The big challenges lie ahead

In four years, we have done a lot. But we are the first to say: there is a lot to do. There is hope in our country today but there is also struggle.

For many of our people, their daily lives are hard: paying the bills, making ends meet, balancing the practical demands of work with the emotional demands of family life.

They are the British people whom we serve. They depend, in part, on us for their quality of life, their living standards, their peace of mind. They know Jerusalem is not built overnight. They understand that better schools and hospitals, greater wealth and happiness take time to deliver. They know it's a journey of renewal for Britain and a long one.

They know that though we've made a good start, the big challenges lie ahead.
They want to see the map to the future.

Consider Britain today.

There is more prosperity than ever before. But now the challenge, in an uncertain world is to keep it and then drive it through to every region, every town and city, every family in the nation.

There is the largest ever investment now going into public services, but the challenge remains to make the money work alongside fundamental reform to deliver the quality schools, hospitals and transport we need.

There are one million fewer children in poverty, one million more in jobs, one million pensioners lifted off the breadline, but the challenge ahead is to take all our people out of poverty and give jobs to all who can work.
Overall crime is down but the challenge now is to wage war on the anti-social behaviour, the crime driven often by the menace of drugs that makes life hell for many of our most vulnerable citizens.

Britain stands tall in the world again and has regained a position of strength in Europe but the challenge for the future is to continue that strength and persuade our nation that to be in favour of Europe is not to be anti-British but is indeed the true British national interest.

One challenge above all, is before us: to stop wasting the huge talent of the nation. Yes, we have the best primary school results this country has ever seen, with almost a fifth more children getting the right grades than four years ago.

But that leaves around 200,000 each year that don't get them.
There are 7 million adults in Britain today without the basic literacy and numeracy skills.

How many of us know in our own constituencies of people, often doing menial jobs or no jobs, yet who have talent, ability, natural resourcefulness but have never been given the chance to shine through and flourish.
How many people held back by poor education, broken homes, prejudice of class, race or status?

If Britain has one failing, it is that we are not ambitious enough for ourselves and our people. We don't yet have a Britain where merit is the key to success, where the only thing that counts is not where you come from but what you are, and where everyone not just the privileged few get the chance to succeed.
Of course a meritocracy is not enough. We should value all our citizens not just those who rise to the top.

But I say: we have still not achieved even a meritocracy. We are still denying the talent of millions of our people. And if there is one mission that should drive us above all else, it should be to break down the barriers that hold people back, liberate that vast talent, because that is the only way to reach our goal of economic prosperity and social justice for all.

To meet these challenges, there must be radical change in our country and we must be the agents of that change.
Perhaps some under-estimated the sheer scale of the task four years ago. Perhaps they did not see sufficiently how fundamental were the problems that confronted us. Change has sometimes been slow, and slower certainly than any of us would have wished.

But the huge majority was never a reason to do the job quickly but to do it properly for the long term. As a result, in this first term, we are better prepared to overcome the challenges ahead than any Government for decades.
The first essential is a strengthening economy.

The country could not ask for a better Chancellor than Gordon Brown.
The Labour Party could not have won a bigger political prize than, in a single Parliament, to be so firmly established as the party of economic competence, the party of economic stability, the party that banished Tory boom and bust, and for that we can thank Gordon and the tough decisions made early on.
As Gordon made clear on Friday, the watchwords for the first term were prudence and stability. If we are re-elected, the watchwords for the second term will be prudence and stability.

