Speeches

I stand here today to make the case that this country should take up a noble cause. The cause of social mobility. The cause of equality of opportunity for all.

Because there can be nothing more fundamental for people than to have an equal shot at life.

Opportunity is the most precious commodity there is out there. People will strive for it like few other things.

People will risk dying for it. I’ve met them. They’ll cross oceans in a boat that might never make it to get more opportunity for themselves and their children.

It’s bound up with human rights and freedom.

And it’s bound up with human nature. The simple instinct to achieve things that give our lives meaning to us.

That’s opportunity.

And when more people have it, it’s better for them and I’d argue that it’s better for us all.

We need a collective agreement in Britain.

It should be talent and hard work that determines where you get to in this country, not privilege.

But that’s not the case in our country. It’s never been the case in our country. We’re a country where class still matters.

Only 60% of people surveyed by the Sutton Trust believe people in the UK have a good opportunity to get ahead.

And that needs to change.

And this matters to us as the Conservative Party, because we’re about effort and reward.

So if we see a Britain, where some talented young people can get on in life because they get a good start, find the right opportunities.

But then there are other young people who don’t connect up with opportunity…all because of a randomness of the start they had…..
That’s unacceptable.

No one chooses their start. Mine was in Rotherham. I went to my local comprehensive, I had a Saturday job in Morrisons supermarket.

I had a dad who was unemployed for a year so I know what it’s like in a family on benefits.

But it’s unacceptable that in Britain, your start so determines your future.

…..this party should be the first to challenge it.

And yet, sometimes it feels like we’re the last.

It’s now 31 years since this party last won an election with any kind of substantial majority.

We’ve traditionally connected with people’s heads. They know it’s sensible to vote Conservative if you want a strong economy, if you want our public finances well managed.

But we haven’t won that big electoral mandate we had in decades past, because sensible isn’t enough. We’ve not connected with their hearts.

We’ve not been a party that’s spoken enough to the aspirations and the challenges of younger generations of people in our country.

In fact, if we’re to play our role in this democracy and give young voters a choice, we must set this out. We have a duty to.

The Conservative Party must stand for building a country where talent, hard work and competence counts for much more than privilege, cash and connections.

The Conservative’s clarion call on opportunity and aspiration, when I was a child, growing up in Rotherham it reached out to me in a very basic way and my instincts. Instincts of working hard, of ambition, of wanting to have a better life than my parents. Instincts of fairness, of how our country should work.

I didn’t even know what a politician was then. As far as I knew, they were just people my dad shouted at when they came on the tv. He used to call them berks. I never knew that I’d become one of those people myself.

And we should never underestimate how powerful a message of opportunity is for people. If they know we’re on their side, taking away the barriers that spurs them on too. It did me.

Social Mobility characterized my own life.

All those times I had set backs on my own journey. Jobs I didn’t get – in one case because I’d not been on a gap year. It didn’t matter. I took them on the chin. It taught me resilience. But there were no free passes.

The path has to be clearer for the next generation to make its way.

And like any battle on equality – whether it’s gender, LGBT, if you’re not actively winning, you start losing. And that’s what happened in Britain.

The percentage of people who think we have had equality of opportunity has fallen.

We should leave no stone unturned, no bastion unchallenged to level that playing field.

It is a question of what kind of country do we want to build beyond Brexit?

This will be a new phase of our nation’s history. But what will it be? That’s up to us.

For Britain in the 21st century, what’s next? What do we stand for now?

Labour has the wrong answers. Rooted in anger, and envy. They’d level opportunity down, not up. I saw that for myself in Rotherham.

Many people who voted Leave were fed up with a country that seemed to work for some but not others.

The Prime Minister has rightly talked about burning injustices.

But I believe we can fix this. We can change it.

But it requires a conscious decision.

Brexit can be a catalyst to make that choice. For things to be different.

And we’ll all have a role to play. Government yes, but business too.

In March I launched the Social Mobility Pledge. It’s supported by the CBI, the British Chambers of Commerce, and the Federation of Small Businesses.

It asks businesses to commit to three simple things.

Partnering up with a school – that’s easy

Opening up to do apprenticeships or work placements

And having open and fair recruitment practices, like name blind recruitment or contextual recruitment.

So far, the response from businesses has been remarkable.

We’ve got companies large and small, from ITV to Aviva, Marks & Spencer to John Lewis, Adidas to Severn Trent Water.

We’re well on the way to having a million employees working in businesses who’ve already made the commitment in little over a month.

But it has to just be the start. Businesses driving social mobility, working with civil society has to be the norm.

Every single business, large or small that signs up to the Social Mobility Pledge is a step closer to a Britain that has equality of opportunity. If you want to help, get yours to do it.

Speeches like this do matter. But they’re not enough.

You’re always going to hear talk from politicians.

Actions speak louder than words. That’s why I’m going beyond that to take action. Committing as many companies as I can to the Social Mobility Pledge. To actively make a change on the ground for young people.

And all this is hard work.

There’s no magic wand you can wave that will create a Britain with equality of opportunity.

Some politicians will say – look, this policy will fix it. They’re wrong.

It’s more complex than that. It’s more than about government.

This is about a culture shift in Britain, changing our national DNA more permanently.

We need to consciously seek out the places where inequality of opportunity exists and sort them out. Bit by bit, piece by piece, step by step. Company by Company.

There’ll be a load of hard yards to be done for a load of hard years, but it’ll be worth it.

Because in the 21st century, for any country, success is about human capital.

And the country that gets the most out of its biggest asset, its people, will do the best.

That should be us.

We should reinvent ourselves in our own eyes and the world’s eyes.

From the country with the oldest, toughest class ceiling to the one that smashed it and finally, now has none.

A country where people really do feel they can have an equal shot.

What kind of things might that country achieve, how much further might we go? How much prouder would we feel of ourselves?

I know some people who’re happy with the status quo. Because it works for them, but that’s not enough anymore. Because for too many people it doesn’t work. And it didn’t work for me.

You shouldn’t have to beat the system to get on in Britain. That’s how it felt for me. You shouldn’t have to be lucky to beat the system to get on in Britain.

Change is going to happen to Britain.

The Conservative Party has to get ahead of this curve and we need to re-present ourselves to the British people and a brand new generation of voters as the party that delivers equality of opportunity.

Those people who joined Momentum, they had a mission.

We need a mission and this should be it. An equal opportunity society. Levelled up Britain.

And if we look back in 15 or 20 years, and this is still a place, where we haven’t made the change.

Where kids growing up in different parts of the country still have such different paths ahead of them….

……well we will have no one but ourselves to blame.

I’ve said I’m already taking action on this. That’s what the Social Mobility Pledge is all about. Action, and change and opportunity. Businesses as the solution.

I’m putting out a call to action for social mobility to anyone who wants to take up the cause, who thinks this matters to do the same. Make the changes you can to level the playing field on opportunity.

On behalf of every kid who’s grown up and deserves the right to be the best version of themselves.

On behalf of communities who’ve produced every bit as much talent as anywhere else, but just don’t have the opportunities on their doorstep to make the most of it

On behalf of businesses, who are crying out for that talent – and it’s there, but they still can’t find enough of it.

On behalf of us all, because, if we can’t go forward together as a united country, we can’t go forward at all.

That is why this is a noble cause.

Social Mobility is not a zero sum game. It makes all of our lives better in the end.

That’s why it must be the priority for our country, that’s why it has to be the priority for the Conservative Party.

The guiding light, the lodestone, the mission.

Just because Britain hasn’t achieved equality of opportunity in the past, I don’t accept that has to be our future.

It’s our choice.

People change things.

I took a decision to devote my time to social mobility because I feel it’s so overwhelmingly important.

It was far more important to me than any personal privilege of a role I might have had in Government.

I cannot emphasis enough at the individual level how important a role we can all play in being the change makers.

Working together, we can build a very different Britain.

Everyone has the right to be the best version of themselves.

And so does this country. It’s time to unleash the talent.

The Rt Hon Justine Greening MP is former Secretary of State for Education

Good morning it’s a real pleasure to be here and great to see some old friends in the audience. I’m really proud to be asked to open what I think is going to be an incredibly productive day, not only because Ben Caldecott is a master of this stuff, and knows far more than me, but also because I think we’re kind of at a tipping point in this whole debate about environmentalism and climate change.

And I’ll talk a little bit about that, but Al Gore – I don’t know if anyone saw his second movie, there are many things about Al Gore that aren’t to love, he didn’t invent the internet, let’s be clear – but he described us as being in a sort of ‘yes we can’ moment when it comes to environmental solutions, and I think that is true both in the UK and I think that it is also true globally, and in a couple of weeks I’ll be off to the 23rd Council of Partners which is the UN’s negotiating panel, and its very striking how the renewed commitment to the Paris Agreement is being expressed by countries attending, and also very practical actions are coming together – Ben [Caldecott] talked about the phase out of coal, when we have the country that built the industrial revolution on the back of our fossil fuels underground will be one of the first to phase out unabated coal-based power production and we’ve been joined by Canada and we will be launching a global ambition with other countries signing up.

So there is a real kind of momentum in this area, but if you’ll forgive me I want to take you back a few years because when I came into this brief, and I’ll tell you a little bit about my journey, it was in the knowledge that the sort of core conservative principle of stewardship – of actually taking for a relatively short period of time responsibility for an asset and preserving it, and enhancing it, and handing it on in a better place – was something that had been very profound and had run through the Conservative Party for many, many years. I wanted to quote from three speeches that have been made over the last couple of decades to illustrate this.

So come with me to 1989, a speech made to the United Nation’s General Assembly and remember this is the point of the falling of the Cold War, a feeling of incredible political change but also a move towards political stability if you like in the world for the first time in many generations. And our speaker said this: “we have become aware of another insidious danger, the prospect of the inevitable damage to the atmosphere, to the oceans, to the earth itself. It is mankind and his” – or her, that wasn’t said at the time but perhaps it should have been – “activities which are changing the environment of our planet in damaging and dangerous ways.” Growth that does not protect the planet today – we should be looking for growth to protect the planet today and does not leave our children to deal with the consequences tomorrow. And modern multi-national industry is effectively the way to deliver this – we rely on them to deliver the research and find the solutions to our problem, and was left with the rallying cry that: “no generation has a freehold on this earth, all we have is a life tenancy.” And that of course was Mrs Thatcher, who was a scientist, who was an environmentalist. The pressing problem at that point was acid rain which we had suddenly woken up to as being a consequence of having south-westerly prevailing winds and large power stations. But the first speech ever made on the floor of the General Assembly, and I think those themes are as relevant today as they were then.

Now, we’re in 2009 in Britain. In the depths of the longest and deepest economic contraction in the economy for Britain and for the world since World War Two where all sorts of questions were being asked about: “how is this affordable?”, “how can we possibly be investing money in these long-term solutions when we’re actually struggling to deal with funding the automatic stabilisers that happen in a recession?”, and our speaker said this: “fighting climate change is costly, some say it is unaffordable especially at the time of recession, and that environmentalism is purely sacrificial, effectively looking forward to a deep-green future where our quality of living standards are much lower. But, investments in energy saving measures are not just costs, but they clearly generate returns on investment. And investment now saves the cost of mitigation and adaptation further down the line, and also improves our energy security.” And this speaker set our ambition for the UK to be the world destination for sustainable energy investment and to promote investor confidence. And that of course was Greg Clarke, my current boss, who was the shadow Secretary of State for Climate and Energy in 2009.

2015. A speaker from our party said: “I do not accept it has to be a choice between future prosperity and safeguarding the future of our planet. It is not a zero-sum game. The costs of doing nothing are catastrophic, and many of the measures we take now to mitigate climate risk will stimulate economic growth”. And that was Philip Hammond, speaking at Conference in 2015.

So I think this narrative of optimism, actually – because I think one of the things that does distinguish our political beliefs is a belief in optimism, that the future will be better – an idea that we have responsibility in stewardship, actually improving things that we pass on, and an interest in working with the private sector to deliver the change that we require.

And for me, I became a Conservative in 2006 – and I know many people in the room will have had [Conservative] Party membership for a lot longer – but I did so because I had been active in a number of environments, all of them had never been political and I’ve voted all over the place, never joined a party, and in 2005/2006 when we started the policy work, things like ‘don’t give up on two degrees’, I felt convinced that the solutions the [Conservative] Party was putting forward were the answers to many of the long-term challenges we faced, including the challenge of environmentalism and mitigation – and that’s what led me to join the [Conservative] Party. So when I was offered this job in June, and it seems like a long time ago, I bit the Prime Minister’s hand off metaphorically speaking, and it was absolutely brilliant brief because a) I am fascinated by it, b) I am passionate about it, and c) we are at this tipping-point I think in the way that we approach this problem and the way that we deliver solutions.

And I spent pretty much all summer producing this baby, and I carry it around – it’s now a very dirty copy of the Clean Growth Strategy – because this started as a rather dry, deep-green to deep-green document talking about meeting our carbon budgets. And one of the reasons why Britain has led the world in this space – and we have led the world – if you look at what happened in terms of economic growth and decarbonisation – because clearly the best way to cut emissions is to have a massive recession – that’s very helpful, but we don’t want that, we want to prosper and grow whilst decarbonising. Britain has led the G7 pack in decarbonisation and economic growth since 1990. Now that is not a fact that we ever talk about. I was stunned to learn that – I don’t think that had ever really featured – and it was that sense of sort of getting out of the deep-green to deep-green conversation about carbon budgets, and we have to produce carbon budgets because they’re set by the Climate Change Act – something which was introduced in 2008 with cross-party support – so we have a statutory obligation to set budgets and then to meet them.

But there was this enormous, burgeoning opportunity that was out there for the UK and it’s rooted in the fact that this trend towards low-carbon economic growth is now what’s called a global megatrend – which sounds a bit pokey but actually it’s up there with the digitisation, migration. It is a fundamental shift in the way policy makers and business people do their work. And this has slightly been my response to those, because of course you will hear – what is it? – the climate deniers talk as if we’re a religion and it’s absurd. Because well there are facts, and you can either choose to believe the facts or not, and it strikes me as entertaining when people believe Steven Hawking when he talks about black holes – which is something I can’t even conceive of – and yet when he talks about climate change we think as if he’s been in a bottle – it’s just astonishing. But I’m fed up with having that debate, it is an irrelevant debate. Thirteen and a half trillion dollars of investment says that that is a false conversation, because that is the sum of money that has been committed publicly and privately just in the clean energy sector globally, to meet the Paris goals. So there is a wall of investment money that is coming in. There is an enormous and unstoppable shift to this form of economic growth, so this is not a conversation about it is warmer outside or what are the oceans doing, are we right in extrapolating from the UK’s 3% land area to the globe – it is a conversation about how we participate in an unstoppable economic shift, as important I think as the industrial revolution, and make sure that we basically get our fair share of it. And that was the fundamental premise of the Clean Growth Strategy – that we have led in this space, thanks to legislation, and thanks to an enormous amount of public and private work. And offshore wind pricing – you know when we first put that structure together, we were buying wind at £157 per kilowatt hour – it was an extraordinarily, extraordinarily high number. We’re now buying that at £57 in the latest auction per kilowatt hour – that is cheaper than new fossil fuel plants.

