Conference, we meet in some of the toughest times that we can remember. Much of what I have to say today focuses on finding the best possible way for Wales through these difficulties, so that we emerge stronger on the other side.
Yet, before we plunge into these very real problems, let’s not get drawn into believing that in everywhere you look, Wales is a land of doom-and-gloom.
Let us not forget our ornithological success stories.
What’s he on about? I hear you mutter – ornithology?
Yes, of course, it’s the high flying ‘Bluebirds and Swans’, I’m referring to.
This afternoon, while you are all enjoying yourselves in the workshops, I will be attending the final league match to be played at Ninian Park – yes, I know, it’s a huge sacrifice to flog my way along the M4 and submitting myself to 90 minutes of unbearable, nail-biting, nerve-tingling tension, but someone’s got to do it.
So, let’s all get behind the Bluebirds and the Swans in these final, vital weeks of the season as they push on to the play-offs and then on to the Premiership.
Congratulation, too, to the Cardiff Blues for their fantastic performance in winning the EDF Energy Cup in such style last weekend. On, now, to the Heineken Cup, and please bring even more glory for Wales a week Sunday and on to the Final in Murrayfield on 23rd May.
Congratulations, finally, to those thirteen Welsh members of the Lions squad.
We’re all going to need something to cheer this summer, and with those thirteen Welsh rugby stars in the squad, there’ll be every chance to do so.
And, while we are being positive, let us remember, in this hall, that while global conditions are as tough as they have been in our lifetimes, we have a Labour government which knows, in its heart and in its head, that economic recovery depends on rolling up our sleeves, and getting our hands dirty and getting the economy moving again.
That’s how we take action to protect the most vulnerable, ensure that the pain is shared fairly by those who can afford to bear it the most, and make those investments which will bring us out of this downturn, stronger than we went in to it
Chair, you’ll be familiar with that old socialist recipe for progressive, left of centre government – ‘provide for today; prepare for tomorrow’.
That is exactly what Labour at the Assembly, and Labour at Westminster has been all about.
Let me give you just a few examples.
Here in Wales, we know from the experience of the 1980s and 1990s, that industries which lose their skilled labour during a recession are then poorly placed to take advantage of the up-turn when it comes.
Our ProAct redundancy avoidance scheme, unique to Wales, is based exactly on the recipe I just outlined.
It provides for today, because our wages subsidy of £2000 allows firms a breathing space, in which workers who would otherwise have been made redundant can be kept in employment even when order books are well down.
But you don’t get paid government money to sit at home and paint the bathroom. Instead, you get paid to train, and to upgrade your skills.
That is why it prepares for tomorrow, because ProAct contains a further £2000 to ensure that workers can use the time when order books are slack to improve their skills, and invest in training.
The ProAct scheme, a £48 million investment, unique to Wales, for which we’ve already had 135 applications, new inquiries coming in at 30 a week, 2,400 jobs saved in 31 approved schemes to date.
Provide for today; prepare for tomorrow.
Conference, what a contrast that simple statement of social purpose provides to the experience to which Wales was subjected in the long Tory years, when the Welsh economy of the 1980s and 1990s was allowed to go to hell in a handcart.
And when we complained about the way in which whole industries, and whole communities were consigned to the scrap heap, we remember the answer we got back.
‘Unemployment is a price worth paying’.
And, in any case, there was nothing which government could do, because Ministers were powerless to ‘buck the market’.
Twenty years later, the Tories have learned nothing.
Their response to global crisis is still to do nothing – Tory Vice-Chairman John Maples recently summed up that Tory view perfectly when he said “This recession must be allowed to take its course”.
But being in Government is not a spectator sport.
It is a participant sport.
You’re in the field of play.
Government is no place for sniping from the sidelines.
For the Tories to say “This recession must be allowed to take its course” is the greatest abdication of responsibility since Edward VIII ran off with Mrs Simpson.
Unless, of course, they really do have a plan of what they would do if in government, but just don’t want to tell the rest of us about it.
Chair, one of the disgraces of our times, is to see George Obsborne traipsing from tv studio to tv studio without once giving a straight answer to a straight question.
How would you have dealt with the banking crisis?
How would you deal with the consequences of the banking crisis on the real economy?
If you think the national debt is too high, what would you cut, and when would you start to cut it?
