Labour

Barbara Keeley MP, Shadow Cabinet Member for Mental Health and Social Care, speaking at the Labour Party Conference in Brighton today, said:

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Conference,

It is an honour to close this debate as Labour’s Shadow Cabinet Member for Mental Health and Social Care

I am proud to have this role in a Labour party that understands how vital Mental Health and Social Care services are. And that makes protecting these services a major priority.

And it’s even more important when we see the crisis the Tory Government has created in both social care and mental health.  A crisis made in Downing Street

They are failing people across the country, failing those who need care and their families, failing unpaid family carers and failing hundreds of thousands of care workers.

People are now going without the care they need. Nearly half a million fewer people getting publicly-funded care since the Tories came to office. Over a million older people with unmet care needs, many of them isolated and lonely

But this Tory Government isn’t just failing social care users, it’s failing their families too. With hundreds of thousands of unpaid family carers struggling to balance work and care. It’s failing hundreds of thousands of care staff, because under the Tories too often they are under-paid, under-trained and under-valued.

Caring staff who are forced to work on zero-hours contracts, denied pay for travel time, underpaid for sleep-in shifts, with care visits of just 15-minutes. Prevented from giving the quality of care which people deserve

And the Tory Government is failing children and young people in need of mental health services, denied treatment due to Tory cuts. Young people told they are not thin enough to be treated for an eating disorder. Children who have self-harmed being turned away unless they have made a serious suicide attempt.

And thousands of people in mental health crisis being sent hundreds of miles from their families just to get the treatment they need. Mental health services for young people that are now so poor, a High Court Judge had to tell Jeremy Hunt that this country: would have “blood on its hands” if suitable care could not be found for a suicidal teenage girl.

Conference, it’s time for us in the Labour Party to say that this is not good enough.

Not good enough that care quality has fallen, with one in four services now failing on safety grounds.

Not good enough that thousands of vulnerable people are stuck in hospital for weeks or months, because there is no care for them at home or no place in a care home.

Not good enough that last winter the British Red Cross talked of a humanitarian crisis that saw people sent home from hospital without clothes, people falling and not being found for days, people going unwashed because there are no care services to help them to wash.

This Social Care Crisis was made in Downing Street. A crisis made by a Tory Government cutting billions of pounds from council budgets. And by Tory Ministers failing to find the extra funding needed for social care

And then during the Snap General Election, Theresa May announced her solution to the crisis would be a new tax on care. Dubbed the “Dementia Tax”, hitting people who need care even harder. Making people use the value of their homes to pay for their own home care

Such a failing and toxic policy that Theresa May announced a U-turn on it within 4 days. And then the Tories quietly dumped their policy. But in its place, the Tories now have nothing to say on the future funding of social care. They just promise a consultation and a Green Paper.

And on the crisis in mental health for children and young people, they also promise only a Green Paper.

Conference, Labour will fill the Tory policy vacuum. We will show that we are the party that values social care and mental health. At the election, we pledged an extra £8 billion for social care in this Parliament, with an extra £1 billion this year to deal with the Tory crisis.

This would have delivered: paying a real living wage to care staff, paying them travel time and letting them choose regular hours; finally ending inadequate 15-minute care visits and ensuring free end of life care.

And Conference, Labour believes funding must be found to pay care staff properly for sleep-in shifts.

And Labour will support family carers. We have pledged to increase the carers allowance for unpaid carers to at least the same rates as Jobseeker’s Allowance. A small first step to recognise the value of the work of unpaid family carers.

And Conference, a Labour Government will build a National Care Service. A service in which we pool the risk of high care costs, so that no-one is faced with catastrophic costs as they are now.

In its first years, our National Care Service will receive an extra £3 billion in public funds every year. Enough to place a cap on what individuals have to pay towards care. Enough to raise the asset threshold for paying for care. Enough to provide free end of life care

To act on our pledge, we will invite an independent, expert panel to advise us on how we move from the current broken system of care to a sustainable service for the long term.

In mental health, we will increase the amount we spend on services for children and young people. We will ring-fence mental health budget,s so that money isn’t siphoned off by other parts of the NHS. We will bring an early end to patients being sent hundreds of miles for mental health treatment. And we will offer school-based counselling for young people in every one of our high schools.