I opened Britain’s first subsidy free solar farm just a few weeks ago, so all of these bets that we placed together – these public and private investments we made together are starting to pay off, and that isn’t an accident, that is because we set an ambition, we had a very good policy framework, and then we challenged industry to do what it does best, which is to compete and innovate. So taking that leadership position which we have developed, and looking at the global opportunity, the question is then: “how do we actually capture that? So how do we continue to decarbonise our economy?” – and by the way energy is a hugely important part of that but actually the deepest pools of emissions now are in the industrial sector – business emits about 25% of our current emissions, both through its industrial processes, some of which are impossible to decarbonise unless we invest in technologies like carbon capture and storage, and also through the fact that business energy efficiency is just quite poor. It’s hard to persuade an SME in rented accommodation that they should be working with their landlord to improve the energy efficiency of their premises – and we have policies for that. But we need to do the same on transport, and we need to do the same in our homes, we need to do the same in terms of land use and forestation, we need to effectively march forward on all parts of our economy.

People kept saying to me: “what’s the magic bullet?”. And the answer is I’m sorry folks but there is no magic bullet, there is no one technology that we could pump all of our investment in that would deliver the outcome we want. And in a way that’s quite exciting, I think, because there are so many opportunities for investors, for individuals, for groups like Bright Blue, to help shape that agenda.

And actually, there are three tests we are using now in government when we look at investments in this space. The first is: “what is the decarbonisation potential? How much will this particular technology contribute towards our goals?” – and by the way we have very stringent goals, and again we are well ahead of the EU in terms of our ambition. There are two countries in the world who last year delivered enough progress to be on track for a two degree hold on the temperature, and that is China, and the UK. So don’t let anyone tell you that we are not doing enough – we are miles ahead of the pack in terms of our own decarbonisation programmes. So: “what does this technology do in terms of reducing our emissions?”

Secondly: “what’s the cost trajectory?” Because as you will know too often this whole debate has foundered on the shoals of two things: the march of onshore wind turbines, and the cost of energy. Now it is true that our businesses are paying a higher cost of electricity – not gas – than some other places, in the EU. And that’s why the Dieter Helm review, which was an independent review, which has come out which talks about some of the structural changes we will need to do is really important. But it’s also the case that household bills have gone down over the last four years. And what I couldn’t understand is when we had the facts and I put them in the document, household bills have dropped on average by £14 per annum since 2012. Why? Because although policy costs, the investment cost, if you like, has added something to the input cost of energy, people’s consumption of energy has dropped – because we have more efficient households, we have LED lighting, the eco programme which we effectively used has succeeded in reducing the carbon footprint of millions and millions of homes. So it is working. So again, you will see when we announced the Clean Growth Strategy that it didn’t end up as a story about the costs of green growth, and this is going to be ‘x-million’ pounds going on our energy bill. In fact quite – and I think this is probably going to be the high point in politics for me, Ben [Caldecott], there’s only one way to go after this – so the launch of the Clean Growth Strategy was welcomed obviously by the green groups, we were obviously challenged to do more which is fine, we got a good write up in the Guardian, the Times, etc., and then the Daily Express had a positive headline – do you know why? Because we lead the EU in cutting carbon emissions. So it just goes to show that for one tiny, fleeting moment in my political career I managed to please everybody all at the same time – and it will never, ever be repeated. But it does just go to show that in this narrative there is so much to welcome.

Energy security – we’ve moved away from a highly concentrated energy system, one where we were reliant on lots of imported energy, we will be in a far, far more diverse and secure place if we continue to make the investments in our energy network. But the cost of this – so the first test is carbon reduction potential, the second test is cost – “can we see a cost-effective trajectory to bring this new form of power generation or technology online?” – and if we can’t, can we challenge industry as we did with offshore wind to deliver it so we have certainty as to what those costs will look like. And of course the great win from developing lower cost technologies is that as the developing world looks to very rapidly increase its decarbonisation it’s a bit like what we saw when developing countries jumped the landline telephone installation stage – they went straight from no connectivity straight to mobile – developing countries are jumping straight over fossil fuels and looking to renewable energy sources in particular. And if we can produce low-cost, exportable, skills, products, technologies – we can help in that market.

And then the third piece of our triple test is: “what is the technological potential of this particular investment?” Because the UK’s low-carbon economy right now employs about 440,000 people – it’s bigger than aerospace, and we don’t talk about that a lot. And it is spread right across the UK. So if you want to see the power of this new form of working, go to Hull and see the regeneration effect of offshore wind – look at the Siemens wind turbine factory that’s opened, that’s employed 1,000 people. These are high-value jobs, right across the UK. And what we want to do is capture this big, global pivot to low-carbon economic growth and bring it back to UK prosperity. So the third test is: “is there something in what we’re being asked to fund or develop – publicly and privately – that gives us a competitive advantage to help us win in this global race?” And that’s why, if you look at some technologies, and I’m happy to take questions – and you know, carbon capture and storage always comes up and I’ve put 100 million quid back into that technology – but you know what we were being asked to fund a few years ago was not value-added, it was high-cost, there was no clear trajectory to a low-cost potential, there was very little in there that we could export from, and now – oddly – I understand the sort of not great market signals and the failure of that competition, we now have the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative – a group of the world’s ten largest oil and gas companies who are committing $1 billion to that technology and actively looking to invest in the UK. So in a way we have ended up in a much better place with that technology.

So that is the triple test which we have set. And we’ve also set ourselves with 50 summary policies – a nice round number in here – that we will now be bringing forward to deliver what we need to deliver by 2032 in terms of our carbon reduction emissions, and then beyond that to 2050.

But I’m fascinated by the fact that the narrative of doing this in a way that provides maximum protection to the environment that we have inherited, does so in a way that works with the market, doesn’t leave it all up to market forces – because in fact government in this space, setting an ambition and setting policy drivers is a hugely important way of stimulating market changes, but also recognising the power of innovation and R&D – and I’ll just finish with a couple of points on that.

So we as a result of this will be committing £2.6 billion of our money – taxpayers money, not government money – to investment in R&D and innovation in this space. And you can see where that money is going to go. We’re are looking to innovate in the energy sector, we need to work out how to get homes who are currently off the gas grid into a more sustainable place because everyone’s relying on fossil fuels, we need to invest substantially in energy efficiency in the industrial sector, and it is the biggest sort of R&D bet, I think, that we have ever taken as a Government – in fact the R&D spend that is coming out on is the biggest since the 1970s because we think we have the most brilliant academics, researchers, developers of early-stage technology in the world and we want to make sure we stimulate that and provide a route to market.

So it is an incredibly exciting time, we’ve got this amazing framework that we can work with in order to drive this. And I guess my final thought is how do we make this last over political cycles? Because to make a tiny political point, just for a moment – and I try very hard not to politicise this debate – but it was the case that in the 13 years of the last Labour Government, there were two energy white papers, three energy departments, 15 ministers, and not an awful lot of policy progress. So 95% of the solar panel installations that have happened in the UK has happened since 2010. So despite all the challenges we have hugely ramped up our investment in this area, and I’m just incredibly proud to be the minister who gets to launch the new strategy.

 

But we can’t do it alone, and this comes back to my kind of rallying cry. So one of the perhaps slightly more gimmicky announcements I was proud to make – it was all my idea – was that we are going to have a ‘Green Great Britain Week’ every year, a little bit like they do in New York with Climate Week. Where we bring together the fantastic policy work that’s being done out there in institutions like Bright Blue – we work with the NGOs who are a very powerful lobbying force – we work with the education system, we celebrate what Britain has done, we promote the fact that this is an enormous source of high-value, prosperous jobs in the future, and we recommit to our own ambitions by publishing what is the emissions intensity ratio – the measure of every pound of economic growth we deliver, how much have we decarbonised for that pound of growth? And it’s actually become incredibly exciting because everybody wants to work on this and wear the badges and think about how we’re going to do this because I think it is in that way of reconfirming our ambition, setting the envelope for what we want to do going forward, and working together to deliver this, that we will succeed. But it’s a very powerful challenge, and an incredibly exciting challenge, and to finish with the words of Al Gore: “yes we can.” It’s that moment, so thank you very much for your interest and I’m looking forward to working with you.

Claire Perry MP is Minister of State for Climate Change and Industry

I want to thank Bright Blue for inviting me, but more importantly for providing an opportunity for serious Conservative thinking to take place. As we look ahead to the next five years we need this as much as ever before.

The emergence of Bright Blue on the Westminster Think Tank scene was a welcome moment for those of us who want to see the Conservatives pursuing a sensible, centre-right agenda, with as broad an appeal as possible.

And this conference today, and the topic in particular – social reform – demonstrate why Bright Blue is an important voice in this field and will continue to be so over the coming years.

I know many of you here today will be Conservative Party members, and many of you will therefore share my disappointment at the recent general election. We should not be completely downhearted. We won the most seats and the most votes. There are 13 Tory MPs in Scotland, and I now have Conservative colleagues representing Mansfield, South Stoke, Middlesborough South, and Walsall North. Of course I now discover a Labour MP as one of my neighbours in Kent, which is a less pleasant shock.

But to put our disappointment in perspective I first started writing pamphlets and making speeches saying the Conservative party needed to modernise in the late 1990s, when we had 165 MPs. Now we have 317.

I am not standing here and saying all we need to do is keep calm and carry on. We need to think hard, work hard, and change hard. We need to show how Conservative values and policies can work for those parts of the country, and parts of the population, who have turned away from us.

It is now clear that the root of our failure to win a majority last month lies in those aged 18 to 35, among whom Labour led the Conservatives by over 30 percentage points.

Education played an equally major factor in voting decision. According to Ipsos Mori, while the Conservatives had a 17 point lead among people with no qualifications, Labour led by 15 points among graduates.

While we can justifiably take heart from our total vote share and our growth in support among the working class, these figures show that we need to do much better to convince young metropolitan Britain that the Conservatives are the party for them.

We must be in no doubt that this failure has the potential to do serious long-term damage to our party if it isn’t tackled.

I therefore come to the conclusion that it is imperative that the modernisation of the Conservative Party starts again, and starts now.

I hope and expect this Parliament to last five years, but we need to start work now to make the full use of those five years. The first thing we need to do is to challenge the cliché that tory modernisation must be about hugging huskies, cuddling hoodie-wearing teenagers and PR stunts.

Modernisation in 2017 involves, as ever, listening to the complaints of those who are being excluded and developing both individual policies and an overall message which speaks to them. A country that works for everyone is Theresa May’s ambition, and it is exactly what we need to aim for, as successful Conservative leaders have in the past.

Throughout the last century, when faced with challenging circumstances such as these, our party has shown an inspiring capacity to recast our core beliefs in a manner that captures the prevailing mood of the era.

To redefine the importance of aspiration and opportunity in a way that shows we have something to offer for everyone in Britain.

Think of Benjamin Disraeli and his one-nation conservatism, dispelling the notion of the Tories as rich, unfeeling property owners by providing workers with employment protections that last to this day.

Or Mrs Thatcher, whose Right to Buy scheme created millions of new homeowners in the 1980s, transferring power and wealth away from the state to hardworking families.

These achievements and those of other modernising Tory Prime Ministers – from Churchill to MacMillan to David Cameron – show that renewing the party is not just about communication but actions that make a real difference to the lives of all those in Britain.

Theresa May has always believed that, so we have a Prime Minister who can repeat the successful modernisations of previous Conservative leaders and build that country that works for everyone.

It would be remiss to give a speech about the future of our country without addressing the tragedy of Grenfell Tower.

The terrible events at Grenfell are a stark demonstration that there are communities in the UK who have been so let down over the years by state institutions they have come to the conclusion they have no voice and are not being heard.

This Government is determined to reverse that perception, and we have a bold and ambitious programme for achieving that end, to which I will return in a moment.

But it is clear that the some voters who abandoned the Conservatives at this election, did so because they believe we simply don’t care about people who live in tower blocks.

You know and I know that this couldn’t be further from the case.

And in the measures the Prime Minister has announced in the past fortnight to rehome the victims of Grenfell, ensure others across the country aren’t put at similar risk, and uncover the causes of the tragedy, she has demonstrated our commitment to govern for everyone in Britain.

It remains essential, however, that we not only do our utmost to, as Theresa May so rightly said, tackle the burning injustices at the heart of our society, but that we are also seen to be building a stronger, fairer, more prosperous Britain.

Talking a good game on social mobility and reforming public services is easy.

But actually doing the hard, detailed work necessary to overcome the complex problems and challenges that confront so many is much more difficult.

In short, if we are to bring young, educated, working Britain back to the Conservative Party, we need to make a reality of the promise to build a country that works for everyone.

To that end the Prime Minister has, in the Queen’s Speech, laid the foundations of a policy agenda I am confident will show the Conservatives don’t just talk about ending social injustices, we actually do it. Brexit is the most important challenge facing us in the next two years, but it must not and will not absorb all our attention. The domestic policy agenda will be the platform from which we will launch our recovery.

Theresa May’s first act as prime minister was to order an unprecedented audit of racial disparity across public services.

We will publish the results of this audit in the coming months, when it is complete, and this government won’t hesitate to act on its findings, however uncomfortable they may be.

We will take action to close the gender pay gap, by requiring companies with more than 250 employees to publish data on the pay gap between men and women, and push for parity in the number of public appointments going to women.

The government will bring forward a new Mental Health Bill, one that puts parity of esteem at the heart of treatment and ends the stigma of mental illness once and for all.

And we aim to get 1 million more people with disabilities into employment over the next ten years.

We have, in government, already made great strides in helping victims of domestic violence find refuge.

In this Parliament we will go further, and give all services dealing with domestic violence additional powers to tackle this scourge, from investigating cases, to care for victims, to the effects on families later in life.

As home secretary, Theresa May brought forward the Modern Slavery Act – the first of its kind in Europe – appointed the world’s first anti-slavery commissioner, and set up the Modern Slavery Taskforce.

We aim to go further in the next few years, and use the UK’s power in international bodies to finally put an end to criminals forcing men, women and children into illegal, dangerous and exploitative working conditions.

So those are our first practical steps demonstrating that Conservatives care, and Conservatives act. But these measures must be part of a crusade to argue that free markets, enterprise, and individual success can all play a part in creating a good society.

The discontent with capitalism since the 2008 crash, which is vaguely expressed as being anti-austerity, needs to be tackled head-on. If young people feel the world is not giving them an even break they look for radical change, even if what is being promised, by populists on the left or right, is just a better yesterday. UKIP hankers after the 1950s, Corbyn’s Labour the 1970s, with both hoping that nobody under 40 reads a history book and sees the glaring faults in those eras.

So what are the 2017 problems that a modernising Conservative Party needs to address?

Let’s start with housing. Home ownership levels are falling. This is a profoundly unconservative trend, so this government will fix the dysfunctional housing market. Housing needs to be more affordable so that the 20 and 30-somethings have the security they need to plan for their future.

We will meet our 2015 commitment to deliver a million homes by the end of 2020 and will deliver half-a-million more by the end of 2022.

These houses will be high quality, matching the standard of those we have inherited from older generations, and include social housing that creates sustainable and integrated communities.

For those renting we will bring forward proposals to ban unfair tenant fees, encourage landlords to offer longer tenancies, and crack down on unfair practices in leasehold, such as escalating ground rents.

The second area where we need a distinctive Conservative message is in our cities. We have already achieved a huge amount ,with the creation of genuine local power centres through the Mayors, and the growing number of City Deals which put large sums of money under

the control of local institutions to regenerate and develop the cities.