If you think Alistair Darling’s forecasts are too optimistic and national debt even worse, isn’t it even more incumbent on you to say what would cut and how soon you would cut it?
My fear, my fear for Wales, is that, if they were to get back in to office again, it will only be because the media have given them an easy ride, not getting those straight answers to those simply, ‘what would you cut?’ questions.
Then, the hammer blows would fall, and this recession would get longer, and deeper, because they would repeat the Tory mistakes of the 1930s.
Cynhadledd, gwers y slymp fawr yn oes fy nhad a mam yn y Tridegau yw ei fod hi ddim yn bosib I dorrich ffordd trwy ddirwasgiad – yr unig ffordd I ddod a ddirwasgiad I ben yw i dyfu eich ffordd mas trwyddo fe.
Dyna’r gwahaniaeth fawr rhynto ni a’r Toriad yn yr etholiad gyffredinol nesaf, ai torri neu tyfu eich ffordd trwy’r dirwasgiad yma.
Isn’t it just amazing to listen to the Tory finger-pointing and doing the deadly dance of the blame-game over rising unemployment, pretending that they are the great defenders of high employment and low unemployment?
Does this remind you of anything?
For the forty somethings, and fifty somethings in the hall, remember the great Tory con-trick, in the spring of 1979, the ‘Labour Isn’t Working’ posters, and the fake-snake dole-queue posters of advertising executives from the Mayfair offices ofSaatchi and Saatchi, with photos cunningly glued together to make it look like a long dole queue?
Unfortunately Britain bought the con-trick and, shortly afterwards, the Tories were in power.
Then we didn’t have fake long dole queues, made up of doctored photos.
We had real dole queues, long enough to last for the next 18 years.
Yes, sadly the British public did buy the Tory 3 card trick!
They actually believed the message behind those ‘Labour isn’t working’ fake dole queue posters.
Ooh, the Tories really do care about unemployment. If we vote Labour out and vote the Tories in, they’ll bring unemployment down! Tories bring unemployment down!
You don’t know whether to laugh or cry!
Democracy is cruel sometimes. Getting the public to believe that a Tory government would bring unemployment down, was miss-selling on the epic scale of the sub prime mortgage scandal.
That’s why it is so important for us in politics and those in the media not to allow David Cameron and George Osborne to get away with mis-selling now, the way the Tories got away with their giant con-trick 30 years ago.
Well here are a few facts of what’s actually happening now and what was actually happening back in the summer of 1979.
It is sadly a fact that there are now 75,000 people on the dole in Wales, up by 90% since last year. That’s serious.
Well, for the whole of the Tory year 18 years, dole queues averaged out at122,000. And that was despite government coffers being awash with North Sea oil revenues.
The Tories were in power for 18 years, less one month. That’s 215 months.
Guess how many months out of those 215, unemployment was lower than 75,000?
Just 10 months, Conference, just 10.
And those 10 months were all right at the start, before Tory economic policies really had a chance to get going.
For 205 months out of 215 – from April 1980 right through to April 1997 - unemployment in Wales was higher than it is now. What a horrendous record.
Yet when you listen to David Cameron or George Osborne, what do you hear?
‘Oh, isn’t the present recession dreadful. You, the redundant, the homeless, the unemployed of this country, we feel your pain. We may be Tories, but we’re all heart, you know, when it comes to worrying about the threat of unemployment. We care….’
The brutal truth is that the only thing David Cameron cares about is how to get in to No 10 Downing Street without saying a word about what policies they would follow to get the national debt back to a sustainable level.
‘What would you cut David?’
‘I’m not saying…’
‘What would you cut George?’
‘I’ve suddenly been struck by the total loss of the power of speech…I’ve taken Trappist vows. I’m pleading the Fifth Amendment. Whatever it is, we’re not telling.’
Never judge the Tories, by what they say or, even what they won’t say in the run up to an election.
Judge them by what they actually do after the election is over.
In fact, as we in Labour know, investment and growth are the only way to put our economy back on track.
And that the only way out of our difficulties is by harnessing the talents and commitments of all the different players, to make the sum of the effort across Wales greater than the individual parts.
In the economic summits which we have used to pull the key stakeholders together, we have evolved something new for Wales, a new model of social partnership – an informal, agile, anti-recession partnership, for these fragile times.
