“Making the Conservative Party more open to women has been a major part of my agenda, as you know.
This wasn’t an artificial adjustment, a lick of paint to lure the voters. It’s one of the deep, lasting changes that we needed to make.
We didn’t transform the number of women candidates because it might make our Party look good.
I fought for them to be selected, and I will fight for them to be elected, so that in government we have people with the ideas and the experience to help make Britain a fairer and more family-friendly place. We haven’t focused on issues that traditionally matter to women because some focus group told us to. I have put education and family policies at the heart of our agenda because these are the key to strengthening our society and that is the chief challenge of our time.
Changes like these show that we’re a modern, forward-looking movement – and not a narrow, self-interested club. That’s why people are taking us seriously again. But we’ve never been complacent. And right now, you could say we’re being tested by events. Britain is facing some very difficult economic circumstances. Banks that people thought were a permanent part of our landscape have gone under, the pound is falling, inflation is rising and so is unemployment.
Since Gordon Brown’s boom went bust, Labour have had a clear political strategy.
It’s to say that this recession is caused solely by international factors and has nothing to do with domestic mistakes. Every hand shake by Brown with another international leader is supposed to drive home the point. Once again, he is taking the British people for fools.
He’s brought Mandelson back to spin fantasies about how they’re the ones to take us through the dark times, even though they’re the ones that switched off the lights. It’s clear – Labour’s prime concern is setting the agenda rather than setting right the mess they helped to make.
But we’re not going to be distracted by that circus. We are focussed on what this recession is really about, and that’s people. People losing their jobs. People losing their homes. People worried about paying the bills each month. Today I want to talk about the people that I worry will be hit hardest by this recession, and what the Conservative approach to helping them will be.
WOMEN AND THE DOWNTURN
Of course the impact of this downturn is being felt across our society. But I’m concerned that one group may be hit particularly hard and that’s women. There are many reasons for this.
First, women may be more vulnerable to redundancy. Far more women work part-time than men.
There’s a danger that if people are being laid off, part-time workers might be the first to go. And it’s where women work, too. Nine out of ten are employed in the service sector, in banking, retail, education, hospitality, social work and other industries.
Last month the sector shrank at the fastest rate since such records began and it’s set to contract further. So there’s a real risk of redundancy for these women. On top of this, they’re less likely to be cushioned from increasing costs. Women earn less than men – seventeen percent less, on average they’re less likely to have financial assets to fall back on and as nine out of ten lone parents are women, they’re more likely to be shouldering the cost of raising a family alone. So it’s clear – the recession is likely to have a disproportionate impact on women.
It’s going to be our job – you and me – to develop the thinking and the policies that will provide more opportunity for women in future. Normalising family-friendly working, ensuring girls get better career advice, opening up educational routes into well-paid employment, broadening horizons and bettering prospects for women across Britain.
That’s our long-term challenge. But the current question is this, what can we do now to help those women that are struggling – indeed to help everyone that is suffering? The first and best immediate help we can give is to leave people with more of their own money through the tax system.
Over the last few weeks George has been setting out how we can do that in a responsible way.
Freezing council tax for two years, deferring VAT payments for small companies, cutting payroll taxes for every business with under five employees and stopping the planned tax rises on family cars. That’s how we can help ease the strain.
UNEMPLOYMENT
But the biggest worry for so many people right now is redundancy. Unemployment is rising at its fastest rate for 17 years. Between June and August the number of people without work soared by 164,000 – taking the total to 1.79 million. It’s got worse since then, and predictions for next year are grim.
Today I want to speak to you about what our approach to unemployment will be during this recession. Because before people hear your policies, they want to know what values and attitudes you bring to the table, and that’s what I’m going to set out.
You don’t need a long memory in this country to remember the trauma of mass unemployment. As a recession sets in, hundreds of thousands of people are at risk of losing their jobs, and as recessions go on, long-term unemployment soars.
That is a tragedy for the people involved, and it’s a tragedy for us, too – for all of society. There’s a certain approach to this which says that however painful this may be, large-scale unemployment is an unavoidable consequence of recession, that because it’s the natural movement of the markets, all that government can do is stand by and pick up the pieces.