We clearly are getting no electoral credit for this, partly because we have not developed and clear message about why we are doing this. The message is a combination of two essential Conservative principles. First, that decisions should be taken as locally as is practical. Secondly, that it is only through individual flair and ideas and freedoms that the dynamism of a great city comes to pass. All the central planning in the world does not create a London or Manchester or Glasgow—creative places where millions of disparate individuals find their own niche, and create new communities. Building on this to create a new City Conservatism is one of our challenges.

The third task for today’s Conservative modernisers is to develop the Industrial Strategy so that it gives hope to young workers that jobs will be available to them in tomorrow’s labour market. One of the great successes of Governments since 2010 has been in promoting job creation. Unemployment is at its lowest level for more than forty years, there are more women at work than ever before, and young people are significantly less likely to be unemployed than in most European countries.

The threats to this scenario in the future are new ones. Robots and Artificial Intelligence are much more likely to sweep away traditional areas of unemployment than any of the traditional worries we have about job creation. To respond to these threats requires the agility and flexibility that only free markets and entrepreneurial skills can provide, and that in the current political scene only the Conservative Party will support. Even if we fulfilled the left-wing fantasy of re-opening the coal mines, we would probably send robots down them to do the mining.

So we need new types of jobs, and higher levels of productivity to provide the wage increases that we also want to see. Hard work but stagnant wage growth is another recipe for political discontent that we see around us.

To avoid that, we need everyone to have access to a world-class education.

So we will ensure schools are fairly funded, and strengthen the teaching of literacy and numeracy in the early years so that all pupils – regardless of background – get the best possible start in life.

We will also reform technical education to put it on a par with academic qualifications to make sure our children have the skills they need for the high-skilled, high-wage jobs of the future.

And we will continue with our ambitious programme of free schools and academies expansion, building at least a hundred new free schools a year.

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All of these measures will not only work towards a more fair and just society, but also show the Conservatives are the party to create that society, and will be combined with a steady, sensible hand on the economy.

Because we know that only a vibrant and robust economy that creates the jobs and generates the tax revenues needed to invest in the National Health Service, schools, and other public services, must be made without saddling future generations with unmanageable debts.

It is an inconvenient fact, all but ignored by the opposition, that the deficit is still far too high, so I am pleased we have renewed our commitment to restore the public finances by sticking to the fiscal rules announced by the chancellor in the autumn statement, which will guide us to a balanced budget by the middle of the next decade.

I have picked three policy areas which we must get right to show that a modernising Conservative Party has the principles and policies to address the challenges facing Britain in the 2020s. There are of course many more and I expect Bright Blue to be bursting with ideas across the board. Indeed other Think Tanks are available, and I want them to compete to shape a modern Conservative message, which is new, but which puts into practical form Conservative principles.

In that classic Daily Telegraph slogan, Times Change, Values Don’t. Conservatives believe in free markets, individual liberty, a helping but not all-powerful state, strong defence and our traditional institutions as strongly as ever. But realistic Conservatives recognise that we need constant reform to defend those values. Fighting yesterday’s battles is a recipe for irrelevance. Tory Reform is the route to a successful party, and more importantly a successful country.

We have the capacity, the intellectual energy, the will to succeed, that means we remain the party that is best equipped to puts its values into practice. That is why we are in Government today, and need to remain in Government not just for the good but negative reason that the alternative is a front operation for the hard left, but for the better and positive reason that a reforming, modernising Conservatism is best for Britain. That’s what Theresa May’s Government is for, and that’s what I want to help bring about.

The Rt Hon Damian Green MP is the First Secretary of State and Minister for the Cabinet Office

Thank you for inviting me to come along here this morning to participate in your conference and in particular in the launch of the essay collection on Conservatism and human rights. I have to say, when I first heard that Bright Blue was doing this, I was absolutely overjoyed because from my point of view, I’ve felt slightly, in the course of the last eighteen months, that I’m in danger of turning into one of those CDs which has got caught with a scratch and just going on and on and on about the same theme. As I once said to one of my colleagues in the Cabinet, it would be very nice to get a life again. This was because of course I parted company with the Prime Minister over the issue of adherence to the European Convention on Human Rights and the Government’s proposals in respect of a bill of rights.

What excited me so much of seeing the papers written in Conservatism and Human Rights in the essay collection was this was really breaking new ground, booking new topics and perhaps, dare I suggested, getting away from an argument that I sometimes fear is in danger of becoming a little bit sterile. What I wanted to do this morning, then, at the risk of going over an old argument, was just to touch a little bit on this fundamental issue of our relationship with the European Convention because I think it’s rather important in the way it colours everything else that we might be doing including this work being done by Bright Blue in looking at other areas of discrimination or indeed of human rights more generally.

The first thing I think we have to remember particularly as this is a think tank rooted in liberal conservatism is that traditions of liberty run really deep in conservative philosophical thinking. It isn’t difficult, if you go along to what I would describe as a very traditional conservative audience, to start getting them quite misty-eyed if you start talking about the traditional liberties, starting with Magna Carta, Habeas Corpus, and the Bill of Rights of 1689. They are, indeed, rooted in our DNA, and I think a little further than that, rooted in a tradition of English … I say, “English” with some diffidence, but I think one has to accept it starts with England, of English exceptionalism, a view that within the land and territory in which we live, there are fundamental values reflected in our political system and in the rights and liberties of the individual which we may have exported elsewhere but are very much our own creation.

I’m always mindful that there are other extraordinary treaties written in the middle of the fifteenth century by Chief Justice Fortescue who wrote a book for the son of King Henry VI, who was subsequently, I might add, murdered after the Battle of Tewkesbury, which was a manual of government that he’d seen. It was called De laudibus legum Angliae, in praise of the laws of England. Rather remarkably, if you go to this treatise, you will find a denunciation of torture and the fact that it is alien to our common law. You will find in it a praise of due process of law, a praise of limited government, pointing out that the King of England, unlike foreign kings, is not able to do whatever he wants because he is a political … he governs a body politic, which can control his actions and, I think in a way, most remarkably, you see his statements about trial by jury, which he says is an excellent principle for the protection of the individual. He goes on, rather remarkably, to say that he would rather see twenty guilty men acquitted than one innocent person wrongfully condemned.

That tradition runs through the conflict between king and parliament in the seventeenth century, the petition of right, Lord Mansfield’s judgement in Somerset’s case, sometimes seen on slavery, sometimes seen as being a great model of liberalism, but actually it was approached from a thoroughly conservative angle. He just said there can’t be slaves in this country because there never have been, and the law of the common law does not allow it; and of course on through the nineteenth and twentieth century to the aftermath of the second world war. In the aftermath of the second world war, we did do something very different. When Eleanor Roosevelt came along and said that she wanted a Magna Carta for the twentieth century, we concluded, along with our European partners that had survived the second world war and were free countries rather than under communist tyranny, that we were going to try to actually crystallise what was an aspirational document, the UN Charter, into a document that really conferred rights, which was the creation of the European Convention on Human Rights.

Not surprisingly, at the time we did it, there was a lot of controversy about whether it was right that we should do it or not. There was a wonderful Foreign Office memo which says “to allow governments to become the objects of such potentially vague charges by individuals is to invite communist crooks and cranks of every type to bring actions.” A lot of anxiety that it was loosely worded. A lot of anxiety that it would be open to judicial interpretation by, of course, ultimately, an extraterritorial court. We eventually signed up and, indeed, its greatest proponent was David Maxwell Fyfe, who was both a Conservative Attorney General and subsequently a Conservative Lord Chancellor. Why did we do that? I think we did it because as well as our national tradition of exceptionalism, the United Kingdom in the two hundred years leading up to the second world war had become totally enmeshed in the international system.

We were a trading nation and even at the height of our imperial power, we had a keen understanding that our own country was very small by global standards and that its power depended as much on trying to change people’s behaviour as all asserting power over them. I once asked the Foreign Office if they could tell me how many treaties the United Kingdom is adherent to. They got into a terrible state about this and they all disappeared down into the bowels of the Foreign Office and they came back and they said they were very reluctant to go back beyond 1834 because their records might not be accurate. Since then, their figure was 13,200 treaties that the United Kingdom had signed and ratified, and perhaps more tellingly, over 700 had an arbitral mechanism for resolving disputes over interpretation.

Of course these range from the UN. charter, the International Convention for the Law of the Sea, the European Convention on Human Rights, dare I say, I won’t dwell any further about it or our treaties of accession to the European Union and the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg, but that’s about all I’m going to say on that aspect of Europe. Why are we signed up to all these treaties? We signed up because we believed that it was important to create a mesh of mutual obligations which raised the standards of behaviour, not just for ourselves but for other people.

Over the years, those standards of behaviour have shifted. They’re not just about how one state behaves toward another state but, as was shown in the UN. Convention and in the European Convention on Human Rights, how a state behaves towards its own citizens, a critical change from the Westphalian model, which said that ultimately what a state does to its own citizens is entirely a matter for itself. President Putin in a sense establishes in his intervention in Syria, which is the Syrian Government is responsible for its own citizens and he just goes there to pursue his own foreign policy, regardless of its implications.

My view is that, one then has to look at how the convention has worked since. Sixty five years on, it does seem to me that the convention has been a remarkably successful document, indeed so successful that when the Conservative Party published its paper suggesting that we should leave it, it had to acknowledge … and I think I’ve got the quote right, that it was an entirely sensible statement of principle that should underpin a democratic nation. Unfortunately, we as a party have then gone on to accuse the court in Strasbourg of subverting the intentions of the draftsmen and because of that, that is our principle argument why we might want to pull out.

As you’ll be aware, the only paper we’ve seen so far on the subject published in October 2014 … we still wait for the famous bill of rights, that document that is due out at some point but not until well after the referendum, I suspect, is that they want to clarify rights, particularly under article three and eight, that’s torture and right to private and family life, and confine it to serious matters that should be determined by parliament as to that threshold, and potentially break the link with the Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg altogether and have a wholly, home-grown, national bill of rights, I suppose in keeping with that English exceptionalism which I touched on at the start of my talk.

I think that that is a mistaken approach. I’m reassured that even Michael Gove may think it’s a mistaken approach because he’s rather rowed back on it, although he still told the parliamentary committee that he wasn’t 100% sure that we might not have to withdraw from the convention. My reason for thinking that the party is mistaken is that, of all its faults, it does seem to me that the convention has stood the test of time. Not only has it stood the test of time but it has been the most powerful and effective lever for promoting human rights on our planet. I haven’t got time this morning to run through a lengthy list, but it is perhaps just worthwhile highlighting a couple of cases. Just consider, back in the early seventies the court removed the rights to discriminate against children on the grounds of their legitimacy.

Dudgeon in the United Kingdom, on homosexuality in Northern Ireland, the judgement, of course, which was far more important outside of Northern Ireland than in other countries, particularly in Eastern European after they signed the convention. After all, in England and Wales, we had decriminalised homosexuality some time before. More recently, in Russian, establishing the principle that people trafficking is a form of slavery and, therefore, not only is it something which must be criminalised, but there must be a positive duty on the state to try to suppress it in exactly the same way as we did with slavery in the late eighteenth and nineteenth century.

Of course, all these things and developments highlight the fact that the convention is, to quote its detractors, who seem to use this term rather frequently, a living instrument. If it wasn’t a living instrument then none of the judgments I’ve just given you would ever have been able to take place because the standards to be applied to the convention would have been the standards of 1950, when discrimination on the grounds of illegitimacy, criminalization of homosexuality were perfectly permissible and people trafficking didn’t exist as a phenomenon at all. What’s happened in each of those cases is that the Court of Human Rights has been able to interpret the Convention in light of current social standards and circumstances. This appears to be something which comes in for a lot of criticism from some traditionalists, but I have to say that without it, it’s very difficult to see how, in fact, the law could be made to work at all.

When we look at this, we might also want to consider the cross-fertilization that has taken place between the court in Strasbourg and our own courts. It shows that, in fact, the working together of two different traditions of jurisprudence can be very effective. Take most recently the question of hearsay in criminal cases. There was a case called al-Khawaja in Strasbourg, which suggested that our hearsay rules might be unacceptable. We then countered with another judgment in a case called Horncastle and we persuaded the court in Strasbourg to change its view. Of course, sometimes the Strasbourg court simply comes to a conclusion which is different with our own court altogether, but the examples are not necessarily all one way. We may get credit for the need, I claim, of the court’s decision on prisoner voting as being an excessive interpretation of the convention, of not giving the United Kingdom a sufficient margin of appreciation in order to make up its own rules.

I have to say that in the last five years, I have never had a single complaint about the decision of the Strasbourg court to condemn the United Kingdom for its blanket policy on DNA and fingerprint retention in S and Marper, notwithstanding the fact that the House of Lords had signed it off as being completely acceptable. That’s not to say that all is perfect with the Strasbourg court. I don’t think it is.  It’s a court that has grown from an idea that it might handle a half a dozen cases a year to one which, at its worse point five years ago, had a backlog of 150,000 cases. The court was drowning under the impact particularly of the arrival of states in Eastern Europe with no rule of law tradition at all.

In fact, it has succeeded partly because of the work of Ken Clarke when he achieved the Brighton Declaration in 2012, in entirely transforming itself, reducing its backlog now to 60,000 cases and with the insertion of the preamble into the text of the convention, asking the court, reminding it to allow national courts and parliaments … that it is national courts and parliaments who are primary applicants of the convention and not the court itself, which is the longstop. There’s a remarkable change, I think, which has been taking place in the way in which the court approaches its workload. Previously, it had probably been micromanaging a bit too much, partly because of its deep concern about the Eastern European countries which had joined and where the rule of law appeared to be so fragile. As a consequence of that, we get cases like that on political advertising, where interestingly enough, the animal defenders, the court agreed that the United Kingdom’s interpretation of freedom of expression to limit the right to political advertising was completely acceptable, even though when it had first considered it, it thought that it was not because it was an excessive restriction.

Then, we just have to consider what’s going on elsewhere. I always find myself a bit worried when I discuss human rights issues. It seems to me there’s a little bit too much of the, ‘me, me, me’ going on, and it becomes an entirely introverted discussion about the United Kingdom or even, for that matter, just England. We ought to consider whether the convention’s working. We also have to look at what it’s doing elsewhere. We don’t live in a bubble. At the moment, just to give you an idea, in the course of its history, 2,400 of the judgments of the Court of Human Rights have been against Turkey. Forty three percent of all cases on the freedom of expression have concerned Turkey, which have gone before the court.

In a moment, you won’t be surprised to learn that a lot of its workload concerns countries like Russia and the Ukraine, and indeed, Georgia, Azerbaijan. The public defender in Georgia told me … he’s a sort of ombudsman. He said as far as he’s concerned, he could not do his job without the convention because ultimately, even though the rule of law was very fragile in his country, the Georgian Government believed in its membership in the Council of Europe, saw it as an important statement both of the intent and status, and would therefore comply with judgments. That was the only way in which he was able to get redress for the citizens who came to him with violations of human rights, usually by state actors, often the police or other public authorities.

Nor, I think, is the suggestion that the convention is now worthless because there’s a failure of implementation decisions. I don’t think that stands up to scrutiny either. It’s true there’s a backlog of about 11,000 cases which haven’t been implemented. Russia … Italy is the worst culprit, but that’s because of the length of time it takes to get its cases heard. Actually, in terms of egregious breaches, it’s undoubtedly the Russians, and I regret to say that at the moment, the time it takes to get a decision implemented against the Russians is about ten years, but they do eventually pay off damages to the people whose rights have been violated.