Conference, under the Tories we have seen years of neglect of care needs. Neglect of older people. Of younger people. Of vulnerable disabled people.

This Tory Government has no solution to the problems it has created. Only Labour will end this crisis made in Downing Street. Only Labour will bring hope to those in need of care and those who care for them

And only Labour will build care services fit for the many. Not the few.

Jonathan Ashworth MP, Shadow Secretary of State for Health, speaking at the Labour Party Conference in Brighton today, said:

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It is a tremendous privilege to speak from this platform, humbled in the knowledge that it was this Conference over 80 years ago that demanded public universal healthcare.

And this Party, almost 70 years ago, established a National Health Service, free at the point of use covering every man, woman and child in the land.

So today we renew our commitment to that cause and dedicate ourselves to electing a Jeremy Corbyn Labour Government whose mission will be the rebuilding of a comprehensive, reintegrated, public NHS, free at the point of use, there for all who need it.

And we must also speak out with a sense of urgency about what is happening to our NHS. In the past year: waiting lists topped 4 million and 2.5 million people waited over four hours in A&E; over the winter, patients crammed on trolleys in corridors; ambulances backed up outside overflowing hospitals.

And the nation left shocked by a little boy, with suspected meningitis, waiting 5 hours in A&E without a bed, forced to lie on two plastic chairs.  Some called it a humanitarian crisis. When you underfund the NHS and slash billions from social care let’s call it what it is, a Tory manufactured crisis.

A crisis where waiting lists are so lengthy, more and more patients feel they have no option but to pay for a surgeon to come to their bedside, while the rest wait longer and longer.

Friends, a person’s health should never depend on their individual wealth.

So a Labour Government would allocate an extra £45 billion for our NHS and social care sector. And to avoid another winter like the one we’ve just had, we would establish a half billion pound emergency winter fund, so that patients and their families never suffer like that again.

And we will invest in general practice too, and start recruiting so everyone can access a GP when they need one.

Don’t let anyone tell you we cannot afford to invest in the NHS. If our forebears were able to marshal their resources to create our NHS in 1948, then we owe it to their endeavour 70 years later, to give our NHS the funding it needs today.

This is the leadership Jeremy Hunt should be showing. Instead he ordered hospital bosses to a summit last week where they were instructed to chant ‘we can do this’The NHS doesn’t need silly Jeremy Hunt gimmicks; it needs a Jeremy Corbyn Labour Government.

I will be a Health Secretary, who will work closely with NHS staff.

So let us send a message to the staff of the NHS, who work day in day out, at weekends too, whose hands deliver us into the world, who comfort us in our final moments, you have our gratitude, our backing and you have our commitment that a Labour Government will tackle vacancies, will bring back bursaries and scrap the pay cap to deliver fair pay for you all.

To those who come to our shores from the EU and beyond, we say you are welcome, your rights will be secured, you are not bargaining chips, but part of our society and of the fabric of our NHS.

Our NHS is undermined by millions of pounds wasted on endless tendering of services to private providers. It is patient care that suffers.

Let me give a quick example, an ambulance contract here in Sussex handed to a private company who didn’t own any ambulances so they sub-contracted to 20 other companies. Two ceased trading, and ambulances drivers couldn’t be paid. Thankfully the contract was taken back off private hands.

I had the privilege of meeting those ambulance drivers recently. They continued taking patients to appointments for 8 weeks without pay. Doesn’t that show public service is about a greater calling, is about compassion, care and public duty, not contracts, markets and commercialisation.

So a Labour Government will legislate to reinstate the Secretary of State’s duty to provide universal care, we’ll reintegrate the NHS, reverse the Health and Social Care Act, fight fire sales of hospital assets and end Tory privatisation.

Cutting beds, closing services and rationing treatments because of underfunding is not sustainable transformation. So we would stop the STPs and integrate health and social care.

I also want a new approach to public health that protects people’s wellbeing for years to come.

To prevent disease, to reduce the toll from cancer, stroke and diabetes it’s time to start tackling the causes of ill health too. We need to end the dismantling of our public health services, we need to tackle social isolation, build decent homes and improve the quality of the air we breathe.