Just as, in so many other areas, we have shown that by investing today we make a real difference to tomorrow.
That’s why, in the economy, we have worked so hard to bring forward labour-intensive small capital works which provide work in the here and how and leave behind lasting improvement for the future.
That is how, over the past four years, we have eliminated long waits in the Welsh health service.
At the end of 2004, a third of those waiting for inpatient treatment had waited more than six months. Now, no-one does.
At the end of 2004, over half of those waiting for an outpatient appointment had waited for more than three months. Now, those lists have evaporated.
And we remain committed to an all-in, referral-to-treatment wait of no more than six months by the end of this year.
And, the same pattern is to be found in primary care.
When the Assembly came into being, in 1999, primary care in the South Wales Valleys was in a perilous state. There were whole towns where not a single woman GP was to be found.
Now, ten years later, we have over 50 salaried primary care workers in RCT and Merthyr alone, including 15 salaried practice nurses and 34 salaried GPs, many of them women, and a standard of service which would have appeared as a pipe-dream only a decade ago.
We could not have done that without doubling the intake of students studying medicine in our medical schools in Wales.
Provide for today – prepare for tomorrow. Just as we are providing primary care services which no-one would have thought possible, so the tower cranes to be seen in Ystrad Mynach, Mountain Ash and Ebbw Vale are symbols of the investment we are making in the best possible hospitals for the future.
That hospital in Ystrad Mynach, first promised to the people of the mid-Valleys area of Glamorgan and Gwent 40 years ago. I am proud that this investment, this £175 million new hospital, the first truly 21st century hospital to be built in Britain, is under construction right now.
The same principle, exactly, can be seen in our education services. The Foundation Phase remains the biggest investment in new primary education in Wales ever.
Yes, it is a departure away from over 120 years of British educational tradition. Devolution has enabled us to strike a new path within these Islands, although this learn-through-play type of nursery education has been very successfully used in Scandinavia for a long time.
Our tomorrow is being built today in Wales’ nursery schools by what is available now because of devolution, and because Labour, Welsh Labour, put it in our Manifesto back ten years ago now, ready for the first elections to the Welsh Assembly.
Chair, as I look back over the history of the first decade of devolution, it is difficult, in a short time, to pick out just a few highlights from that period, over and above the Foundation Phase for 3 – 7 year olds.
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- dealing with fuel protests, flooding, steel job losses and the foot and mouth epidemic during our first two years, earning our stripes in dealing with a crisis;
- abolishing prescription charges and introducing free breakfasts in primary schools in the second;
- setting up the Richard Commission in the first four years, and seeing it through to a conclusion in the Government of Wales Act in 2006, to strengthen our devolution model.
- Abolishing the quango state that had ballooned out of control under the Tories. Bringing them back under democratic control in our second term, so that everyone could be clear who was running Wales – it was the democratically elected government;
- and then on to putting the first-ever Welsh Measure, or law, on the statute book in our third term.
Behind all this, of course, is a basic fact about which we cannot remind people often enough.
Labour, and only Labour, has been the Party of devolution in Wales.
Just ask yourself, who has done the heavy lifting in devolution? Labour promised to do it, over 30 years ago, but couldn’t get it past the referendum test.
Labour then put it back in our Manifesto for the 1997 election. Then we did get it past the referendum test.
Then it was Labour, again, who put the stronger version of devolution we now operate under, into the 2005 election Manifesto, leading to the Government of Wales Act 2006.
For the Tories, devolution is a threat.
It points up their own internal divide, as they battle out their views between the extreme hostility of the likes of David Jones and David Davies in Westminster – the two Dai Don’t Like Devolution - and the more devo-friendly face they try to wear at Cardiff Bay.
David Davies and David Jones were happy enough to draw the Assembly Members’ salaries when they were in Cardiff Bay, but are happy now to slag the Assembly off, now they have got to Parliament.
It threatens that big Tory lie that there is no alternative to the sort of privatising, marketising, Thatcherite free-for-all which has been their malevolent principle.
The position of the Conservative Party on devolution is this
Even when they are for it in prospect, they are always against it in practice.
They were against it in 1999.
They were against it when the 2006 Government of Wales Bill was before the Commons.
What can you say, though, about the Lib Dems?