Other countries like Poland, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria also had poor records but the evidence is overwhelming that the convention is working to improve their systems. Of course, it’s not just convention states that benefit from the existence of a convention. Take that great popular bugbear of the Daily Mail, Mr. Abu Qatada, something which is likely to make the hackles rise on the napes of the neck of the average Conservative voter. Mr. Qatada, as you recall, we eventually deported to Jordan. The Daily Mail thought it took far too long and cost far too much money, but the simple fact was that in deporting him to Jordan, we eventually got rid of him because the Jordanians entirely changed their criminal justice system in respect to evidence in order to ensure that no evidence could be accused against him which had been obtained under torture.

It must represent one of the most tremendous victories for those who wish to see torture removed off the face of our planet, and it was achieved entirely because the United Kingdom was prepared to obey the rules, and not as the Daily Mail recommended, to chuck Mr. Qatada on the next plane, regardless of the views of the Strasbourg Court. That’s why I take the view that the convention is of the utmost value to us. If we are prepared to work within the context of the convention, then, as this tremendous booklet shows, we can start thinking about other areas of rights which need to be addressed. Interestingly, as the last session demonstrated, we’re beginning to do it. After all, the Equality Act could have gone into a bill of rights but we chose to do it as an equality act.

On the face of it, there are problems with the Equality Act. I have absolutely no doubt about it, and we’ve had some recent cases about issues of the balance of the way it works. Nevertheless, it seems to me that it’s working well. The law is developing. All that is being done entirely in conformity with our adherence to the European Convention on Human Rights. In the paper which has just been published, there are a number of essays on challenges posed dealing with the problem of refugees in the mass migration, an intensely political issue, which, on the face of it, highlights severe shortcomings in the way in which the UN Convention on Refugees operates.

We have a discussion on LGBT matters, which we have just listened to this morning. For example, there is a whole chapter on the duty of rescues, and that struck me as quite relevant because the one thing it didn’t have was the question of the international dimension in the duty of rescue, which of course came very much to the fore in the decision which was voted down by the House of Commons but which the Prime Minister wanted to pursue, of invoking the Doctrine of Humanitarian Necessity to take military action against President Assad. Highly controversial, because that doctrine is not recognised in some sections of international law. It’s impossible to speculate whether the outcome in Syria would have been better or worse had we taken such action.

Finally, an excellent chapter by Malcolm Rifkind on the investigatory powers bill which, as chairman of the ISC, is a subject which I know is highly controversial, very complex, but one where we as conservatives have to somehow try to strike the right balance between security and privacy, and I believe are in a position to do just that.

I promised I would speak for no more than half an hour and I suspect my half an hour is coming up, so I’m going to bring my remarks to an end, but I really want to repeat again what I said at the beginning. As conservatives, liberal conservatives, I think we would do well to remind ourselves that we are the heirs to a great tradition, one which I think has a lot of traction outside of the Conservative Party or indeed conservative circles itself and one for which we are instinctively respected.

If we want to build on that, we need to look at the totality of the architecture of rights and we need to do that most conservative of things, which is to conserve and then build on what we have conserved. In that context, my view has always been absolutely clear in my mind that to start to knock down the architecture of the European Convention on Human Rights in the, to my mind, rather deluded belief that there is a better tomorrow, an easier tomorrow if you do it is, I’m afraid, a delusional mirage.

Rather, what we should do is accept the frameworks in which we operate, seek, of course, as we did at Brighton in the Brighton Declaration, to change those if we think it’s necessary to do so by negotiation with our partners, and also to use the creative engagement, even if sometimes it irritates us a little in order to decide how we ourselves take rights forward in this country. If we do that, then we’re doing exactly what a Conservative Party should be doing, which is striving to look at our national picture and to do good for our fellow citizens. Thank you very much.

The Rt Hon Dominic Grieve QC MP formerly served as Attorney General

What kind of society do we want to live in? How can we help Britain to be and remain that kind of society?

But I want today to set out what is, I believe, at least an important part of the answer.

These are questions with which anyone who is serious about politics is bound to wrestle. They are so difficult that none of us can expect to know the whole answer to either of them.

Much of what I want to say will be familiar to anyone in this audience who is familiar with the speeches on the neighbourly society that I gave in the early 2000s, or with the reports on Breakdown Britain and Breakthrough Britain that Iain Duncan Smith published as part of the Policy Review which I chaired in the lead up to the 2010 election.

But I believe — and I want to explain today why I believe — that the programme of social reform being carried out by David Cameron’s administration makes it the most ambitious, socially reforming government since the Second World War, doing more to answer these questions in the right way than any previous government has done.

Let me start with a story from my own childhood.

Sitting next to my grandmother on the sofa in her home in Chicago, I heard her describe the end of a journey. The year was, I think, 1919 and it had been a long journey for my grandparents — all the way from Kiev via the Baltic to America. A long journey, and arduous; much of it on foot; the last part by ship.

As she stood on the deck of the ship carrying her and my grandfather into New York, she saw before her the statue of Liberty rising above Staten Island. What did that statue mean to her as she gazed at it, with tears rolling down her cheeks? These were tears, no doubt in part of loss, in part of relief, but also (and foremost in her mind as she told me the story) they were tears of hope — the hope that she had at last reached a place where she and my grandfather might have opportunities.

The statue of Liberty symbolised for her not just freedom from oppression but more particularly a land of opportunity. I will not dwell here on the many vicissitudes that in practice befell my grandparents as they strove to make the most of the opportunity that had presented itself. What matters, for my present purposes, is just that first emotion — the hope and joy that is engendered by the ability to write one’s own life story, as Michael Gove so beautifully put it.

And now I want to move to an altogether different time and place.

I recently spent some time in a newly founded studio school in my own West Dorset constituency. It is set in the terrain occupied by Kingston Maurward — an excellent and well known local land-based FE College. The school has been established to provide a first-rate education for young people who are, for one reason or another, more likely to prosper if their academic study is wrapped into the acquisition of practical, land-based skills rather than being behind a more traditional desk.

Going round that school and talking to some of its pupils, one could not fail to be impressed by the sense of opportunity — of prospects opened. I suspect that for some at least of its pupils the more traditional forms of schooling will have proved daunting. The way forward was now being shown to them; the lights along the runway were being lighted to guide them towards take-off.

Talking to the teachers, too, there was a palpable sense of excitement about the enterprise in which they were engaged. They clearly saw themselves as providing those lights along the runway to lift their pupils into a stratosphere of opportunities that might otherwise so easily have been denied to them. What occupation could be more fulfilling than that?

And finally, I want to draw your minds to another setting: the Social Mobility Foundation — a charity founded by Linkson Jack and gradually built up by its trustees, of which I was myself one for a time. Its purpose has been to find means of making it easier for extremely talented but disadvantaged young people to make their way into universities, and ultimately into professions that might otherwise seem unapproachable to them despite their talents and evident fitness.

I remember, years back, attending a seminar about the work of the Foundation held in the offices kindly made available to us by one of Britain’s great law firms. I recall going in through the vast glass doors of the hugely impressive building occupied by that firm as I made my way up to the seminar — and feeling somewhat daunted as I entered. If I, who had been lucky enough to have every conceivable advantage in life, felt that way, what must it have felt like to someone coming from a vastly less advantaged background?

Of course, these three images — of my grandmother gazing up at the statue of Liberty, of the children and teachers in the rural studio school, and of the bright kid from the disadvantaged family being helped through the doors of a great city institution by the Social Mobility Foundation, are very different from one another in a multitude of ways.

But they have this in common: all three are about the opening of opportunities that would otherwise have remained closed; all three are about the liberation of the human spirit. I maintain that any person of goodwill, regardless of their political persuasion, is bound to feel the immense emotional force of that liberation of the spirit.

Arrows are forced by physics towards their target, birds can only seek the sky; but we human-beings have the ability to fashion our own dreams, to formulate our own ambitions. When those dreams and ambitions are thwarted, not by the lack of effort or talent on our own part but by gates that are locked against us, that is a terrible imprisoning of the human spirit. Nothing, therefore, is more moving than when those gates are prised apart for people (like the political prisoners from the dungeons in Beethoven’s Fidelio) to emerge into the welcome light.

But my concern today is not just with the emotional pull to liberate the spirit through opening opportunities to those who would not otherwise have them. My concern is with the implications for government.

What are these implications?

So far as the ends are concerned, the conclusion is, I believe, clear. The answer comes, I believe, in two parts. There is a set of implications about the things governments should seek to achieve, and there is a set of implications about how governments should seek to achieve those things — ends and means.

We need to work towards the creation of a society in which the human spirit is liberated because there is real equality of opportunity for all. That is the kind of society in which we want to live – where an individual with the propensity for hard work has an equal chance of achieving success regardless of where he or she started life.

But there is more to this statement than might at first appear. I want to dwell on the meaning of what I regard as the critical phrase within it — ‘real equality of opportunity’. By ‘real equality of opportunity’, I mean something more than just the appearance of open doors.

I don’t think we can say that two people have an equal opportunity to do something if one of them has been equipped with the skill required to take advantage of that opportunity and the other has not. I don’t think we can say that two people have an equal opportunity to do something if one of them is physically capable of doing it and the other isn’t and hasn’t been able to obtain technology or help to overcome that disability.

I don’t think we can say that two people have an equal opportunity to do something if one of them is subtly (or not so subtly) prevented from doing it because of gender, or sexual orientation, or ethnic origin, or disability, and the other has no such obstacles placed in the way.

So equality of opportunity is a positive, active concept. But, at the same time, it is emphatically not the same as the idea that everything should be made available regardless of personal effort.

Those of us that want to build a society in which there is real equality of opportunity for all want to tear down the barriers that prevent people striving to fulfil their dreams; we want to equip people with the skills and knowledge that they will need if they are to fulfil their particular dreams; but we emphatically do not seek to deliver them their dreams on a plate, free of effort on their part. To be given an opportunity is not the same as being given an outcome; and equality of opportunity is not the same as equality of outcome. You may ask: ‘why all this emphasis on effort and striving — on the endeavours of the individual — rather than just on the delivery of the dream?’.

There are three reasons.

First, it’s for the sake of society as a whole. Adam Smith’s unseen hand works to help all prosper if each is striving to achieve what he or she is capable of achieving. But none can prosper where each merely demands. This is true not just of the economic prosperity that is created by strivers competing in free markets; it is true also of the beauty and sustainability of our surroundings, the bringing up of our children, the enhancement of our culture and the progress of our science. In every domain, our society as a whole benefits from the actions of strivers.

Second, it’s for the sake of the individuals who participate in our society. The point about the opportunity to fulfil your dreams is precisely that it is an opportunity — taking the opportunity, striving for the fulfilment, is in itself something of inestimable value; the effort is a great part of what is fulfilling about the fulfilment. To put it in Michael Gove’s terms, part of what it is to write your own life story is to have written it yourself — not to have sat idly by while a ghost-writer prepares the manuscript for the publisher.

And third, it’s for the sake of fairness. It is fair that each individual should have the same opportunity as each other individual. Indeed, I cannot think of a more fundamental determinant of fairness than equality of opportunity. But it is not fair if those who, once given the opportunity, stay out of the fray are honoured for their lack of effort in the same way as those who join the heat of battle. Equality of outcome regardless of effort is a form of unfairness.

So much for the meaning of ‘equality of opportunity’. What about the ‘for all’ bit? I have heard people from many different political persuasions — of left and right — dismissing the concept of equality of opportunity on the grounds that it cannot really exist in a society if it does not apply to all the citizens of that society, and that the obstacles to its existence for some are too massive to make that possible. I do not accept this thesis — and I believe it is important that we should firmly reject it.

Let’s take one of the most difficult cases of all — that of a young person caught in the ghastly vortex of dependency on heroin and crack (probably with a cocktail of drink, cannabis and amphetamines thrown in), with a chaotic lifestyle, in the grip of the dealers and their gangs, utterly alienated from family and the mainstream of society, engaged no doubt in a regular rhythm of low level acquisitive crime to support the habit.

How can a person in this appallingly unfortunate position ever join the ranks of those who have equality of opportunity?

I accept that this question sounds difficult to answer. And indeed it is, in practice,  difficult to answer. But, at the same time — pace the cynics — it is possible to answer. It is possible to rescue a person even from this form of life, this deepest of internal imprisonments. We know that this little miracle is possible, because it is being done around us every day — yes, with huge skill by people of huge dedication and against the greatest odds; but it is being done. Even these colossal barriers to opportunity can be removed.

And if they can be removed, so — sometimes also with great difficulty — can the others be. Equality of opportunity FOR ALL is not easily achieved; but it is achievable and so it should be our aim.

I want, in a moment, to turn from this discussion of ends to a discussion of means — what governments can do to achieve equality of opportunity for all.

But, before I do that, I just want to deal with one question that might otherwise be left hanging in some people’s minds and that might distract from the main line of my argument.

This is the question: what about people who lack goodwill? Can we really advocate equality of opportunity for all if some people would misuse that opportunity to strive to fulfil malign ambitions?

And if we seek to solve this conundrum by constricting the ambitions that people can legitimately have, are we not contradicting ourselves by depriving some people of the very ability to pursue their dreams that we supposedly support?

I don’t myself believe that any of these questions are anything like as troubling as they might seem either for those of us whose dispositions are liberal or for those of us who advocate equality of opportunity for all.

The answer is provided by the history of our liberal democracy — and it is crystallised in the philosophy of Michael Oakeshott. Our history is one in which our parliaments and our courts — through common law tempered by statute law — have established what Oakeshott describes as ‘adverbial constraints’ on our actions. In other words, our law does not PREscribe what ambitions we should adopt; instead, it PROscribes certain ways of fulfilling those ambitions. We may pursue the fulfilment of any dream — but we cannot do so in a way that involves violence towards others, or other anti- social courses of action. And our constitutional democracy provides a fair and transparent collective method of establishing or modifying those adverbial constraints in law.

So, for completeness, I should redescribe my account of the aim that government should seek as “equality of opportunity for all under the rule of law”.  Now let me turn to the means by which this aim can best be realized and the means by which it is, I believe, progressively being realized in our society today.

Let me start with what I think matters most of all to opportunity: education. Tony Blair said some things I don’t agree with. But he also said some things I very much agree with — and one of them was when he gave education a very high priority, for just this reason.

A proper grounding at school equips someone to take advantage of opportunities in the rest of life in a way that almost nothing else can do. So we owe it to ALL our children that they should have access to a really good school, and one that suits their particular needs.

The reason I mention Tony Blair in this context is that I think it has been over the last several decades (and perhaps it still is) a matter of consensus across the main political parties that the nonsenses of the 1960s must be put firmly behind us, and that we must devote huge efforts to ensuring that every child, everywhere can acquire as many of the fundamental skills and as much of the fundamental knowledge as their abilities enable then to acquire.

This means schools that are at the same time rigorous and imaginative: rigorous in what they demand of their pupils, and imaginative in how they go about enabling their pupils to meet those demands — as in the studio school which I described earlier in this talk. But there is a lot of difference between establishing a consensus about the broad requirement and, on the other hand, fulfilling that requirement in practice. I believe that the reforms that Michael Gove began, and that Nicky Morgan is continuing, constitute the most sustained attempt that this country has seen since the second world war to make a reality of that aspiration for our schools.

