Young people have the same ambitions as generations that came before them - to own their own home with a wage that pays the bills, to live in a decent neighbourhood, to raise their kids well, perhaps to save for retirement too.
We Conservatives have always shared those ambitions. But under Labour the hopes of many young people were blocked.
Even during the boom times youth unemployment was rising.
Owning your own home became a distant prospect.
Access to the great professions was increasingly restricted to the privileged few.
And on top of all this, young people have been left to pay decades of bills for today's public spending.
We must give them reasons for hope for the future. We can do it. We are the party of aspiration. Even now, in tough times, we are giving young people the opportunity to achieve their ambitions.
Under Labour the routes to riches were to work in the City, win the Lottery, be a celebrity - or of course to be an international peace envoy. Those were for the few, not the many. But there should be other more solid routes to prosperity. I salute those people who have mastered their craft and have made their fortunes by building a business. There's a new word for them - skillionaires, like Anthony Bamford of JCB, Delia Smith and James Dyson. We need more of them.
One way people used to work their way up to a well-paid job was through an apprenticeship.
That is why at last year's conference I promised we would create 50,000 more apprenticeships in our first year. I have to report that we have not delivered the figure we promised. In our first year we have created not 50,000 extra apprenticeships but 100,000. We have delivered the single biggest increase in apprenticeships in our nation's history. We now have as many apprenticeship places as places at university.
And it doesn't stop there. For too long the vocational route has come to a halt at a lower level than the academic route. Our great industries like advanced manufacturing, engineering and IT should have apprenticeships that go beyond the equivalent of A-Levels. That is why, in 2008, I pledged to our conference that we would create 1,200 new skills scholarships for apprentices wanting to study at a higher level. Again, we will not be delivering that figure. We have now received so many good quality bids that I can today guarantee we will deliver 10,000 higher-level apprenticeships. Under us, there will be no limits to what you can achieve through your skills.
That's our party delivering opportunity. I pay tribute to the fantastic efforts of my friend and colleague John Hayes who is passionate about craft skills. And it is true across the whole Coalition. I work closely with Vince Cable and he is absolutely committed to spreading apprenticeships.
We will get rid of the red tape that stops people recruiting an apprentice, setting up a business, or taking on extra staff. Last month, we launched a new simple scheme for larger employers that take on apprentices, eliminating cumbersome data and audit requirements. Now we are reducing the obstacles facing small businesses. Our pledge is very simple: no employer in our country, large or small, should face barriers to taking on an apprentice.
It is all part of our wider attack on red tape. Sometimes the regulations we are sweeping away are crackers. Literally. We are abolishing the law that blocked young people from buying Christmas crackers.
Until last weekend, it was illegal to sell unwrapped bread unless it weighed 400g or multiples thereof. It was illegal to sell two-thirds of a pint of beer. And it was illegal to sell wine in glasses of less than 125ml. As the Minister for measurement, I have just swept away such absurd rules.
All too often, regulations stand in the way of the creation of new businesses and new jobs. Those must go and they will go.
And we want young people to take up the opportunities we offer. Within 3 miles of Tottenham when the riots broke out there were 3,100 vacancies on the National Apprenticeship website. When we make opportunities available, we expect young people to take them up. There are no excuses.
There is another great driver of opportunity and growth in our country - our universities. They are amongst our greatest national assets. Like our monarchy and our armed forces, they are British institutions that are respected across the world. On Thursday, I expect the latest world rankings in Times Higher Education to show even more of our universities in the top 200 than last year - double the number for Germany and six times the number for France.
Universities transform lives - the typical graduate earns £31,000 a year as against £19,000 a year for a non-graduate. That is why it is right to expect graduates, not students of course, to pay back if they are in a well-paid job.
Yes it would have been easier not to do it. Instead we could just have sliced away at university funding without putting anything else in its place, weakening them in the face of international competition. That really would have been to let down our young people. But I want our universities properly funded, competing to improve the quality of the academic experience. Our reforms are making universities stronger.
Let me say this direct to young people thinking about going to university. You pay nothing up front for your education. You will only start paying back if you earn more than £21,000 - a much higher threshold than at the moment. So if you earn say £25,000, you will be paying back not £75 per month as in Labour's system now but £30 per month under us.
That is a fair deal.
We are taking the tough decisions. Labour is shirking them. Last week at the Labour conference Ed Miliband gave up his opposition to increasing fees. A few weeks ago he wanted to scrap them, now he wants to double them.
Then, after all that, he said that might not be their policy at the next Election anyway. He still flirts with a graduate tax. That would mean universities would look up to Whitehall for funds not out to students. We have more confidence in our young people. We believe money should follow the well-informed choices of students. That is why we are getting rid of some of the quotas fixing how many students should go to each university. Fewer quotas, more choice - that's what Conservatives believe in.
We are doing more to set universities free. At the moment universities get 60% of their income for teaching from the state. In future, they will get 40% of their income from the state. This really matters because as soon as you get less than half of your income from the state you are freed from obligations on the public sector set by the European Commission. So I can announce today that we believe EU public procurement rules will no longer apply to the vast majority of our universities. That will cut bureaucracy.
Universities will be able to contribute more to their local economy by negotiating direct with local business. It is all part of the long march to freedom for our great universities.
As we tear down the barriers between universities and business, I want every business person to know they can knock on the doors of a university and ask:
"We need to try a new manufacturing process - can you test it?"
"We need training - can you provide it?"
"This is the problem our company faces - can you help us crack it?"
But let me make this clear. Our universities must always have space for the free spirit, the eccentric, the blue skies researcher. As well as scientists and engineers, any civilised country has social scientists, people studying its history and its culture. And not just our own country's, but 'the best that has been thought and said in the world'.
Without that our national life, however prosperous, would be grey and diminished. Conservatives will never let that happen.
Now my Cabinet colleagues have made many exciting new announcements at this conference. I have one too. Mine is about broccoli. But this is not any old broccoli. This is the broccoli of the future. We are world leaders in agricultural science. Our researchers have created a new type of broccoli that lowers rates of heart disease and some forms of cancer. It's called Beneforté and it's available in Marks and Spencer stores from today. And it tastes good too. That's what we get from our world-leading research centres. It's why we were right to protect the money going to them.
Last December, I was at the Nobel Prize ceremony in Stockholm. Four of the prize winners had done their research in Britain, two of them here at Manchester University. Their work has produced graphene: the thinnest and strongest material ever found.
It is a revolutionary discovery. But as George Osborne said yesterday we must do better at turning such discoveries into the products and industries of the future. That is why
we are backing it with extra investment of £50million.
And that's not all. Our national infrastructure is not just the roads, the railways, the National Grid, essential though those are. It is also the IT infrastructure of the future, the super computers handling enormous amounts of data, and the software to analyse it. We are investing £145 million in super computing. We must remain at the cutting edge of this technology.
That combined investment totalling £200million shows our support for the high-tech industries of the future. It is only possible because of the courageous decisions the Coalition has taken to get a grip on our public finances. Unlike the eurozone, we are not staggering from crisis to crisis, that's why we can have our eyes on the future and govern for the long term. We have great craftsmen and designers. We have world-leading universities and great scientists. We can live on our wits as we always have. We have the enterprise and the ambition to achieve in the future. That is what we offer the next generation. We will not let them down.