Today the government can be proud of a hat trick of good economic news:
The lowest unemployment for 25 years.
The lowest inflation for 30 years.
The lowest sustained interest rates for almost 40 years.
This is a Labour Party that will enter an election ready and waiting to fight on the economy,
to fight on lower mortgages,
to fight on lower inflation,
to fight on more jobs,
ready and waiting to say to the British people if you give the Tories the chance of power, all this, every bit of this economic good news will be thrown away on a Tory Party branded for ever as the party of:
22 tax rises,
vat on fuel,
16% mortgages,
3 million unemployed,
soaring social security bills,
negative equity,
house repossessions and two deep and painful recessions.
Don't let the Tories take Britain back to those days.
Don't let the Tories return Britain to boom and bust.
On the basis of economic stability, we made sure that as interest payments on national debt came down and unemployment fell, we used the money to invest productively for the future.
And it is making a difference. Yes we need 20,000 more nurses in the NHS but we already have 16,000 more than in May 1997.
Yes, we need more teachers, but there are 7000 more than four years ago.
Yes, we still have huge problems in our transport infrastructure, but now we are set to triple public investment, within a 10 year plan to get us there.
For the first time in years police numbers are going up again.
17,000 schools with capital investment from the New Deal.
Over 200,000 teachers with a £40 per week pay rise on top of the normal pay award.

New bursaries for student teachers.
A 25 per cent rise in nursing pay.
Every A&E department that needs it being modernised.
NHS Direct handling now 3-4 million calls a year.
65,000 a month using the NHS walk-in centres.
Tell me when a Tory Government ever did any of this and tell me who believes any of it would have happened without a Labour Government dedicated to quality public services for all not just the few that can afford to pay?
The New Deal that has put over 250,000 young unemployed back to work.
The WFTC that has made work pay and given hope to 1¼ million families the length and breadth of the land.
More than £600m programme for coalfield communities to help them overcome structural change.

The £2bn programme to regenerate our inner cities.
The £200 Winter Allowance for the over 60s, the free TV licences for the over 75s, the free eye tests for pensioners.
This April, the £5 and £8 a week rise in the Basic State Pension.
Yes, I know it has come late.
But when did any Tory Government ever do any of this and who believes these vital measures of social justice would ever survive under them if they came back to power again?

It's been done by this New Labour Government and done in a way that can last, because it is built on secure economic foundations.
Never forget: under the Tory Government, 42p of every additional pound of public spending went to pay interest on debt and social security.
With us, it is 17p.
So 25p more in every additional pound of public money can go to the things we want to spend on, not the bills of failure.
On May 1st people voted for a change of values not just a change of government. And slowly but surely - often in small ways - we are setting in place a different governing ethos. I believe that Britain today is more civilised than four years ago.

Listen to a woman who wrote to me from here in Glasgow:
'I'm the wife of a Japanese Prisoner of War and have just received the ten thousand pound payment. I am just saddened it has taken so long as it is too late for my dear husband and many others. I am very grateful to your government for your compassion, you are the only party who have listened and recognised the suffering of these men and for this I thank you very much.'
After years when the Tories ignored their calls it is this Labour government that has recognised the suffering of the Far East Prisoners of War and given them the compensation they should have got years ago.
Listen to a pensioner who wrote from Kent about the £200 winter fuel allowance:
'Thank you very much for the extra money. I have a heart problem and it enabled me to keep the bungalow warm night and day this winter.'
That woman like every pensioner knows that the Tories, the party of Vat on fuel, the party of pension cuts, the party that plans to scrap the winter fuel allowance, the free TV licence, even the Christmas bonus, is a Tory Party that has never and will never do the right thing for Britain's pensioners.

Listen to the young New Dealer I met in Sheffield, wearing a suit three sizes to big for him, borrowed for his first week at work, who said to me: 'I'm now going places.'
Or the woman on the Minimum wage: 'At last I've got some dignity'.
We have so much more still to do, but we are strengthening British values, we are turning the selfishness of the Eighties into the compassion and community of the new century.

A Britain that spends more money on the arts is a more civilised Britain
A Britain that introduces the world's first meningitis C vaccine and within a year it almost wipes out the killer disease is a more civilised Britain.
And a Labour government that true to its great traditions and ideals has led the world in writing off the debt of the world's poorest nations is a more civilised government than the Tory one it replaced.

100 years ago when this Party was formed, there were three crucial parts to their programme: a minimum wage, devolution and an end to hereditary peers in the House of Lords.

100 years later, we now have a statutory minimum wage; we have devolution and we are ending hereditary peers in the House of Lords.
But I know there is so much more work to be done. I know that Britain today has not reached the limits of its potential.