I am not one of those people. In fact, I wholly disagree.
Today I want to say that the Conservative party will not stand aside and allow unemployment to claim livelihoods and ruin lives on a massive scale. We will not walk on by while people lose their jobs. And there are three reasons for this.
VALUES
The first and most important reason why we won’t walk on by is our values. For me the most important values of Conservatism are responsibility and compassion. Responsibility is what this party is all about. That’s the belief that people must take responsibility for making their own life choices. It’s also our personal, civic and corporate responsibility to each other.
But the emotional agent that activates real social responsibility is compassion, a profound reaction to injury, injustice, pain or hardship. It’s compassion that makes us want to go beyond our normal responsibilities to each other.
It’s compassion that led a hundred Conservative politicians and activists to Rwanda this summer, where they worked under the African sun to build a community centre for families affected by the genocide.
It’s compassion that has prompted hundreds more Conservatives up and down the country to start their own social action projects, doing their bit for the local community.
So the authentic Conservative response to the pain of mass unemployment is a fusion of this compassion with responsibility. Not just throwing money at the problem – because that would be irresponsible. But not just standing by either – because that would be uncompassionate.
We have a moral obligation to help those who have lost their job through no fault of their own, or are in danger of doing so. Because being out of work can seem like the hardest work in the world. The workplace offers more than a pay-packet. It’s where we see ourselves through the eyes of others, where we seek to define ourselves, where we socialise, where we go to get started on living a better life.
Losing a job means losing all this, and it hurts and our Conservative values mean we won’t stand by and do nothing while people suffer like this.
BROKEN SOCIETY
The second reason why we won’t walk on by is because too much of our society is broken already. Mass unemployment isn’t just an economic waste; it’s a recipe for social disaster. People are not just units of production and jobs are not just about function.
When you strip people of their daily purpose and its structure, you rob them of their security and you leave them open to all sorts of instability. The combination of hopelessness and debt can create the conditions for family breakdown. That in turn causes increases in educational failure, drug abuse and crime.
Fixing our broken society means breaking this chain that links unemployment, family breakdown, debt, drugs and crime not strengthening it by standing by while hundreds of thousands are laid off. We’ve got to isolate the economic effects of recession before its social symptoms sweep the country, because we cannot allow Gordon Brown’s broken economy to deepen the problems of our broken society.
HISTORY
The third reason why we won’t walk on by while unemployment climbs is because we have learned the lessons of history. We know from past experience that when people are laid off in a recession, the impact often lasts way past the slump, even into recovery. Cyclical unemployment becomes structural unemployment. There’s a clever term for this – hysteresis – but at its heart is a very human story.
When someone loses their job, they very often lose their self esteem and from there it’s very easy to lose hope. The longer they are out of a job, the more their social and economic skills diminish, and the harder it is to get work. Some become lifelong statistics in official unemployment figures.
It’s a personal tragedy, an economic waste and a source of social decay. It is in no one’s interests to allow long-term unemployment to take root, which is why we’ve got to take action now to prevent mass unemployment happening. And this week Chris Grayling, George Osborne and I will be setting out exactly how we’re going to do that.
CONCLUSION
I want to finish today by thanking CWO for all the work you do. You’ve helped to change our party for the better, as women have done throughout our party’s history. Reaching out and broadening our appeal, you’ve helped make this party relevant to the twenty-first century.
We’ve won respect in new places, amongst new people, and it’s bringing us success. They said we’d never get 40 percent of the vote and we got 44 percent in the local elections this year.
They said we couldn’t take ground in the North of England and we won Crewe & Nantwich with a stunning swing.They said we couldn’t resonate with modern, metropolitan voters and Boris won the mayoralty in the world’s most diverse and dynamic city.
The Conservative Party is back on the political map of Britain. This success has not been built on anything slight or insubstantial. It’s built on certainty about what we believe, sureness about what is right for Britain and the sincerity of our values, the values that have always underpinned our party and the values that will take Britain through these difficult times, responsibility to each other, compassion for all.”