And I think that the work which David Willetts began and which Jo Johnson is now carrying forward will come to be seen as the most sustained attempt our country has seen since the 1950s to open opportunities in and through higher education.

But the great thing is that, since 2010, we haven’t focussed only on schools and universities — crucial as these are to our economy, our society and the removing of barriers to opportunity. We have attended with equal vigour to what, for decades, was the almost forgotten element of education — technical and professional training and, above all, apprenticeship.

Over the last half century leading up to 2010, one of the great barriers to opportunity in the UK was the lack of a route through apprenticeship to satisfying and rewarding work. This was in marked contrast to the position in Germany, where the apprenticeship system continued to provide a recognised route for huge numbers of young people throughout those years.

Now, since 2010, we have been steadily building a system of work-experience, traineeships and apprenticeships to provide a ladder of opportunity for hundreds of thousands of young people — a system that will in due course rival Germany’s and will transform not only our ability to compete with the most productive economies in the world but also the prospects for generations of school-leavers.

These reforms of education and training represent a huge step forward in the battle to dismantle the barriers to opportunity in our country. But of course education and training — though fundamental — is not the only thing we all need if we are to make the most of our talents.

We also need to ensure that all of those who emerge ready to join the mainstream have equal opportunities to get a job commensurate with their abilities. Work is not only the best route out of poverty; it is also the route into great and fulfilling achievements. So we need to make sure that the way is open not only for everyone to get work – as we are beginning to do with a record low in the number of workless households – but also for those who enter the world of work to progress in their chosen careers, making their way to the very top if that is what they are intrinsically capable of doing.

We need to do many things — and many things that are now beginning to be done — to make this more of a reality.

We have committed ourselves to significant increases in Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic participation, including a 20% increase in the number of workers in employment, a 20% increase in the proportion of apprenticeships undertaken, and a 20% increase in the number of students going to university. George Bridges and I have taken responsibility for working with colleagues in all the relevant departments of the government to make sure that we focus on these ambitions, and on identifying the particular barriers that are getting in the way of fulfilling them — so that we can together remove those barriers.

For example, in the Department of Work and Pensions, Iain Duncan Smith and Priti Patel have been leading ground-breaking work to identify particular ethnic groups within which either men or women face particularly low work- participation rates. And work is now underway to identify the particular barriers that are blocking access to work for those groups.

Then there are general moves that we need to make to open employment opportunities for all. As the Prime Minister pointed out in his Party Conference speech earlier this year, “even if they have exactly the same qualifications, people with white-sounding names are nearly twice as likely to get call-backs for jobs than people with ethnic-sounding names”. So we must act to remove that unfair barrier.

And I’m proud to say that my colleague Matt Hancock in the Cabinet Office has been leading the way in doing just that across Whitehall. The Civil Service is now moving fast towards using name-blind recruitment as the default.

Then there are cases in which politicians need to lead by active example — such as by bringing more women and more representatives of the various  Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic communities into Parliament. We have made great strides in this over recent years, across the political spectrum — and I am convinced that organisations like Operation Black Vote, which I have myself strongly supported, can make a big difference going forward.

And it isn’t just in Parliament that we need to see more women and more ethnic minority candidates reaching the top. As Trevor Phillips recently re-emphasised, we need to do much, much more to crack through the glass ceilings that remain in our professions and in our board-rooms. What was once exceptional, and is still too rare needs to become a norm, so that people of all kinds beginning their careers can see the prospect of real success opening up before them if they put in the effort to achieve it.

Getting educated, getting trained, getting a job, making progress in a career, making the way to as near the top as your talents and efforts make possible — all of these are hugely important components of what it is to have the opportunity to write your own life story.

But there is, of course, much more to life than learning and working. It is in our families and amongst our friends that we human beings find our chief solace, our greatest support, our most profound attachments. We need of course to remove the remaining barriers to the full enjoyment of a rich family and social life for all — as we did, for example, through the introduction of same-sex marriage. This, too, is a part of providing equal opportunity for all.

But the formation of a family and social life is something that typically takes place in a place. And this brings us to the settings within which so much of that family and social life is inevitably carried on — our homes.

As Greg Clark has recently said, we must avoid the temptation to talk of homes as if they were mere matters of bricks and mortar. They are much, much more than that.

For many of us, the various homes in which we have lived bear the indelible imprints of the various stages of our lives. The finding and establishment of a home — and indeed the opportunity, however gradually, to acquire a home of one’s own is one of the great opportunities of life.

This is not something that should be available only to the privileged few. It should be available to all. The housing ladder should become, for all our citizens, a ladder of opportunity.

That means doing all of the many things this Government is already doing with huge energy and determination — opening the way for hundreds of thousands of new homes to be built, and opening the way for young people of modest means to climb onto the ladder through starter homes, part equity, Help to Buy, Right to Buy and a series of measures to make it easier for house-builders (including self-builders) to build homes at costs people can afford to pay.

But it also means doing the most exciting thing of all — working with the residents of the most disfavoured estates to provide them with new hope of a new life by transforming the physical condition of those estates in the way that the Prime Minister set out just a few days ago. As he so poignantly described, “within these estates, behind front doors families build warm and welcoming homes just like everyone else. But step outside and you’re confronted by concrete slabs dropped from on high”. So we have adopted the colossal ambition to “work in partnership with residents, housing associations, local authorities, social enterprises and private developers, and sweep away the barriers that prevent regeneration”.

For most of us, the great opportunities of our society (cultural as well as economic) can be opened up through these very things — the provision of a good education and of first-rate vocational training, followed by an open route through a chosen career as well as access to the housing ladder and to the savings and pensions that secure us in old age. That is what those lucky enough to start and remain in the mainstream most need.

But not everyone is so lucky. Some start with colossal disadvantages. Some fall, for one reason or another, out of the mainstream. For people in these positions, too, the years since 2010 have seen great moves forward.

We are fostering a hugely ambitious programme of social reform to remove barriers to opportunity for those with the greatest disadvantages.

The list of action in this area stretches right across government. There is the Troubled Families programme, now vastly expanded. There is the rolling out of Universal Credit. There is the Work Programme, now evolving into the Work and Health Programme. There is the reform of disability benefits and of ESA. There is the refocussing of drug and alcohol treatment on recovery and abstinence. There is the establishment of an entirely new rehabilitation programme for prisoners.

To these must be added not only many other existing programmes and policies (in areas from adoption and child protection, to the widening of access, to talking therapies for the mentally ill) but also the list of new measures identified by the Prime Minister in that remarkable speech on Life Chances just a few days ago:

•increased investment in preventative relationship support;

•a new emphasis on parenting skills in the Troubled Families programme;

•newly recruited mentors for young people;

•a huge new investment in mental healthcare; and • a new voucher scheme for parenting classes;

•the expansion of the National Citizens Service to bring many more young people from all backgrounds together in joint social endeavour;

•a new effort to ensure that arts organisations engage with those who might otherwise believe that culture is not for them;

•a new social investment Outcomes Fund to encourage the development of new treatment options for alcoholism and drug addiction.

I am conscious that, in describing these measures to open opportunity to the least advantaged, I am leaving to one side other, vastly important questions such as the questions of technique — the extent to which we have chosen to use, in many cases, the Big Society rather than the Big State to carry forward these programmes; the extent to which we have in many cases sought to use ‘nudge’ rather than clunky (and often less effective) regulation; the extent to which we have brought in new methods of social finance through social impact bonds and Big Society Capital.

But my purpose today has not been to focus on the technical and administrative questions which form so large a part of my working week. Rather, my purpose has been to identify the ambition of this Government, the range of activity in which this Government has engaged in pursuit of that ambition, and the extent to which that range of activity forms a coherent project of social reform.

We have before our eyes a clear aim which we believe to be in the interest of the whole country, in the interest of justice and fairness, in the interest of social cohesion and social stability, and in the interest of our economy through increasing its ability to harness the full talents of our people.

None of this is about offering an easy ride or making excuses for anti-social behaviour. It is about removing barriers and helping people to make their own way through their own efforts, justly appreciated and justly rewarded. It is a massive, sustained, consistent, courageous attempt to create a society in which there is genuine equality of opportunity.

The Rt Hon Oliver Letwin MP is Minister for the Cabinet Office

It is a real pleasure to be able to take part in this Bright Blue conference focusing on the challenges and opportunities facing young people in modern Britain, not least because my boss is now the hon president of Bright Blue. As someone who regards himself as a liberal Conservative I’m a keen supporter of the work of Bright Blue.

Two of Bright Blue’s defining principles are key to my view of politics: “optimism about human potential” and “enthusiasm for the future”. I strongly believe there is no problem facing mankind that we cannot resolve, provided we live in a free society committed to the rule of law, to democracy and to market economics. Disease, famine, energy crises – all can be resolved with human ingenuity and the right incentives in place to find solutions. War, brutality, corruption – all can be conquered with the right philosophy, democratic government and a strong education system.

Democracy is the greatest of all human inventions, ensuring our society is benignly regulated to our mutual benefit; and without education we cannot pass on to the next generation all that has been learned by thousands of generations of our forebears. But both have suffered damage over the last 30 or 40 years.

Even before the expenses scandal of 2009, disillusionment with politics was deeply entrenched. The turnout in the 1997 election was 69% – by 2001 it had fallen to 59% and the phrase “all politicians are the same; they’re all in it for themselves” could be heard in every focus group and political discussion outside the beltway. Leo McGarry summed it up when he began his search for a presidential candidate to support – “I’m tired of having to choose”, he said, “between the lesser of who cares.

Yet Britain is probably one of the best run countries in the world; virtually corruption free, we are a nation that is prosperous, tolerant and free. Why should cynicism about our politics be so strong? And what can we do to restore faith in politics and by extension to democracy? What can we do to boost confidence in mainstream political parties,

Part of the reason for this disillusionment is the tribalism of our political parties, which on occasion seems to put party advantage ahead of what’s right. Just after the 1997 general election, for example, Conservative MPs voted against Labour’s plans to privatise the air traffic control service, ostensibly because it wasn’t the right kind of privatisation but in reality because Labour’s left wing was rebelling and we sensed an early defeat for Tony Blair. So we were voting against what we believed to be in the best interests of our country for cynical party advantage. Just for balance I should add that in 2006 under David Cameron’s leadership we voted FOR Labour’s flagship Education and Inspections Bill despite a Labour rebellion so large that without our votes the Bill would have been defeated and with it, probably, Tony Blair’s premiership. We voted for the Bill because we agreed with it.

The yah-boo of Prime Minister’s Question time baffles people. I’ve disliked it ever since I was first elected in 1997. It’s not the exchanges between the party leaders that’s the problem, nor the questions from backbenchers, but the constant braying and jeering that entrenches the impression that politics is all about party tribalism and that political parties and Members of Parliament put their own interests above those of the people and our country. The juvenile bacchanalia of PMQs is a self-indulgence that is deeply damaging even though it belies the reality of serious politics,

Another major cause of the disillusionment is the failure of politicians to deliver on their promises. Police on the beat is a classic example. All political parties make this promise in the full knowledge that chief constables regard what they see as a Dixon-of-Dock-Green approach to policing as ineffective and out of date. In education, politicians have, in the past, promised a return to basics, to higher academic standards, to traditional teaching, while presiding over changes to the curriculum in the late 1980s, the late 1990s and again in 2007 that at each stage increased the influence of progressive and failed teaching methods in our state schools. The reason for the disconnect between what politicians promise and what they deliver is, in a way, a lack of confidence or ability to challenge the experts who run our public services – the chief constables, the educationalists who dominate the education faculties of the universities and the local education authorities. In a technically demanding modern country it’s never easy to defy the ranks of long-serving experts, even when the public service they deliver is demonstrably under-performing.

And here’s the Catch 22. The more disillusionment there is with politics and politicians the more it undermines politicians’ confidence to challenge the resident experts and the vested interests. And the more we fail to take on these interests and consequently fail to deliver on our promises the greater that sense of disillusionment.

How many times have we heard the call for politicians to keep out of decisions over the curriculum? Tax experts, they cry, should preside over the technical aspects of the Finance Bill. Teachers and education academics should determine the school curriculum, not Michael Gove or Nicky Morgan, or Heaven help us, Nick Gibb. Why is he telling us which algorithms children should use to multiply and divide?

In recent years politics and politicians have been under pressure and under attack. Politicians need to regain confidence in themselves and in the importance of politics; by being serious about the way we conduct politics but also by not joining in the disparagement of politics and politicians. We know why we all came into politics – to help improve the way our country is run and to help improve people’s lives. If politicians themselves cannot make the case for politics then democracy itself is in danger of being overwhelmed by a tidal wave of cynicism.

That’s why my firm belief, is that we simply can’t restore faith in politics by constantly criticising our political system as it is, although there are things we need to change. We’ll only succeed in doing it by outlining a confident, optimistic vision of what we want our politics to be and to make sure that the next generation are inspired to do their bit to realise that vision of the future.

One of the characteristics of David Cameron’s leadership of the Conservative Party has been to keep people in place as shadow ministers and ministers for long stretches of time to enable them to acquire the expertise with which to challenge civil servants and experts in their department. This isn’t a plea for me to keep my job after the election – although of course it is – it is an argument that ministers need to be executive officers of their department not non-executive directors monitoring decisions taken by others. Ministers need to ensure that the ideas and policies that led to their election are delivered. Over the last five years the most successful reforming departments of this administration have achieved precisely that – from the Treasury to the DWP, from the Home Office to the Department for Education, challenging the police, challenging the educationalists, taking bold decisions about the public finances and the reform of the benefits system. Five years has been too short a time for these achievements to undo decades of disillusionment and, of course, there are some areas of policy where a successful outcome is still a work-in-progress or where the politics of coalition have proved an obstacle. But if we are to restore faith in politics we need to ensure that our next term of office continues to deliver effective reform and delivers on the promises made in our manifesto.

This conference is about the future; it’s about the opportunities and challenges faced by our young people. This week’s Economist features the challenges from China, a country that manufactures 60% of the world’s shoes and 70% of the world’s mobile phones. And even as China’s wage costs rise, Northampton is unlikely to see a resurgence of its famous past as a world centre of shoe manufacturing or source of thousands of unskilled or semi-skilled jobs. Britain’s future lies in having an educated population that designs shoes, that designs products that are manufactured in low cost countries in a global economy. Britain’s future is in its high value-added manufacturing; it is in its creativity in the arts, literature and music. It’s in finance and entrepreneurialism – setting up new and innovative businesses. It’s in the sciences, medicine and bio-technology.

All this means we must have an effective education system. Shanghai’s 15-year-olds are three years ahead of their British peers in maths, according to the PISA 2012 survey. That’s why we’re learning from their approach – whole class teaching, extensive practice, good quality textbooks, detailed and effective teaching, traditional algorithms – no chunking in division and no grid method for long multiplication – methods introduced into our schools under the last Labour Government that had no evidential basis and which have demonstrably failed. That’s why I have a view about what algorithms children should use in maths! We are currently working with the publishing industry to create a new generation of high quality textbooks that go beyond the curriculum and exam syllabuses, for use in primary and secondary schools.