I recognise that for many families this Sunday is not a Sunday of comfort or satisfaction.
For thousands of men and women it is a Sunday of work not rest in order to bring home enough money to provide for the family.
For some it is a Sunday of anxiety waiting for an NHS operation that seems a long way from coming.

For others it is the first Sunday at home since that burglary made home feel a little less like home.
For all those families, our task is not yet done, our efforts must be redoubled, our commitment strengthened.
Our first phase was to prepare ourselves properly for the journey ahead, to begin strongly but steadily. Now we can move forward with greater speed and renewed purpose.
The economic stability we must preserve and lock in. It is our most powerful weapon in fighting our way to the future.
But the next steps are to build upon it, an industrial base harnessing the new technology and increasing dramatically the nation's productivity. There is no new and old economy. There is one economy, all of it being transformed by globalisation and the information revolution.
So as the next steps, we will see:
The largest ever increase in investment in our science base to turn our ideas into good product.

Changing the tax system to promote industrial investment including through the Research and Development Tax Credit.
Equipping people with the technological skills to prosper in the computer age through the university for industry and new technology centres in every region.
Supporting small and medium size firms through the Small Business Service.
Giving greater power and resources to the RDAs to give every region its own economic strategy.
Exploiting our head start in digital television by achieving universal access in this vital technology quicker than any where else in the world.
Our aim: to be the leading place in Europe to do business and the No. 1 digital economy in the world.

We must be not just the defenders but the reformers of public services.
Money alone won't transform them. That is why, built on the primary school changes, the secondary school revolution must follow.
My passion is education because education is the liberation of human potential. Yes, we have made great strides forward.
But too many of our children in our schools are not getting the education the need, are leaving with less than five GCSEs and in some cases none at all.
For those children, their life chances are gone before their lives have barely started. We cannot continue to let them down. No Tory Government will keep them. A reforming Labour Government can.
So the next steps:

Transferring the literacy and numeracy strategies from primary schools to all 11-14 year olds.
New vocational GCSEs alongside traditional academic ones.
Every secondary school to have its own distinctive mission and ethos, with specialist schools increased to at least 1500 within five years.
Huge new capital investment in technology and buildings.
Much greater flexibility for successful head teachers in how their schools are run and their staff rewarded.
A goal of 50% of young people going to university, with universities given greater freedom to develop close ties with business and enterprise.
That is why with the record investment in nurses, doctors, equipment and buildings going into the NHS there must be fundamental reform of the way staff work, the way they are rewarded and the way the service is delivered.
Booked appointments instead of waiting lists.
New contractual arrangements where nurses are given greater freedom, GPs able to perform routine surgery, consultants better rewarded for their NHS work.

A whole new structure of PCTs with the power and incentives to deliver a vastly improved primary care service.
Again, the largest ever capital programme in the NHS.
Specific programmes to tackle cancer and heart disease with a 50% increase in consultants in training.
That is why, along with record numbers of police by 2003/4, the next steps must include change at every level in the criminal justice system, in the way the courts work, the police operate, sentencing, criminal law and the treatment of victims. These next steps will be announced shortly in the crime plan.
The plans for radical reform in the NHS, schools, crime and transport are born out of one conviction: that if we who believe in public services do not reform them so that they offer not the basics but excellence, then those who don't believe in them will use their shortcomings to destroy them altogether.
And the reason we believe in public services is simple: because we know that through them we can achieve together what we cannot achieve alone. They are part of what makes us one nation, one society. Their values are the values of service, commitment, duty to others.
Their renewal is part of a bigger vision, which is the renewal of civic society itself.

Our duty collectively to provide opportunity for all.
Our duty, individually, to show responsibility to all.
That means that when we publish soon the next steps to extend the New Deal, we will step up the opportunities but also the responsibility.
As a condition of benefit, an unemployed person will not just be expected to take work, but where they need new skills, to take our offer of help to pay for them and get the skills they need.