We have seen an increase in hospital admissions for malnutrition, and a stalling in the improvement in life expectancy for the first time in 100 years. We know a child born into poverty is likely to suffer far worse health outcomes in life.

It was once said “there can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children”. This Party has long been committed to abolishing child poverty, so I can tell you today that the next Labour Government will commit to an all-out assault on child ill health too.

No longer will we let squalor impair the health of our children.

We’ll recruit more health visitors for our communities. We’ll invest in dentistry and, to tackle child obesity, we’ll give every infant a free school meal and ban junk food advertising on family night-time television.

And we’ll end the disgraceful cuts to child and adolescent mental health budgets, end the scandal of children being treated on adult wards, and finally deliver true parity of esteem.

I want to mention one other area. This year £43 million will be slashed from alcohol and drug addiction treatment services. Recently, I chose to speak out very personally about my own circumstances, growing up with a dad who had a drink problem. He was an alcoholic.

His drinking hung over my childhood with the fridge empty other than bottles of drink. His drinking became so bad in his final years he couldn’t bring himself to come to my wedding because he felt too embarrassed.

I tell this story not for your indulgence or sympathy. But because 2 million children grow up with an alcoholic parent, 335,000 children grow up with a parent with drug abuse issues.

So as part of our assault on child ill health, I will put in place the first ever national strategy to support children of alcoholics and drug users and we’ll invest in addiction treatment and prevention as well.

So conference, a fully funded public National Health Service; fair pay for our staff; an end to Tory privatisation; an assault on health inequalities. The very best quality of care for all, free at the point of use, there when you need it.

This is what we strive for. We settle for nothing less. It’s the demand of a civilised society.

So today we pledge ourselves to united effort: and resolve that the next Labour Government will rebuild our NHS.

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Author Naomi Klein, speaking at Labour Party Conference, said:

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Thank you Kate for that lovely introduction and all the work that you do to put social justice on the world agenda.

It’s been such a privilege to be part of this historic convention. To feel its energy and optimism.

Because friends, it’s bleak out there. How do I begin to describe a world upside down? From heads of state tweeting threats of nuclear annihilation, to whole regions rocked by climate chaos, to thousands of migrants drowning off the coasts of Europe, to openly racist parties gaining ground, most recently and alarmingly in Germany.

Most days there is simply too much to take in. So I want to start with an example that might seem small against such a vast backdrop. The Caribbean and Southern United States are in the midst of an unprecedented hurricane season: pounded by storm after record-breaking storm.

As we meet, Puerto Rico – hit by Irma, then Maria – is without power and could be for months. It’s water and communication systems are also severely compromised. Three and half million US citizens on that island are in desperate need of their government’s help.

But just like during Hurricane Katrina, the cavalry is missing in action. Donald Trump is too busy trying to get Black athletes fired – smearing them for daring to shine a spotlight on racist violence.

Amazingly a real federal aid package for Puerto Rico has not yet been announced.

By some reports, more money has been spent securing presidential trips to Mar-a-Lago.

As if all this weren’t enough, the vultures are now buzzing. The business press is filled with articles about how the only way for Puerto Rico to get the lights back on is to sell off its electricity utility. Maybe its roads and bridges too.

This is a phenomenon I have called The Shock Doctrine – the exploitation of wrenching crises to smuggle through policies that devour the public sphere and further enrich a small elite.

We see this dismal cycle repeat again and again. We saw it after the 2008 financial crash. We are already seeing it in how the Tories are planning to exploit Brexit to push through disastrous pro-corporate trade deals without debate.

The reason I am highlighting Puerto Rico is because the situation is so urgent. But also because it’s a microcosm of a much larger global crisis, one that contains many of the same overlapping elements: accelerating climate chaos; militarism; histories of colonialism; a weak and neglected public sphere; a totally dysfunctional democracy.

And overlaying it all: the seemingly bottomless capacity to discount the lives of huge numbers of Black and brown people.

Ours is an age when it is impossible to pry one crisis apart from all the others. They have all merged, reinforcing and deepening each other….. like one shambling, multi-headed beast.

I think it’s helpful to think of the current US president in much the same way.

It’s tough to know how to adequately sum him up. So let me try a local example.