We have re-written the national curriculum, ensuring it is equal to the best curricula in the world. We leaned on the Singapore curriculum for maths in primary schools. Now every 9-year-old will need to know their multiplication tables to 12 times 12 by heart.  In English we’ve changed the way reading is taught and now because of our focus on phonics 102,000 6-year-olds are reading more effectively.  We’ve introduced a knowledge-rich curriculum ensuring young people have the knowledge to help them understand the world. All this was against a back-drop of opposition from the educationalists in the university education departments who claim knowledge doesn’t matter, it’s the processes of learning that’s important; educationalists who fiercely opposed phonics and the explicit teaching of grammar, spelling and punctuation that we now test at age 11.  And we want pupils in all schools to have read as many of the great works of literature as children are reading in the best state and independent schools.

We’ve given professional autonomy to at least 60% of all secondary schools who are now free to adopt approaches to education that the evidence says works rather than obeying advice from a cadre of local authority education advisers. Already 17% pf primary schools are following in their trail and adopting academy status. These 4900 schools are now blending into academy groupings or chains and competing on reputation for academic excellence. Last week I visited ARK Priory Primary Academy in Ealing – where Year 1 children – 5- and 6-year-olds – had learned to read so effectively in the Reception class that many of them were reading full-length children’s novels. They were able to answer with ease questions such as 17 minus 8 and 3 times 4.

I’d like to take everyone here to see Michaela Community School, a free school in Wembley, run a by a formidable group of Teach First teachers headed by the remarkable Katharine Birbalsingh, or the East London Science School, a free school run by David Perks. These schools are putting the acquisition of knowledge at the core of the curriculum and nurturing well mannered, happy young people in a caring and safe school environment.

Yet we all know the opposition we faced from some teacher unions and the left generally when we sought to convert some of the weakest schools in the country to academies. Downhills school in Haringey for example was chronically underperforming and in special measures but when forced to become an academy sponsored by the highly successful Harris Academy Federation had to resist fierce opposition from the Save Downhills campaign, from the local authority and the local Labour MP. In 2009 just 40% of pupils at Downhills secured a level 4 or above in both English and Maths in their KS2 assessments. But under Harris and renamed the Harris Primary Academy Philip Lane its level 4 results in reading, writing and maths are now at 77% and its Phonics Check results have risen from 36% passing in 2012 to 75% passing in 2013. Children at that school are now benefiting from a first class education that they would not have had had we not resisted that opposition.

Nationally, there are now over a million more children in schools graded good or outstanding by Ofsted than five years ago.

We have reformed GCSEs and A levels, moving away from assessing coursework and modules to end of course exams and we have strengthened their academic content. We introduced the new English Baccalaureate performance measure revealing how many pupils in a school achieved C or better in the key combination of GCSES, namely: English, maths, two sciences, a foreign language and a humanity. It resulted in the number of pupils taking foreign languages rising by 29% since 2012 and an increase in the number taking history and geography GCSEs.

We have raised the bar for entry into the teaching profession. As a result, 71% of new entrants into teaching last year had a 2.1 or first class degree. We have given schools more say over teacher training, challenging universities’ monopoly over how teachers are trained.

All these reforms have been implemented in the face of bitter opposition from the vested interests but all of these reforms are essential if we are to give young people the opportunities they need to compete in the global jobs market and to prepare them for life in modern Britain. No-one’s potential should be lost because of a poor education.

Having the courage and expertise to stand up to the vested interests in education has been essential to delivering our manifesto promise to raise standards in schools. There is more to do to entrench and strengthen these reforms, and to ensure all schools are as good as the best. But what I believe we have demonstrated is that with determination, a clear sense of direction and two Secretaries of State committed to reform, politicians can effect change in the face of opposition from long-entrenched vested interests. This more than any other reform to our political structure will, in the long run, restore faith in the political process and in democracy and I hope will encourage young people to regard politics as a noble and worthwhile profession.

I am hugely optimistic that human ingenuity can solve the problems confronting our world, including restoring faith in our politics. I am hugely optimistic about the future of our country and what Britain can achieve if we keep on the current course. The decision voters will make in 50 or so days’ time will determine whether we do. But I am increasingly confident that we will.

Nick Gibb MP is the Minister of State for Schools

The last time I spoke at one of these I made waves by saying I thought our Party needed to talk a bit more about what we’re for than what we’re against. You might not think that a particularly remarkable statement. So perhaps the fact a few journalists wrote it up says much about the impact Bright Blue has had on the political scene and on political debate generally.

This is one of the most exciting think tanks around, with an important programme of research and a clear vision about the future of our Party. It’s good to be here among friends this evening, to be able to accept the kind offer of becoming co-President, and to be able to talk to you about such an important theme.

This is a speech about the future. But I want to begin by taking you back.

It’s actually frightening as I look around the room to think that some of you may not really remember the leadership contest of 2005.

But I do. And during that campaign – as the two candidates toured the country over many months – each developed a core speech to deliver at every rally, every hustings, every event.

And I always remember a few key lines from David Cameron’s.

Elections, he said, are about a simple choice. One party talks about the past and they lose. The other talks about the future, and they win.

That’s as true today as it’s ever been.

And it’s why in this election, we are firmly focussed on the future… with a positive and aspirational message about the difference our long-term economic plan is making – and will continue to make – to people’s lives.

We had to make some difficult decisions when we came in. But I believe people respect us for that. And now as people focus on the choice – the competence of David Cameron and his team on the one hand, and the chaos of Ed Miliband on the other – they are increasingly coming to realise what is at stake. That’s why it’s essential that we all – everyone in this room tonight, and every party member, MP, candidate and supporter beyond – stick to the strategy, support the campaign, and remain disciplined, deliberate and determined to drive home the message of our long-term economic plan every day between now and the 7th of May.

Our plan is a plan with a purpose: to build a better, brighter future for Britain.

The plan is the method; but the opportunity to change Britain for the better is the motivation. That’s what brought me into politics and why we’re all here. Not to stand still or hark back to some mythical golden age, but to move forward, to progress, to change things for the better.

But I want to argue tonight that if we are to do that, we must face up to and embrace the world as it is – not as it was. That’s the only way we can begin to shape it into the world we want it to be. This can sometimes be a challenge because it involves facing difficult truths, making difficult decisions, making difficult judgements about how far the writ of government should run.

In the very first statement I made as Education Secretary back in July, I said that the abiding principle of this government’s education policy is that schools should prepare young people for life in modern Britain, and indeed the modern world.

You may think this uncontroversial, but you would be surprised. People are wary of the word ‘modern’. They suspect an ulterior motive. For them, it conjures up images of all the things they are suspicious of: diversity, multiculturalism, globalisation. Modernity for some people is a dirty world.

As one commentator put it “that ‘modern’ is redundant and showy-offy. It is politically correct. It is meaningless”.

That commentator is wrong. The word ‘modern’ is in fact essential.

Because it signals that we are now in a different age. It shows that the world has changed. It says that there is something new and different about the society in which we find ourselves – and that it makes new and different demands of us.

If we don’t recognise this – if we don’t come to terms with and understand the realities of modern society – then what hope do we as politicians and government have of responding to the fresh challenges those realities present?

We would instead continue to meet modern challenges with old-fashioned solutions. We would become ever more ineffective and ignored. Most importantly, we will fail to rise to the most important duty of any government and the reason I as a Conservative wanted to be elected: to create the conditions in which every person has the chance to fulfil their potential and succeed in life.

Unlike that commentator, I am profoundly optimistic about modern Britain.

This country, though small in size, is large in ambition. I do not accept the narrative of decline or the arguments of those that say our best days are behind us. We continue to set an example here at home and to play a leading role internationally. We continue to defy the odds and punch above our weight. We continue to be a beacon that shines around the world.

Wherever you travel, people welcome and embrace you because you are British. Our culture and our society transcend borders. In the furthest backwaters of the world, this small country is known and loved.

We have created and are home to some of the world’s leading and most recognisable brands. You only need to look at the nightly news to see pictures of young children from across the world draped in Manchester United or Chelsea football shirts for example.

We are the jobs factory of Europe. The City of London continues to be one of the world’s premier financial centres. And because of the strength of our economy, we are able to continue to fund the vital institutions that we hold dear – institutions like the NHS that, with their spirit of selflessness and social justice, echo around the world.

Just the other week we saw that the number of people seeking to come to live and work in our country has increased. And while it is absolutely right that people who do travel to live here must have a job and pay their way, we should acknowledge that they’re doing so because of the strength of our economy, our culture, our society. These are the things that make modern Britain an attractive home for so many of whatever nationality, colour or creed.

We are a small but proud country and we can face the future with confidence.

But we should acknowledge that for many people modern Britain can be a rather overwhelming place too.

Particularly if you feel excluded, marginalised or under threat on account of your background, religion, sexuality, or race.

If you’re one of the white working-class children in a school that suffers from what the Education Select Committee described in a report last year as a “poverty of expectation”.

If you’re someone seeing your community change with the introduction of new voices and faces, while you struggle to find where you fit.

Sadly increasingly, if you are Jewish and living in fear of a new wave of anti-semitism that we all hoped had been consigned to the past.

Modern Britain can be an overwhelming place for many people in many ways. But I think it can be particularly overwhelming if you are young.

Because growing up in Britain today is no easy task. Yes, there may be more opportunities than ever before. And yes, some argue that today’s young people have it easy. We all know of someone who will all too easily claim that it’s not like it was in their day.

But let’s be honest. The pressures young people face today were unimaginable to my generation.

Pressures to conform and pressures to perform.

They grow up in a world that places huge value on style and arguably not always as much value on substance.

The democratisation of communications has opened that world up, but brought its own pressures too.

In research conducted at the start of this year, more than a third of 11-16 year olds said they felt pressure to update their social media profiles with pictures or postings that make them look good. And girls feel this pressure in particular. Almost half of the girls surveyed said they felt this concern – but it’s an increasing problem for young boys too.

The same research showed that similar numbers feel worried about how many ‘likes’ or ‘shares’ they get on their postings and pictures.

And more worryingly, two in three 11-16 year olds said they had friends who had been bullied online.

That bullying can take many forms – but we’re seeing increasing incidents of abuse relating to sexting and so-called ‘revenge porn’.

The evidence base is still small, but in a survey conducted last year just eight police forces reported nearly 150 allegations relating to revenge porn over a two year period – and those are just the cases that make it that far.

NSPCC research shows that six in ten teenagers have been asked for sexual images or videos online. And many feel compelled to do it because of peer pressure or coercion.

Let’s be clear that the internet and the advance of the digital age are things to celebrate and embrace, but let us not deny that they bring new pressures that require new responses too.

Young people are also under pressure to perform in school. We demand a lot of them – and rightly so. We urge them to aspire and to succeed.

Some argue that this has gone too far – that the high-stakes culture of today’s schools puts them under too much pressure. But the reality of the modern world is that they must compete not just with their peers at home, but with those from other nations and jurisdictions too.

The jobs for which they will compete in the future will recognise few borders. The careers they will pursue will be increasingly international. Their capacity to fulfil their potential and succeed in life will rely on their ability to navigate an increasingly global world.

The global race may feel overwhelming, but it’s real. If we don’t prepare young people for it then we are selling them short.

And at the same time, the old certainties of life have fallen away as the world has changed. The social contract is in flux.

In his important book ‘The Pinch’, my former boss and now co-President David Willetts observed that “one of our deepest human instincts, somewhere between a desire and an obligation, is to transmit something worthwhile on to the next generation”.

But as he goes on to observe, without action there is a danger of this contract breaking down. The baby boomers have done very well out of life, but without a government that is on their side, young people could face a future of heavier taxes, harder work and less certainty as a result.

The average age of a first-time home-buyer is now 37 and the average deposit necessary to get on the property ladder is around £30,000. If you can rely on the bank of mum and dad then this can help a bit, but not everyone can. And arguably, no one should have to.

As the Prime Minister said yesterday, we are turning this around – meeting every barrier to home ownership with a solution. But it’s clear that the ability to own a home of your own – once regarded almost as a birth right in this country – is no longer as easy as it was.

As a Party, we are showing that we understand these pressures; that we get what it is like to have to try and make your own way in modern Britain; that we have a plan to help young people navigate the many challenges in their way.

For me as Education Secretary, that begins with schools. It means demonstrating that we have a vision for what a good school looks like and the role a good school should play in helping to prepare young people for the realities of life.

That’s why I talk about preparing young people for life in modern Britain. It’s not just a soundbite, but a guiding principle. And it’s not just an add-on, but something that should run through everything a good school does.

The starting point is to help every young person master the basics so that they get the very best start in life. Some say this is backward looking. I say it’s the best way of preparing young people for the future.

The basics matter. They are the foundations from which everything else can grow. They are the point at which opportunity begins.

I don’t really want to make political points, but I will say that I think this represents a genuine difference of philosophy between us and Labour.

The Labour Party will always instinctively believe that there are some young people for whom mastery of an academic core is a step too far. They believe in equality of outcome, not equality of opportunity. And by that they don’t mean the best possible outcomes. They just mean the same. They mean uniformity. Levelling down. A lack of ambition. They can’t help it. It’s in their DNA. They would rather the less able learned less, as long as the more able learned less as well.

That philosophy held sway for too long. It meant that when we came to office in 2010, every third child was leaving primary school unable to read, write and add up properly.

We have begun to turn that around.

But I have to tell you that the Liberal Democrats are barely much better.

Obsessed with drawing false dividing lines between closing the gap and raising the bar. Fearing the fact that some children learn faster than others. Spending all their time focusing on the gap between children rather than improving overall outcomes for all.

It means that we – uniquely – are the Party that unashamedly says every child regardless of background can, should and must be given the opportunity to achieve their very best.

We think that a core academic education is the birth right of every child. But that is the least pupils and parents should expect.

It’s noticeable that in all the conversations I have with parents – and I have to tell you a lot of the research we do in this area too – this is taken as read. People expect schools to help their children master the basics, and by and large they think they do a good job of delivering it too.

What concerns them is what comes next. And this is the other side of the coin. Because preparing young people for life in modern Britain is not just about ensuring they are knowledgeable, but making sure they develop the skills and values they need to succeed in modern Britain.

It’s often at this point that some Conservatives can develop a bit of a blind spot. We love to talk about knowledge – it plays to our Conservative instincts – but we get nervous when thinking of schools as places that instil skills and values too. We worry that this usurps the role of parents. That it means schools overstepping the mark. That it detracts from the core purpose of a school, which is to turn out academically bright young people.

And some even think ‘values’ is another of those words like ‘modern’ – something about which they are inherently suspicious. They think it’s political correctness or an attempt to impose teachings and ideas with which they disagree. But who truly can object to our schools being required to promote the very values that everyone in this room holds dear? Democracy. The rule of law. Individual liberty. Tolerance of and respect for those with different faiths and beliefs.

Schools are absolutely the right places for these things to be taught, promoted and embraced. No matter how many times I am asked, I am simply not going to apologise to anyone for that.

I am clear that schools have a critical role to play in turning out rounded, resilient young people that can face the challenges of the modern world with confidence.

A strong academic core is the start, but it’s just that: a start. It’s not enough. We need to address the whole child.

We send our children to school to learn, yes, but also to grow as people.

To mature and gain confidence.

To learn valuable life lessons, in the classroom and on the playground.

To make friends, meet people from all walks of life, and practice, in a safe environment, at the kind of social situations essential for success in adult life.

