make it happen.

And it will be at the heart of Labour’s manifesto, where the power of government, the excellence of British education and science and the creativity of our companies is brought together to make our country a leader in the new jobs of the future.

This is critical to our future yet the Tories have absolutely nothing to say about it.

And we don’t just need a view of where the new jobs will be - we have to give people the chance to do them.

So opportunity, social mobility, not just lifting the glass ceiling but breaking it, these too must be at the heart of our policy.

We don’t believe in the tired notion that there is a restricted lump of educational excellence and that more always means worse. Do we really think that China or India believe they are not sending enough people to university?  And you can bet your last pound that anyone arguing that case in this country doesn’t want their child to be the one denied the chance to go on to higher education.

No, for us, it is about taking away the barriers that stop people being what they can be, lifting ambition and making sure there is a platform on which everyone can achieve no matter who you are, no matter where you come from.

For us it’s about building opportunity grounded in the changes to come, not nostalgia for a world that isn’t coming back.

Government can drive this forward, sometimes as an enabler, sometimes a supporter, and often as a big customer too.

Government spends billions every year on goods and services.  It must be right that we use this purchasing power to support the young people of this country.  So I can announce today that we will aim for 20,000 apprenticeships over the next 3 years through Government procurement as part of our wider aim to increase apprenticeship numbers.

It’s a fair bargain. If you want to work for government, make expanding the life chances of your workforce part of your mission.

Friends,

Labour’s task this week, and as we develop our manifesto, is to set out what the future holds in economic circumstances very different from those when we came to power.

In the depths of recession, we had to make the right judgements. And it’s not a task for marketing now.  It’s a task of substance, of good judgement.

Some have written us off.  The Tories think this is it, they think it’s all over before a vote has been cast or a seat won or lost.

But we didn’t rebuild Britain just to see it thrown into reverse.

We didn’t put all the energy we had, nationally and internationally, into getting through the recession only now to put the recovery in peril.

We did it to give Britain the platform for the economic changes to come and to give our people the chance to do the jobs those changes will bring.

And that’s our task now.