You know that horrible thing currently clogging up the London sewers. I believe you call it the fatberg?

Well Trump, he’s the political equivalent of that.

A merger of all that is noxious in the culture, economy and body politic, all kind of glommed together in a self-adhesive mass. And we’re finding it very, very hard to dislodge.

It gets so grim that we have to laugh. But make no mistake: whether it’s climate change or the nuclear threat, Trump represents a crisis that could echo through geologic time.

But here is my message to you today:

Moments of crisis do not have to go the Shock Doctrine route – they do not need to become opportunities for the already obscenely wealthy to grab still more.

They can also go the opposite way.

They can be moments when we find our best selves….. when we locate reserves of strength and focus we never knew we had.

We see it at the grassroots level every time disaster strikes.

We all witnessed it in the aftermath of the Grenfell Tower catastrophe.

When the people responsible were MIA……. the community came together…… Held one another in their care, organized the donations and advocated for the living – and for the dead.

And they are doing it still, more than 100 days after the fire.

When there is still no justice and, scandalously, only a handful of survivors have been rehoused.

And it’s not only at the grassroots level that we see disaster awaken something remarkable in us.

There is also a long and proud history of crises sparking progressive transformation on a society-wide scale.

Think of the victories won by working people for social housing and old age pensions during the Great Depression….. Or for the NHS after the horrors of the Second World War.

This should remind us that moments of great crisis and peril do not necessarily need to knock us backwards.

They can also catapult us forward.

Our progressive ancestors achieved that at key moments in history, in your country and in mine.

And we can do it again – in this moment when everything is on the line.

But what we know from the Great Depression and the post-war period, is that we never win these transformative victories by simply resisting….. by simply saying “no” to the latest outrage.

To win in a moment of true crisis, we also need a bold and forward-looking “yes”

– a plan for how to rebuild and respond to the underlying causes.

And that plan needs to be convincing, credible and, most of all, captivating.

We have to help a weary and wary public to imagine itself into that better world.

And that is why I am so honoured to be standing with you today.

With the transformed Labour Party in 2017.

And with the next Prime Minister of Britain,

Jeremy Corbyn.

Because in the last election, that’s exactly what you did.

Theresa May ran a cynical campaign based on exploiting fear and shock to grab more power for herself – first the fear of a bad Brexit deal, then the fear following the horrific terror attacks in Manchester and London.

Your party and your leader responded by focusing on root causes: a failed “war on terror”…. economic inequality and weakened democracy.

But you did more than that.

You presented voters with a bold and detailed Manifesto.

One that laid out a plan for millions of people to have tangibly better lives:

free tuition,

fully funded health care,

aggressive climate action.

After decades of lowered expectations and asphyxiated political imagination, finally voters had something hopeful and exciting to say “yes” to.

And so many of them did just that, upending the projections of the entire expert class.

You proved that the era of triangulation and tinkering is over.

The public is hungry for deep change – they are crying out for it.

The trouble is, in far too many countries, it’s only the far right that is offering it, or seeming to, with that toxic combination of fake economic populism and very real racism.

You showed us another way.

One that speaks the language of decency and fairness, that names the true forces most responsible for this mess – no matter how powerful.

And that is unafraid of some of the ideas we were told were gone for good.

Like wealth redistribution.

And nationalising essential public services.

Now, thanks to all of your boldness, we know that this isn’t just a moral strategy.

It’s a winning strategy.

It fires up the base, and it activates constituencies that long ago stopped voting altogether.

If you can keep doing that between now and the next election, you will be unbeatable.

You showed us something else in the last election too, and it’s just as important.

You showed that political parties don’t need to fear the creativity and independence of social movements – and social movements, likewise, have a huge amount to gain from engaging with electoral politics.

That’s a very big deal.

Because let’s be honest: political parties tend to be a bit freakish about control.

And real grassroots movements….. we cherish our independence – and we’re pretty much impossible to control.

But what we are seeing with the remarkable relationship between Labour and Momentum, and with other wonderful campaign organizations, is that it is possible to

combine the best of both worlds.

If we listen and learn from each other, we can create a force that is both stronger and more nimble than anything either parties or movements can pull off on their own.