As a condition of benefit, we will establish basic skills tests for newly unemployed adults. We will pay for them to learn to read, write and do basic maths. And we will next month announce plans for a new balance of incentives and conditions for them to take up this offer.
We all know hard drug dealing is a menace. The multi billion pound market for class A drugs ruins lives. Since 1997, we have ensured that those convicted for a second time of trafficking hard drugs face a mandatory sentence of seven years in prison. Heroin and cocaine seizures are rising. A Bill soon to be published will give us the power to recover assets from dealers.
We all know that someone doing a million pound drug deal is not a first time dealer. Our task is to make sure it is the last time they deal.
The idea we are now considering is to create a register of hard drug dealers. Give courts the power to order that someone coming out of prison who they think will end up dealing again be put on the Register. Then the police must be informed of all changes of address. Suspicious transactions can be cross-checked. The dealer is on notice.
It is a new weapon in the battle against the dealers. It is now an idea the Home Office will be examining with the police and the other relevant authorities. We want Britain to be the hardest place in the world to be a drug dealer.
Yes, we need to target the 100,000 hard-core criminals.
Yes, we need tougher penalties for drug-dealing.
Yes, we need more police and are getting them.
But I say to you: we cannot fight crime just through more police and tougher sentences alone. We need the whole community behind the fight against crime and that means hitting the causes of crime - the youngsters with nothing to do, the poor schools, the poverty, the drug addiction that creates the conditions in which crime breeds.
Part of that fight is to support the family, the bedrock of any decent society.
From this April, 5 million families will get a tax cut worth more than double a basic rate income tax cut.

I know some say tax breaks should only go to married couples. I believe in marriage and support it strongly. But I also believe that the widow or the single mother whose husband has deserted her, cannot be discriminated against for something not their fault.
And I also know that it is children that deserve our greatest attention in the tax and benefit system, whatever the position of their parents.
But that is also only a start.
Each child is a national asset. Each child has God-given ability we should nurture.