That’s one reason that I have placed such an emphasis on character education – because I want young people to develop the character, determination, resilience and grit that will help them thrive in the modern world.

It annoys me when I hear people being having a go at this, as they do. There’s a snobbish quality to the criticism – a poverty of thought and aspiration by those who say these traits can’t be taught or encouraged by schools.

I believe they can – and not only that, that they are essential too. That’s why we have invested £5 million in identifying and celebrating the best examples of character education at work. And why yesterday I was pleased to be able to announce that some of the successful free schools applications – like those from the Floreat Education group for example – have the development of good character at the very core of their approach.

And it’s this focus on the whole child that leads me to believe that Personal, Social, Health, and Economic Education – or PSHE – is an important part of a school’s offer too.

At this point I can almost hear the screams from some quarters, the printing presses starting up with their negative stories, the howls of derision from elsewhere. You only have to look at some of the headlines this weekend, when we suggested – god forbid – we ought to teach young people about the concept of consent.

But that highlights the very problem with this whole discussion – that any mention of PSHE immediately gets people thinking about sex. And that sparks strong and impassioned debates about what is and isn’t age appropriate; what is and isn’t right.

To be frank, sex education is an important element of the programme. But it’s just one part of it. In fact, proper PSHE should be much broader and should offer young people what I like to think of as a ‘curriculum for life’.

A good PSHE education should cover all of the skills and knowledge young people need to manage their lives, stay safe, make the right decisions, and thrive as individuals and members of modern society.

It helps them build the essential skills for the world of work. Leadership, communication, sympathy, perseverance.

Often called ‘soft skills’, they are actually the kind of qualities that business leaders are crying out for.

And it helps young people develop other skills that will make adult life that little bit easier – things like financial literacy or even more importantly the ability to use the internet as a force for good, offering them unprecedented opportunities, opening up new career paths and transforming them into digital citizens.

PSHE provides a really important space on the curriculum for these kind of skills to be explored and developed. Because the evidence is clear. These characteristics aren’t just innate; they can and should be taught.

It also plays a vital role in educating pupils about mental health, a personal priority of mine, – promoting positive mental health, addressing some of the damaging stigmas around it, and helping pupils learn where to go if they have any worries or concerns.

This is vital. At least 1 in 4 of the population experiences mental health problems at some point in their life. And over half of adults who suffer with mental health problems say that their problems started by age 14; three-quarters by their mid-twenties.

So there’s a huge personal, financial, and societal cost to poor mental health. It is our duty to intervene where we can, to stop this cost and help young people become resilient individuals instead.

But good PSHE teaching is also essential to keeping pupils safe, inside and outside the school gates.

We have all been horrified and appalled by stories about child sexual abuse over recent years. And as I said earlier, there are continuing concerns amongst parents, and children and young people themselves, about the easy availability and sharing of sexual images and pornography by school pupils.

By educating pupils about healthy relationships and consent, we can help them make sense of situations that can often be confusing and distressing for young minds to comprehend, and teach them how to keep themselves and others safe.

There is no trade-off between learning about these things and academic success – they are two sides of the same coin.

In fact, I think you would be hard-pushed to find anyone willing to disagree with the statement that healthy, happy, confident pupils are better-placed to learn.

I want more schools to put high-quality PSHE at the heart of their curriculum. It is an essential part of their responsibility to prepare young people for life in modern Britain.

And some schools already do it brilliantly well.

Last month I visited Eastbourne Academy to see their work as part of Stonewall’s School Champion programme. I was lucky enough to see them perform a play about tackling homophobic bullying and then sensitively discuss the issues raised with their peers.

Pupils at Eastbourne told me how “Sphere” – their name for PSHE – had challenged their stereotypes and misperceptions about people who were different to them and helped them to better understand their communities. Perhaps most importantly they told me that the reason they valued these classes so much was that this was the time when they felt they could “develop as people”.

I would encourage all schools to consider following in Eastbourne’s footsteps, and put PSHE education at the heart of their curriculum, giving it the same focus as they would any other subject.

But what I won’t do is force them to do it in a set prescribed way, decided by me in Westminster.

Too often, when we’re not talking about sex, we instead end up in the circular debate about whether PSHE should be a statutory part of the curriculum or not.

I’ll let you into a secret here: we keep a list at the DfE of every topic, subject and idea that someone wants us to make statutory. It currently runs to several pages, and if we implemented every plea then young people would still be in school at midnight.

I do think PSHE has a better claim than some, but I am not convinced that simply making it statutory is the answer to the question at hand.

I choose to take a different path. I trust schools to do what’s right for them and their pupils. I let teachers decide. I believe schools and teachers are best placed to design their own PSHE curriculum to meet the specific needs of their pupils and communities. And I think it’s important that that curriculum should be able to flex and adapt according to changing social factors too.

“Sphere” might be the right approach for the pupils in Eastbourne, but it won’t be the right approach for pupils everywhere. Let’s let a thousand flowers bloom.

The role of government is not to mandate but to help. And at the moment one of the biggest questions we face is how to improve the quality of PSHE teaching.

Ofsted evidence shows that PSHE teaching is not yet good enough in many schools – we’re letting down thousands of children.

And linked to that – only 28% of primary schools and 45% of secondary schools have one or more staff members holding the national PSHE qualification.

I know that the vast majority of schools and teachers recognise the importance of decent PSHE, and want to teach it well.

That’s why this weekend I announced a range of measures to improve the quality and provision of PSHE education in our schools.

We will establish a new charter mark for schools in conjunction with the PSHE Association. This will be awarded to schools that demonstrate excellence in this area in order to give schools something to strive for in improving their PSHE teaching, and making it easier for schools struggling in this area to work with the best.

We know that one of the biggest barriers that teachers face is knowing which materials to use to teach PSHE. I can see why, the array of materials out there is truly bewildering. Some of them are clearly inappropriate, offensive, or at odds with British Values.

That’s why we want to work with the PSHE association to help them quality assess resources produced by other organisations and ensure that these are the ones that teachers use in our schools.

And later this week we will launch new guidance, produced by the association on one of the most important and sensitive areas of PSHE teaching: consent.

The new guidance will build on an existing programme of work between the Department and the PSHE Association, and will give teachers important information about the law on consent, helping them to design effective lessons accordingly.

And in this modern world, when young women – and for that matter young men – are exposed to so many pressures day in day out, surely we have a duty to make sure they know that they can say no, and to know how to do it.

That doesn’t mean “lessons in rape” as some more hysterical headline writers have suggested, but it does mean telling young people the difference between a healthy and unhealthy relationship: about when something crosses the line and what they can do about it.

Because if the revelations of recent weeks have shown us anything, it’s that the stakes are too high to let our young people leave school without this knowledge. I don’t pretend for one minute that lessons on consent would have been enough to stop the horrific abuse in Rotherham or Oxford, but I will not rest until I know that we have done everything we can to arm young women, and in particular the most vulnerable young women, with the information they need to spot, report and tackle abuse.

And this really is the test – the test of whether we face up to the modern world, or shrink from it. Embrace and respond to the challenges of modern Britain, or bury our heads in the sand and pretend it isn’t here. I know where I stand and where we should stand as a Party too.

For we simply cannot stop the advance of the modern world. We cannot – as some would have us do – stop the world and jump off. And we cannot wish away the challenges this world presents.

Some say we should stop putting so much pressure on our young people, but the pressure is there. The question is how we help them respond.

Some say we should wrap them in cotton wool and not expose them to the realities of the world, but in the internet age that is increasingly hard to do. The question is how we provide them with the emotional resilience to cope.

Some say that things like character, personal and social skills, and emotional intelligence are innate and can’t be taught. I simply disagree. You need only go to some of our finest schools operating in some of our most difficult communities today to expose this as a lie.

I have a vision of what a good education looks like. It is broad, not narrow. Rooted in – and responsive to – the world as it is, not as we would wish it to be. About the future, not the past.

That is what our plan for education has been about – and what it will continue to be about for as long as I am here, because that plan is working.

It is about providing young people – of whatever background – with the knowledge yes, but also the skills and the values they need to succeed in this modern Britain.

A Britain with many challenges for sure, but many opportunities as well.

Where the rewards may be great, but the pressures are great too.

A Britain that demands new things of us – new understanding, new ideas and new responses like those being developed by Bright Blue today.

It is my pleasure to be part of this organisation and to be able to play my part in shaping that response.

Because if we get it right, the rewards for our Party will be great. And the opportunity to change Britain for the better will be ours.

The Rt Hon Nicky Morgan MP is the Secretary of State for Education 

Many thanks to the Fabian Society and Bright Blue for organising today’s event and to the Fabians for your important Inequality 2030 report.  Thanks are also due to the Webb Memorial Trust for supporting today’s event and for the work that you do to put poverty on the public policy map.

Putting the issue on the general election agenda is a shared endeavour between all of you and the Commission on Social Mobility and Child Poverty that I chair.   With two months to go to the election it is time to speak up for the one in six children – 2.3 million – who are officially classified as poor in the UK.  The scale of the challenge we face as a country in reducing such high levels of child poverty can all too easily give way to a profound sense of pessimism about the possibility of making progress. For decades British politicians have agreed that boosting social mobility and reducing child poverty are essential if Britain is to fulfil its potential, be at ease with itself and be confident about the future. The Attlee welfare state and the Butler education reforms expressed this consensus. The Thatcher and Blair Governments made aspiration their political calling cards. The Coalition Government placed itself in this political tradition by committing to make Britain “an aspiration nation”, one that seeks to be truly meritocratic and free of child poverty.

It is worth remembering that the post-war consensus has produced real results. Child poverty has fallen by 40 per cent from its post-war high in 1992. There are fewer children in workless households than at any time in over two decades. Today employment is at record levels and educational inequalities, though wide, have slowly narrowed over the last decade and a half.  More working class youngsters are benefitting from higher education than at any point in history.  Counter to today’s prevailing anti-politics mood, the fact that Britain has made progress on the most intractable social problems of our age, is testament to the fact that our political system can deliver.

Nonetheless, the progress that has been made has been too limited and too slow. While it is in Britain’s DNA that everyone should have a fair chance in life, all too often demography remains destiny in our country. Being born poor often leads to a lifetime of poverty. Poor schools ease people into poor jobs. Disadvantage and advantage cascade down the generations. Over decades we have become a wealthier society but we have struggled to become a fairer one.  Compared with many other developed nations the UK has high levels of child poverty and low levels of social mobility.

The global financial crisis escalated public concerns about social inequality to a new level.  To date the principal focus – even anger – has been directed at those at the very top of the heap.  When excess reward becomes separated from effort and performance it causes understandable outrage.  My plea, however, is to refocus those concerns about inequality so that as much attention is given to helping those at the very bottom as it is to finding ways of restraining those at the top. There are pressing reasons for doing so.   The central conclusion of the Commission’s second annual State of the Nation report published in November last month was that Britain is on the brink of becoming a permanently divided nation. We came to that conclusion because while the economy has bounced back strongly, record numbers of people are in work and some promising school and welfare reforms are underway, the economic recovery is not being matched by a social recovery.  500,000 more children are in absolute poverty after housing costs than in 2010. For families in the middle – those on average earnings – despite welcome recent increases  in earnings, it will be at least 2018 before their wages are back to where they were before the recession.  The gap between the haves and the have-nots is growing.  Between young and old.  North and South.  Rich and poor.

We share the view of those experts who predict that 2020 will mark not the eradication of child poverty but the end of the first decade since records began in which absolute child poverty increased.  Even worse, after taking account of rapidly rising housing costs the Institute for Fiscal Studies predict that there will be more children in absolute poverty than there were in 2000 – an unprecedented two decades of stagnating living standards for those at the bottom. We have come to the relucant conclusion that there is no realistic hope of the statutory child poverty targets being met in 2020.  None of the main political parties have been willing to speak this uncomfortable truth.  They are all guilty in our view of being less than frank with the public. It is vital that they now come clean. We look to them to set out how they would supplement the existing targets with new measures to give a more rounded picture of poverty and to amend existing child poverty legislation to provide a new timescale for achieving them.   The Fabians’ recent report highlights some ways of making progress.

One thing is for certain: without concerted political action there will not be social progress.  There are those who think that a social recovery lies around the corner: that a growing economy will inevitably produce a fairer society.  Nothing could be further from the truth.   In our view a series of profound changes affecting the housing and labour markets threaten to have a long-term negative impact on both poverty and mobility in our country.  None of the political parties have yet come to terms with the fundamental nature of the changes we are seeing. A tidal wave of change is simply overwhelming the current public policy response.

In the housing market, home ownership – the principal means by which asset-based wealth for the majority of citizens can pass between generations – is in rapid decline. The home ownership rate among 25 year olds has halved over 20 years.  Young people are on the wrong side of the divide that is growing in British society.  Their wages are falling and, the risk is very real that this generation of the young – from low income families especially – will simply not have the same opportunities to progress as their parents’ generation.

Developments in the labour market are even more fundamental.  It is welcome of course that employment is rising and unemployment is falling but too many of the jobs that are now being created are low income and high insecurity.   They are a dead-end not a road to social progress. It is no coincidence that whereas a decade ago child poverty was concentrated in workless households, today two in three children who are officially classified as poor live in a household where at least one parent is in work.  Poverty has become the preserve of working people rather than simply the workless or the workshy. The proportion of children in workless poverty fell from over 15 per cent in 1997 to 6.4 per cent in 2013.  This public policy success – reducing worklessness and protecting children’s living standards when parents are out of work – has exposed a policy failure – not ensuring newly working families have sufficient incomes to escape being poor.

So a series of fundamental changes are putting at risk the cherished notion that has glued British society together for a century or more: that the next generation will progress more than the last.  The labour market has changed and with it the housing market.  The state of poverty has changed and the state of the public finances has changed beyond recognition.  The risk is these changes coalesce to make Britain a permanently divided nation. If we do not act, 2020 will mark a watershed between an era when rising living standards were shared by all and a future in which rising living standards by-pass too many in our society. If that comes to pass, social mobility, having flatlined in the latter part of the last century, would go into reverse in this.  Poverty would rise not fall.

So the writing is on the wall.  The question facing our country is whether we will choose to ignore it or address it.  The 2015 general election should be an opportunity for political parties to explain what they want to achieve when it comes to tackling poverty and improving mobility – and how, if they are elected, they plan to do so.  But so far in the 2015 election campaign, rather than facing up to the reality of a divided nation, politicians of all parties have ducked the challenge of setting out in detail how they would seek to make social progress in a time of austerity. Taking refuge in simple policy solutions and treating them as easy answers to the problem of high levels of child poverty and low levels of social mobility is not good enough.  Simply relying on economic growth, any more than simply relying on a higher minimum wage or a lower starting level of tax will not make Britain a high-mobility, low-poverty country. Fundamental changes in the labour and housing markets, in the nature of poverty and in the fiscal position facing any future government mean that a new approach is needed if child poverty is to be beaten and social mobility improved. A concerted and holistic plan of action is called for.

That is why we look to all the main political parties – as they prepare to issue their election manifestos – to set out how they will bridge the great divide in Britain.  We believe there are five priority areas for action.

First, to redeploy spending to maximise social progress.  The old public policy answer to the problem of stalling mobility and entrenched poverty involved spending more. In an age of austerity that is no longer an option. The new approach must be about maximising the social mobility bang for the buck.  Public spending is set to reach historically low levels over the next Parliament. Half of the reductions in public spending announced in this Parliament will not take effect until the next and all of the political parties are signed up to significant additional cuts if they win the election.