Their approach to consistency is like Henry VIII’s approach to monogamy. Last night, I went to my hotel room at 10.30, switched the tele on. There was the national treasure, Vince Cable, doing a Lib Dem PPB, I heard the first 10 seconds, before switching over.
He was saying, ‘there is far too much negative thinking on the economy’.
Then I switched over to BBC 2. There was the not-so-national-treasure, Nick Clegg, saying, ‘the state of the economy is far more dire than Alastair Darling was saying in the budget!’.
You couldn’t make it up, could you?
As for Plaid Cymru, they at least have the consistency of always having been opposed to devolution, except as a bus-stop to independence.
Some might have thought it a tactical blunder for Plaid Cymru, at their recent Spring Conference, to have gone all gung-ho over independence for Wales, just as the vulnerabilities of small nations all over Europe have been so cruelly exposed by the shock waves of the credit crunch.
But, never fear, the plan to make Wales the Iceland of the West came with the imprimatur of that leading Ammanford intellectual, Mr Adam Price M.P., a sort of Eisteddfod Bardic shock jock, nay, Philosopher Royal at the Court of that well known organ of Welsh radicalism, the Western Mail.
My main comfort is this.
If I get a bit fed up with reading daily doses of ‘What Adam Thought’, ‘What Adam Is Thinking’, ‘What Adam Will Be Thinking Next’, ‘What Adam Had for Breakfast’, ‘What Adam Thought Before He’d Even Had Breakfast’ – you’ve seen the stuff - then, things could be worse.
If I’ve had a guts-full, and I’m the Labour Leader in Wales, then imagine how I’d feel if I was Ieuan Wyn Jones!
At least, when I hear that this or that member of the Cabinet would like to lead the Labour Party at the Assembly, I know that I have said there will be a vacancy for my job before the year is out.
Now, Conference, if there is a single lesson which any sensible person has to draw from the global events of the past twelve months, it is that economic survival has depended, crucially, on the resilience which comes with being part of a greater whole.
Here in Wales, it is the being part of the great mutual insurance scheme which is the United Kingdom, which will allow us to survive the economic down turn, and to emerge stronger from it.
Can you imagine a Wales cut off from all of that?
A Wales in which the only resources we had to draw upon where those which existed within our own boundaries.
Because that is what independence means.
We know that Wales has 5% of the UK’s population but we only produce 4% of the UK’s taxes and we have roughly 6% of the UK’s needs.
In the sort of fantasy politics which Plaid Cymru weave around their central policy – and their main purpose as a political party.
Chair, you’ll know already that old joke:
‘What would the capital of Wales be under a Plaid Cymru, independent Government?’
And, the answer, you remember:
‘About £2.50p’.
It is only devolution – the Labour way – which offers Wales the best of both worlds – controlling our own destiny in those things which are best designed and delivered here in Wales; sharing the risks and resources which are needed to deal with those forces which play out on a much wider stage.
We are a proudly devolutionist Party. We did the hard work to deliver devolution and we are using devolution now creatively to combat hard times, as well as to create greater prosperity and opportunity for all in the future.
Let me give some examples of how we have used devolution to combat the hard times we are facing up to.
We have organised five all-Wales economic summits.
Let me pay tribute here to our Secretary of State, Paul Murphy – an absolute rock in these troubled times.If ever there was an argument needed for having a Secretary of State for Wales, then you need look no further.
We are grateful, and Wales is grateful, for having his clear-headed advice and his instinctive ability to make sure that Wales’ voice and Wales interests are heard loud and clear around Whitehall.
Out of those summit meetings we started in the autumn has emerged the ProAct scheme.
I don’t believe you can find any government in peacetime that has taken a brand new scheme from the idea being floated to being a working system to approve or reject bids, in the space of three months.
But we did it.
That’s what I call an agile government for fragile times.
ProAct is the twin of the ReAct scheme, with £32 million, again unique to Wales, in which if you have been made redundant you get a wage and training subsidy to help you find a new employer.
The £20 million of new money to support apprenticeships, because we all remember how the apprenticeship system was allowed to collapse 20 years and more ago, allowed go to waste under the devastating effects of the Tories.
Yesterday morning I announced with the EIB and Finance Wales, our in-house investment bank, the £150 million Jeremie Wales Fund to invest in growing small and medium-sized firms.
That is another example of agile government for fragile times.
This is a trail-blazer for Europe, not just for the rest of the United Kingdom.