I want you to know that what you have done here is reverberating around the world – so many of us are watching your ongoing experiment in this new kind of politics with rapt attention.

And of course what happened here is itself part of a global phenomenon.

It’s a wave led by young people who came into adulthood just as the global financial system was collapsing and just as climate disruption was banging down the door.

Many come out of social movements like Occupy Wall Street, and Spain’s Indignados.

They began by saying no – to austerity,

to bank bailouts,

to fracking and pipelines.

But they came to understand that the biggest challenge is overcoming the way neoliberalism has waged war on our collective imagination, on our ability to truly believe in anything outside of its bleak borders.

And so these movements started to dream together, laying out bold and different visions of the future…. and credible pathways out of crisis.

And most importantly they began engaging with political parties, to try to win power.

We saw it in Bernie Sanders’ historic campaign in the US primaries…. which was powered by millennials who know that safe centrist politics offers them no kind of safe future.

By the way…. Bernie, is the most popular politician in the United States today.

We see something similar with Spain’s still-young Podemos party, which built in the power of mass movements from Day One.

In all of these cases, electoral campaigns caught fire with stunning speed.

And they got close to taking power – closer than any genuinely transformative political program has in either Europe or North America in my lifetime.

But still, in each case, not close enough.

So in this time between elections, it’s worth thinking about how to make absolutely sure that next time, all of our movements go all the way.

A big part of the answer is: Keeping it up.

Keep building that yes.

But take it even further.

Outside the heat of a campaign, there is more time to deepen the relationships between issues and movements, so that our solutions address multiple crises at once.

In all of our countries, we can and must do more to connect the dots between economic injustice, racial injustice and gender injustice.

We need to understand and explain how all of those ugly systems that place one group in a position of dominance over another – based on skin colour, religious faith, gender and sexual orientation – consistently serve the interests of power and money and always have.

They do it by keeping us divided.

And keeping themselves protected.

And we have to do more to keep it front of mind…. that we are in a state of climate emergency….  the roots of which are found in the same system of bottomless greed that underlies our economic emergency.

But states of emergency, let’s recall, can be catalysts for deep progressive victories.

So let’s draw out the connections between the gig economy – that treats human beings like a raw resource from which to extract wealth and then discard – and the dig economy, in which the extractive companies treats the Earth in precisely the same careless way.

And let’s show exactly how we can move from that gig and dig economy to a society based on principles of care – caring for the planet and for one another. Where the work of our caregivers and of our land and water protectors, is respected and valued. A world where no one and nowhere is thrown away – whether in fire-trap housing estates or on hurricane-ravaged islands.

I applaud the clear stand Labour has taken against fracking and for clean energy. Now we need to up our ambition and show exactly how battling climate change is a once-in-a-century chance to build a fairer and more democratic economy.

Because as we rapidly transition off fossil fuels, we cannot replicate the wealth concentration and the injustices of the oil and coal economy, in which hundreds of billions in profits have been privatized and the tremendous risks are socialized.

We can and must design a system in which the polluters pay a very large share of the cost of transitioning off fossil fuels. And where we keep green energy in public and community hands. That way revenues stay in your communities, to pay for childcare and firefighters and other crucial services. And it’s the only way to make sure that the green jobs that are created are union jobs that pay a living wage.

The motto needs to be: leave the oil and gas in the ground, but leave no worker behind. And the best part, you don’t need to wait until you get to Westminster to start this great transition. You can use the levers you have right now.

You can take a page from Barcelona and turn your Labour-controlled cities into beacons for the world transformed.

A good start would be divesting your pensions from fossil fuels and investing that money in low carbon social housing and green energy cooperatives.

That way people can begin to experience the benefits of the next economy before the next election – and know in their bones that yes, there is, and always has been, an alternative.

In closing…..

I want to stress, as your international speaker, that none of this can be about turning any one nation into a progressive museum.

In wealthy countries like yours and mine, we need migration policies and levels of international financing that reflect what we owe to the global south – our historic role in destabilizing the economies and ecologies of poorer nations for a great many years.

For instance, during this epic hurricane season, we’ve heard a lot of talk of “the British Virgin Islands,” the “French Virgin Islands” and so on.

Rarely was it seen as relevant to observe that these are not reflections of where Europeans like to holiday.