We must put children first. That is why we raised Child Benefit to £15 for the first child.
Why we introduced full nursery provision for all four year olds.
Why we gave workers the right to four weeks paid holiday.
Why we boosted Sure Start Maternity Grant.
And why, we are doing more. The next steps will be:
Free nursery provision for all three year olds.
1 million more childcare places by 2004.
The right to time off if your child is sick.
Part-time workers getting the same rights as full-time workers.
The Sure Start programme to help the 400,000 poorest children from birth to the age of three.
Carers getting a better income and relief from caring.
And because a child needs the loving care and attention of both parents and because fathers want to share the joy and the burden of looking after a child, we will introduce for the first time the right to paternity leave, paid for by the Government not the employer.
There are so many stresses and strains in modern family life. The Government can't cure them all. But it can help and we will.
Against us is a strategy not based on coherent intellectual argument. I have never known the Tory Party so poorly led, so intellectually shallow.
Every problem the country faces, just another parking place for a bandwagon beginning to look as incredible as its drivers.
Mr Hague, Mr Portillo and Miss Widdecombe running the country. If that doesn't mean you putting on your coat and going down to the polling station, nothing will.
I know its painful to turn your mind back to Tory Time, to the last Tory government. Remember what it was like to be planning ahead with confidence. To know that your mortgage rate was at 9% and then suddenly without warning - 16% interest rates. For thousands of people each week that kind of gap was impossible to bridge. For them it meant a life turned upside down. A Tory Party that was meant to stand for home ownership became a Tory Party that stood for house repossessions. For breaking up lives. For the humiliation of telling your children you could no longer afford to live in the home you had only just bought.
The Tories have not changed. In fact they are worse than ever. Today their economic plans are less credible, less trustworthy, than the plans that led to all that misery.
Just this week there was a huge breakthrough in the scientific knowledge of humankind. We now know the specific genetic make-up of every human being. I hear that the same huge team of top scientists are now embarking on an even bigger project ... trying to work out Tory policy on tax and spending.
But their strategy for power is not to do it by winning the big argument. It is not to go in by the front door. I'll lay you a bet. They won't be putting billboards up round the country with a picture of Mr Hague in front of No. 10 saying: vote for this. They and those that support them in the press have a backdoor strategy.
It is cynicism. It is to say: nothing ever changes, all politicians are the same, everything about the country is wrong.
A doctor makes a mistake. The NHS is useless.
A policeman is arrested. All police are corrupt.
One school fails. State schools are all hopeless.
It is to try to break the link between politics and progress.
And our response must be clear.
Yes, a lot remains to do. But a lot has been done. And each part of it by choosing to do it.
A stable economy by reducing debt and Band of England independence. Choice not chance.
Reducing infant class sizes for the many, not assisted places in private schools for the few. Choice not chance.
Investing in the NHS and transport and police. Choice not chance.
Every single one of the measures to bring new hope and relieve poverty from the New Deal to rises in the basic State pension. Choices not chance.
And the map to the future can only be drawn by the same choices.
We can't do it alone. We need the British people to help us. By choosing to do the things that allow us to build the country we all want.
And throughout it, are our values, the values of the British people at work, directing those choices, making them happen.
Those values are founded on the belief in the equal worth of all.
Our family doesn't stop at our front door. It doesn't even stop at our own frontier. It knows no boundaries except those of human existence.
Our family is the human race and each and every person belongs to it.
The noble causes have not died with the ideologies of the 20th Century. They live on, in front of our eyes, asking us to hear their cry for help and answer by action.
For the first time in decades, under Clare Short's leadership, we are setting an agenda to help the world's poorest nations.
On Friday Gordon told you of the Conference later this month to help the children of the developing world.
That is part of a bigger picture in which we are trying to find a way forward for Africa. It has been called Partnership for Africa. It is only now beginning but its potential is awesome. On our side, the developed world, the responsibility to tackle the issues of debt, development, bringing inward investment, resolving conflicts, removing the killer diseases of malaria, TB and AIDS. On the part of the nations of Africa, the need to reform methods of governance, legal and commercial systems of integrity, an end to tribal factions and a commitment to develop Africa's resources for its people not exploit them for military conflict.
I tell you: we have no right to call our world civilised until we end the suffering, poverty and deprivation of the people of Africa.
Today the Labour Party, New Labour, stands stronger than four years ago.
We are proving that we can govern competently.
But more than that our New Labour approach shows it is possible to combine enterprise and fairness.
To provide economic stability and record investment in public services.
Low inflation and a minimum wage.
To tackle poverty and be respected by business.
To increase opportunity but require responsibility in return.
To strengthen our armed forces, increase our influence in Europe as well as banning landmines, writing off third world debt and increasing overseas aid.
But in front of us lies an even bigger challenge.
Bigger than winning in 1997.
Our aim is not to re-create May 1997. That was unique.
We enter the next fight knowing how hard government can be but how much good government can do. How much politicians can change people's lives if they have the will and the drive to see things through. We have grown up, matured in power, taken the knocks, endured the crises and the attacks, and come through wiser, stronger, learning from our mistakes.
The desire to get rid of the Tories drove us, drove the nation in 1997. Today we seek to motivate people in a different way. To fight for a second term on our own terms, in our own right. Not victorious just because we are not the Tories. But victorious because we are a new and reformed Labour Party, with a clear vision for change.
That vision: to shift the balance of power, wealth and opportunity away from the privileged few and into the hands of the many, to break down the barriers that hold people back, to set their talent free.
A vision based on economic stability.
There is still so much to do. And we are restless to do it. We seek a second term to create a more enterprising Britain and a fairer Britain. A New Labour second term in which we power ahead with the modernisation of our public services: transforming our secondary schools, expanding our NHS and designing around the needs of the patients, getting the money into our railways, targeting the hard-core persistent criminals. A second term where we use the platform of economic stability to spread prosperity and enterprise to all regions of the country.
Where we lift more children and more pensioners out of poverty faster. Where teachers, doctors, nurses get more pay and more awards.
A vision based on the belief that a real future for Britain will be based on a real future for every child.
Their future is our future. We have made a start. We have the will and confidence to get to our journey's end, with your support we shall.