And it’s not the only way in which we in Wales have blazed a trail in Europe.
It’s a sad time, of course, as we say good bye to Glenys and Eluned – Euro-for-Euro, as I’ve always said, the best MEPs in the whole of the European Parliament.
But, the good news is that we have such a strong team ready to take their place. I’ve had the pleasure of being out on the campaign trail with Derek, Lisa, Rachel and Leighton.
It makes me immensely proud that we have such talent in the Labour Party.
You can read a lot of pontificating from the lumpen- commentariat about how politics is a turn-off for young people.
In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. Young people, when I meet them, are as committed to the future of Wales as any generation before them.
And in our team of Euro candidates we have the living proof that the Labour Party in Wales is the Party of the future.
And, it’s up to every one of us in this hall, and in the wider Party beyond, to do everything we can to make sure that they are elected on 4th June.
Now, the Jeremie Wales Fund demonstrates just how important Europe is to every day life in Wales. Yet it has only been possible to set it up because we had already set up Finance Wales as our own, publicly owned investment bank for Wales.
Where other investment banks in the private sector have lost their way, Finance Wales in the public sector has found its feet.
Now, Conference, how do we, in difficult times, take these messages out to voters?
Well, the first thing we have to do is to reclaim the notion that politics is about the battle of ideas.
While we are mired down in stories about MPs expenses and offensive, pathetic and puerile e-mails, then a sceptical public concludes that all politics is about the stench of the farm-yard, in which the only battle is to see whose snout is deepest in the trough.
In this hall, we know that, damaging and destructive as all this is, it simply does not reflect, in any way, what motivates people to become involved in a political party.
What brings people into parties of all kinds, is a belief in a particular way of looking at the world.
We have to persuade others that politics matters because it embodies a series of fundamental choices which shape every day lives:
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- The belief that society should be organised on the basis of meeting need, not feeding greed.
- The belief that fairness matters, and that those who can pay more, should pay more.
- The belief that every single child is of equal worth, and deserves the best possible start in life – and that government has an essential part to play in redistributing opportunity to those who need it most;
- The belief that public services, publicly provided and publicly delivered reach people in a way that reliance on privatisation and marketisation can never deliver;
- The belief that equality of opportunity is important, but that equality of outcome is more important still;
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- The belief that we cannot slash and burn our way out of a recession, but that we have to invest out way out of it, so that we emerge stronger than when we went in.
All of this, and much, much more is the battleground of ideas which ought to be the meat and drink of politics.
So, how do we persuade people that this is what we are about?
The state of the public finances following the bank bail-out means that we are going to face tough choices.
So that we can protect the growth of public services, front line provision, we have to work smarter.
We have to do things more collaboratively across traditional and geographical boundaries, between our 22 local authorities, and we have to work collaboratively across sector boundaries, such as between NHS and local government.
In effect, we have to re-engineer the state.
We have to re-engineer public services in Wales.
Chair, we’ve seen all too clearly, in recent times, the mistakes which can be made when we retreat from direct engagement with voters, behind the computer screen or the e-mail message.
In Wales, while the internet and text messaging have an important part to play, they have to be as well as, not instead of the old-fashioned, foot-slogging methods of getting out there,
on the pavement,
on the door-step,
in the community hall and town hall square,
shaking hands, delivering leaflets, ringing door-bells,
explaining our message and putting politics back where it belongs – in the real lives, of real people in the real space, not the cyber space, which is Wales.
And so Conference, to the nub of it all.
In the end, all politics is about the divide between right wing and left wing, between parties representing the haves, and parties representing the have-nots.
That’s true in a recession, even more than in a boom time.
There’s no time when Labour’s message, and Labour’s purpose has been more important.
Never has Labour been so relevant to the nation’s needs as during a recession.
Only Labour knows that, when times are tough, it’s the needs of the most vulnerable which have to come first, not last.
Only Labour knows that, when every pound counts, public services have to be first class, not second class.
Why does all this matter?
Because public services, putting people first and knowing that, in the end, the prosperity of any one of us depends on the prosperity of us all.
Margaret Thatcher said, there is no such thing as society!
We know that society is the glue that holds us together.
Provide for today, prepare for tomorrow.
That’s what left wing politics is all about.
And that’s why I – and that’s why all of you – are Labour.