The Commission acknowledges that the next government will face hard fiscal choices.  We accept that but we look to the next government to properly align public resources with its social policy objectives. We find it difficult to see how across-the-board reductions in public spending can be made without seriously affecting the public services that aim to level the social playing field and the income transfers that prop up the revenues of families in and out of work. In particular, plans to cut in-work support in real terms in the next Parliament can only make the working poor worse off, not better off. Nor do we believe that reducing support for the poorest working families while protecting benefits for better-off pensioners is credible. If progress is to be made on reducing poverty and improving mobility in an age of austerity, more will need to be done to reconcile the social policy ends the parties say they want with the fiscal means they plan to deploy. So we look to each of the political parties ahead of the election to set out clear and specific plans about what they will cut and what they will protect to avoid negative impacts on social mobility and child poverty. And we look to the next government – whatever fiscal approach it adopts – to give the Office for Budget Responsibility a new statutory duty to independently analyse the distributional impact of the government’s tax and spending decisions and to publicly report on the likely consequences for social mobility and child poverty alongside each Budget.

The second priority is to restart the twin engines of social mobility – education and housing.  A good education opens the door to a good career.  Owning a home fulfills aspiration today and cascades family wealth tomorrow.   Neither engine is currently firing properly.

For decades the priority in schools has been to raise standards for all children.  That policy is working and must continue but on current trends it would be at least 30 years before the attainment gap at GCSE between pupils who are entitled to free school meals and their better-off classmates even halved. We do not believe that the next Government should settle for that. It should focus early years services on ensuing children are school ready as part of a new national drive to ensure that the attainment of disadvantaged children rises and the gap between them and their better-off peers closes. Just as previous governments have set targets to raise the bar in schools we look to the next government to set new targets to narrow the gap. Illiteracy and innumeracy should be eradicated among 11 year olds by 2025 and the attainment gap between 16 year olds entitled to free school meals and their peers should be halved.  By the end of the next Parliament – if the right effort is made – it is perfectly possible for at least 50% of children on free school meals to achieve five good GCSEs.  That is what London schools manage to do today.  It is what schools in every part of Britain should be doing within the next five years.  That will mean focusing resources so that the poorest areas have far more of the best schools and that the best teachers are offered stronger incentives – including  better pay – to work in struggling schools.

The same steely focus will be needed when it comes to housing policy.  It has been a second order issue for previous governments.  It must become a priority for action for the next. Demand for housing is rising and supply is not keeping pace. Home ownership rates among the young are falling sharply.   The private rented sector, once seen as a temporary haven for young single people, is now home for millions of families, most of whom are living on short-term tenancies with little security – one in four families with children now live in the sector, four times as many as a generation ago and twice as many as before the recession. Rents have risen while mortgage costs have fallen.  So housing law will need to change to offer families more secure, reasonably-priced rented accommodation and new approaches – such as shared equity schemes – will have to be brought to scale if home ownership is to be open to many more young people.  Making the education system and housing market work better have to be priorities for any future government serious about tackling poverty and improving mobility.

The third priority is to realign public policy on the working poor.  Britain’s economy is moving forward.  Low inflation and interest rates help all families including the poorest. There are more jobs than ever in the British economy. The number of poor children in workless households is falling but today there are almost twice as many poor children in working households than in workless ones. For decades successive governments have relied on welfare to work policies as a cure for poverty.  A job does remain the foundation for a life free of being poor and more is needed to get young people into employment.  But work alone is not a cure for poverty. It is not the panacea it once was. Even at the height of the boom in the 2000s earnings growth was lagging behind economic growth. The uncomfortable truth is that work is failing to provide a reliable route out of poverty for too many families, despite welfare reforms by successive administrations aiming to “make work pay”.  More than five million workers – mainly women – earn less than the Living Wage. The UK has one of the highest rates of low pay in the developed world. A two-tier labour market means that, all too often, a low paid job is not a stepping-stone to a better-paid one. Research for the Commission by the Resolution Foundation shows that of those who were in low paid work in 2002 only one in four had completely escaped from low pay by 2012. Most cycled in and out of low pay over the decade. Unless parents moving into low paid entry level employment are able to progress in work and see their earnings rise a move into work merely ends up substituting workless poverty for working poverty.

For all these reasons while getting more parents off welfare and into work – and tackling unacceptably high levels of youth unemployment – is still very important, it is no longer sufficient to guarantee progress. Public policy needs to realign to focus far more effort on the working poor. The priority – for Government and employers alike – is to move people from low pay to living pay. That means action to improve vocational education, to make childcare affordable and to tackle the “poverty premium” which forces the poorest families to pay the highest prices for many of life’s essentials. It means recognising that the road has run out for the old approach of asking taxpayers to effectively subsidise employers to pay low wages that do not cover living costs. In an age of austerity employers now have a bigger responsibility to pay living wages and parents have a bigger responsibility to work more hours.  The next Government should commit to making Britain a Living Wage country by 2025 at the latest.  It should work with employers to bring about improvements in productivity and skill so that by then no worker is earning less than the Living Wage. Even then, our research bears out what you have found in your report.  More jobs and higher wages cannot, on their own, defeat child poverty.  Even world-beating employment levels and better pay rates would still leave millions of children doomed to a life of poverty.  It will remain intractable unless the next government is willing to recycle some of the savings made from increased jobs and earnings into supporting families through the tax and benefit system.  A priority for the next government is to enable the poorest families to better share in the proceeds of economic growth.

The fourth priority is to refocus on opening up the top of British society.  More mobility and less poverty relies on access to the top universities and professions being open to all those with ability and potential, regardless of background.   While both universities and employers have worked hard in recent years to open their doors to a broader range of talent, Britain remains, at heart, elitist. The top universities and the top professions have been dominated by a social elite for decades.  In the next five years they have the chance to break from that past as both are set to expand rapidly.  By 2020 there could be 100,000 more university places and 2 million more professional jobs.  That expansion provides the potential for a big social mobility dividend if both universities and employers more actively diversify their intakes.

If, collectively, universities put their shoulders to the wheel we believe that by 2020 thousands more young people from the poorest backgrounds could have been given the chance to enter higher education. That will require universities to more actively build long-term relationships with state schools in poorer areas and to make greater use of contextual admission procedures. The professions have a similar opportunity to make progress.  An expansion of professional jobs provides space for employers to up their efforts to diversify their workforces.  One way they can do so is by making internships openly advertised and fairly paid. If evidence is not forthcoming that progress is being made we look to the next Government to legislate to end internships that are unpaid.

That brings me to the fifth and final priority for action.  Rebuilding a coalition in the country behind less poverty and more mobility.  Government has a key role to play, not only in getting public policy right, but in forging a coalition for action in the country.  Tackling poverty and improving social mobility require action at every level. As the Prime Minister once put it, we are all in this together.  Parents, communities, schools, colleges, councils, employers and universities all will need to take a lead if Britain is to avoid being a permanently divided nation.

Over recent years the issues of social equity and mobility have had renewed public salience and political focus.  There is much goodwill in place and many excellent initiatives underway.  A growing economy provides the foundation for a new national effort to make Britain the most open, fair and aspirational society in the world. The opportunity now exists to forge a genuine coalition in the country for change. The next Government won’t be able to do it alone but it will have a key leadership role to play.  It can start by reframing the debate on poverty. Today it is all too often seen as an issue only for some in society when it is actually an issue for all.  Pitching strivers against scroungers is not the right framework for a national call to arms.  Of course there are a cohort of people who live in entrenched poverty but they are a minority of today’s poor not the majority.   Poverty is dynamic.  Almost half of Britain’s citizens find themselves being poor at some point over the course of a decade.  Insecurity is endemic today.  It affects people in work and out of work.  It affects low income families and middle income ones.  It is recognisable to both.  It is by tackling insecurity that government can best frame its anti-poverty efforts to build a genuine national coalition of support behind them.    It can make sense of the three-legged stool that government has to construct if it is beat poverty: ensuring that everyone who can work does work; guaranteeing that poverty is escaped through work; supporting those who are genuinely unable to work.

We believe action on these five fronts could form the basis of the new consensus we seek.  It is now up to the political parties to decide whether they allow the fiscal and political challenges of our age to overwhelm them, or whether they will rise to this challenge, and together make social mobility and child poverty core business for the next Parliament.

All the main political parties say they want a fairer, more open society in which people have an equal opportunity to realise their aspirations. Noble ambitions but ones, in our view, that simply will not be deliveredby their current agendas.  The circumstances are so different, the challenges are so great, that the old ways dominating public-policy making for decades will simply not pass muster. What worked in the past will not serve as an adequate guide for the future.  A new agenda is needed if poverty is to fall and mobility is to rise.

If more progress is to be made in the next parliament than in this one, urgent action and renewed energy will be needed to navigate the strong headwinds any new government will almost inevitably face.  The election is the moment when we can reset our ambitions as a nation in the light of the circumstances in which we find ourselves.  It is when we can define clear objectives and new timescales for first reducing and then ending child poverty.  It is when we can better align resources with policies and mobile the whole of society to action behind radical new approaches.

The election is the moment for the political parties to step up to the plate.  It is when politics can make the ending of child poverty a priority for Britain. It is time to make it core business for our nation.

The Rt Hon Alan Milburn is the Chair of the Social Mobility and Child Commission

It’s great to be here, and I want to begin by thanking Bright Blue for hosting this conference.

The central message from today is that we win elections when we’re being optimistic about Britain.

It’s there in our history – from Harold Macmillan’s ‘you’ve never had it so good’, to Margaret Thatcher’s revolutionary zeal for a property-owning democracy.

When we’re telling a story about a Britain on the rise, about a Britain where our children can aspire to more than their parents, that is when we take the public with us.

I am an unremitting optimist. And it’s vital that we keep making the optimists’ argument.

Because we didn’t come into government just to clear up Labour’s mess, and our long-term economic plan isn’t just about economics. It is a moral mission too.

Tackling the deficit isn’t just about stabilising the economy, it is about saying we can be more than just an over-indebted ex-great power, sliding into post-industrial obscurity; that we hope for something better for this country.

Our welfare reforms aren’t just about saving money, but creating a truly compassionate, enabling Welfare State, one which has higher hopes for people than just a signature every fortnight.

It is that spirit of optimism – that instinctive Tory trust in human capability – which is the golden thread tying our policy programme together.

And looking at the electorate we, as a party, have greater cause to be optimistic than ever before.

It used be said that while Margaret Thatcher won all the big economic arguments, she failed to win the culture war.

Yet the evidence increasingly suggests that the tide is turning.

We know from polling data that the under-30s are more closely aligned with Conservative values than their parents or grandparents.

They are more likely to value self-reliance over state-dependence – being less likely to support higher welfare payments for the unemployed.

They are more likely to believe the state taxes and spends too much – and want to keep more of what they earn, because they’ve had to fight for it.

Yes they’re more socially liberal, but so too is the modern Conservative Party: the party of gay marriage, extended paternity leave and tax-free childcare for working families.

Yet only 22 percent of first-time voters polled earlier this year say they will vote Conservative, compared to 41 percent for Labour.

So we have to earn those votes. Our political task is to convert those Conservative values into Conservative votes.

First and foremost that means policies which deliver for young people.

First-time voters say jobs and skills are their top priorities.

And having seen what Labour did for their older brothers and sisters, they’re right to be concerned.

Between 1997 and 2010 youth unemployment increased by 40%. At least 350,000 teenagers were fobbed off with poor quality vocational courses which employers didn’t respect or need.

And it’s a national scandal that Labour left us unique in the OECD in failing to equip today’s school leavers with better literacy and numeracy skills than their grandparents.

But we’re turning this around. Since 2010, our long-term economic plan has delivered more than 2 million private sector jobs, and we are on track for 2 million more Apprenticeships by the end of this Parliament.

We are revolutionising vocational education, so that it truly matches university as a route into a good job.

We’ve applied a new test to every vocational qualification, asking is it rigorous, is it respected, and is it a route to employment?

Where the answer is no, we’ve removed public funding.

We’re rolling out Technical Awards and Tech Levels: new vocational qualifications, designed in partnership with employers, to sit alongside GCSEs and A-levels.

And unlike Labour, we have been unashamedly on the side of the individual learner, not the education provider.

We’ve given schools more autonomy, but within a framework of stronger accountability. League tables now specifically measure achievement in the subjects valued by universities and employers.

And for the first time they will show the destinations of school leavers, not just grades. Schools and colleges will be measured against how many students go into an Apprenticeship, further study or University, and how many end up NEET. These destination league tables will mean schools will have to work harder on building relationships with employers – tackling the key concern of business as set out by the CBI last week.

This agenda is natural Tory territory because it’s about earned reward, not something for nothing.

Learning takes grit, graft, application and perseverance. There are no short-cuts, but the rewards are worth it.

We know that the higher the level of your qualifications the more likely you are to be in work. In 2011 less than half of those with no qualifications – 45 percent – were in work.

This is compared to 80 percent for people with at least one qualification.

It is through education that we go from being prisoners of circumstance to captains of our economic fate.

Better schools and skills are essential part of delivering for young people.

We also need to look at the labour market, and make easier than ever for businesses to take on school and college leavers.

That’s why we’re abolishing NICs for under-21s, and why we’ve reformed employment law so that firms are taking less of a risk when they give young people with no track record the chance to prove themselves.

Our policies back Britain’s young people and we are building them a brighter and better future. This education, skills, and jobs policy is a moral mission to spread opportunity. It is a matter of social justice. It is a deeply ethical drive which will help most the most vulnerable.

For good policy alone is not enough, nor is it adequate to talk just about statistics and hope the message will get through.

As Robert Kennedy said, GDP ‘measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.’

Younger voters should know that we’re on their side.

For it is wrong to say that younger voters simply aren’t interested in politics.

But it’s more accurate to say that they’re less interested in political parties.

Every day we see huge numbers engaging in debate on Twitter and Facebook, and they behave like enlightened consumers – picking out specific issues that matter to them and discarding the rest.

This is because individual choice is encoded into the fabric of the web. Amazon and iTunes have succeeded by offering their customers absolute choice, however obscure their interests happen to be. At the click of a mouse, these sites allow the user access to virtually anything their markets have to offer.

Today’s digital natives – the generation who can’t remember a time before the internet – expect the same of their politics, hence the rise of fringe parties and single-issue campaign groups.

So it’s vital that we communicate with younger voters, or Generation Right as they have become known, using modern media. And the great thing about social media is that the electorate can talk back, it’s a dialogue.

We’ve already shown how modern media can be used to political effect.  RoadTrip 2015, our voluntary campaign team, is essentially a social media phenomenon. Our ‘Share The Facts’ campaign tool on the Conservatives website ensures online activists are armed with the facts they need to argue out the big political issues of the week on Twitter and Facebook.

Our job is to earn the respect of young voters, continuing to build on our youth offer and communicating to them on the issues that matter to them, on the platforms that they use. Above all, we must be relentlessly optimistic. Our message to young people must be that we want a Britain in which everyone can achieve their potential, earn their own success and share in the recovery we have built.

The Rt Hon Matthew Hancock is Minister of State in the Department for Energy and Climate Change and Business, Innovation and Skills