They are reflections of the fact that so much of the vast wealth of empire was extracted from these Islands in bonded human flesh.

Wealth that supercharged Europe’s and North America’s industrial revolution, positioning us as the super-polluters we are today.

And that is intimately connected to the fact that the future and security of island nations are now at grave risk from superstorms storms, sea level rise, and dying coral reefs.

What should this painful history mean to us today?

It means welcoming migrants and refugees.

And it means paying our fair share to help many more countries ramp up justice-based green transitions of their own.

Trump going rogue is no excuse to demand less of ourselves in the UK and Canada or anywhere else for that matter.

It means the opposite -that we have to demand more of ourselves.

To pick up the slack until the United States manages to get its sewer system unclogged.

I firmly believe that all of this work, challenging as it is, is a crucial part of the path to victory.

That the more ambitious, consistent and holistic you can be in painting a picture of the world transformed, the more credible a Labour government will become.

Because you went and showed us all that you can win.

Now you have to win.

We all do.

Winning is a moral imperative.

The stakes are too high, and time is too short, to settle for anything less.

Thank you

Angela Rayner MP, Shadow Secretary of State for Education, speaking at the Labour Party Conference in Brighton today, said:

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Conference, last year I said it was a surprise, but a great privilege, to stand before you as Shadow Secretary of State for Education.  And what a year it has been.

Theresa May started it by warning of a coalition of chaos. Now she leads it. And her education ministers have spent the last few months ripping up their own Manifesto page by page.

They wanted to open new grammar schools. But they can’t. They said they’d build 140 free schools. They couldn’t. They pledged the healthy pupils fund would not fall below £400 million. Now it will. They promised they’d provide free school breakfasts. But they won’t.

When we beat them on tuition fees, they refused to accept it. Instead they will just stop turning up for votes. They’ve gone from running the place to running away from the place.

In fact, I went through their Manifesto line by line. There are more education policies that they are reviewing or abandoning than they are actually implementing.

They’re binning their Manifesto; we are building on ours.

The next Labour Government will create a National Education Service, a cradle-to-grave system supporting everyone throughout their lives. It would start in the early years, where we know it has the most impact in changing people’s lives – just like my life was changed by a Labour Government.

When I became pregnant at sixteen, it was easy to think that the direction of my life, and that of my young son, was already set. My mum had a difficult life, and so did I, and it looked like my son would simply have the same.

Instead, the last Labour Government, through support of my local Sure Start centre, transformed my son’s childhood, and made sure that his life would not have to be as hard as mine had been. So when I say that politics changes lives, I say it as someone whose own life was changed.

Yet those services are being lost across the country. We revealed today that since 2012, £437 million pounds has been cut from Sure Start – nearly half of their funding.  That means more children and families with less control over their lives.

So I am proud to say that we will give £500 million a year directly to Sure Start, reversing those cuts in full. Because to give every child a fair chance to succeed, we need to give them the best possible start in life.

For far too many that simply isn’t happening.  The Tories promised free childcare to the children of working parents. They promised over 600,000 places. But they created less than a quarter of them. The most disadvantaged aren’t even eligible and costs are rising more than twice as fast as wages.

Today, we are publishing a report setting out the alternative. Free, high-quality early education, universally available for every 2-4 year old, and extra affordable care for every family, saving them thousands of pounds a year. So our children will be ready for school. And when children arrive, they won’t be let down for a lack of resources there either.

The Government’s latest U-turn was on their so-called fair funding formula two weeks ago. Thanks to our pressure, and the great campaign run by parents and teachers, they have abandoned cash cuts to schools.

But the truth is, there is no new money – every penny has been found by cutting other education spending.  And they still won’t meet their promise that funding will go up in real terms over five years. This means the continuation of real terms funding cuts to 88% of schools, hitting the most disadvantaged areas hard.

A Labour Government would meet that promise instead: a fairer funding formula, but genuinely fair and properly funded.  And we will remember the most important resource: people.

Learning needs teaching. Teachers would be at the heart of the National Education Service. And we will pay them properly to do it. That is why we will bring an end to the public sector pay cap.  And teaching assistants  and support staff too. Many have lost so much that they are on the minimum wage. We will bring back national standards for them too. They look after our children. We should look after them.

As well as giving our schools the resources they need, we must ensure that they give every child the support they need. Because all our pupils deserve a good quality of life. So, I am proud to say that as your Secretary of State, I will allocate £10m from our departmental budget to end the scandal of period poverty in our schools.

Councils are required to find a school for every child. We will give them the resources to meet that responsibility. Unlike the Tories, we will help successful state schools expand and ensure that every child gets a school place. So we will invest £8bn pounds in new school buildings, where they are needed. And we won’t neglect existing schools to do it.      

We will provide the full £13bn pounds needed for the existing school estate. Instead of wasting millions of pounds on an inefficient free schools programme, we will provide funding to ensure our schools are safe – that flammable cladding can be removed, sprinklers installed and asbestos cleared.

And the National Education Service won’t stop at eighteen, or sixteen.  Further education isn’t just for those who ‘didn’t get the chance’ to go to university; it serves the majority of young people. They too deserve a world-class education.

Instead, the Tories are happy to manage decline. I will only be happy when we manage success. So we will invest a billion pounds into a further education service to deliver T-levels that are a true gold standard.

The Tories keep talking about how they want to help young people. Reducing fees.

Capping interest rates. Raising repayment thresholds. I’ve got a suggestion for them. Stop talking about it, and get on with it.

But our National Education Service is not just for young people either. That is personal to me too. At sixteen I was out of school and looking for work, but without qualifications to offer. I supported myself and my son as a care worker, looking after the elderly and disabled in their homes. Low qualifications meant low wages. No skills meant no security.

As a trade unionist with Unison, I could change that. Not just for myself, but for the carers I worked with, and the people we cared for. Workplace education meant we had the chance to learn more and earn more. Other people need that chance. So, our National Education Service will be lifelong, providing for people at every stage of their life.

That is our National Education Service. Not just another structure. Not another new sign on the school gate.

A promise, from a Labour Government, to the British people and British businesses.

That we believe in all of them, in their talent and their potential, in all they give to our country, and that we will never limit their aspiration or their ability to succeed.  It will set out the education that people can expect throughout their lives. The contribution that society makes to them and that they can make to society.

Today, we outline the principles of that National Education Service in a draft charter, starting a conversation on how we continue to build it moving forward. And I look forward to that conversation, to visiting schools, colleges, and universities, to talking to pupils, parents, teachers, and businesses, so we can truly build a National Education Service for the many, and not just the few.

Conference, Education informs. It inspires. And it empowers. Because knowledge is power. I know that from my own life. We must ensure that power becomes the right of every person, whatever the circumstances of their birth.

That means giving opportunity to all, with a guarantee of lifelong learning, whenever they need it. It means giving power back to our communities, ensuring that every school in receipt of public money is genuinely, democratically accountable to the people it serves.

The Labour Party was founded to ensure that the workers earned the full fruit of their labour.  Well, the sum of human knowledge is the fruit of thousands of years of human labour. The discoveries of maths and science; the great works of literature and art; the arc of human and natural history itself; and so much more that there is to learn. All of it should be our common inheritance. Because knowledge belongs to the many, not the few.

This is our historic purpose as a movement. Not just to be a voice for the voiceless.

But to give them a voice of their own. That is the challenge we face. And it is what we will do, together. 

We have got the Government running. Now let’s get running the Government.

Thank you.

Rebecca Long-Bailey MP, Shadow Secretary for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, speaking at the Labour Party Conference in Brighton today, said:

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Conference, when I was little, my dad would tell me stories of his job in Salford, unloading oil tankers. How we were known as “the workshop of the world”. Life was good for us back then. My dad’s work was unskilled, but it paid well.  My parents even managed to get a mortgage for their own little house.

And from poverty-plagued childhoods, which made the film Angela’s Ashes look like an advert for a luxury minibreak, they felt proud of their achievement! And that was true of so many working class people right across Britain, for the first time in history they were truly being offered the chance to aspire!

But under Thatcher industries such as my father’s were put into what is so callously called ‘managed decline’. It meant factories shutting their doors, firms moving abroad or simply closing down, lower wages for those who could still find work, and cuts to benefits for those who couldn’t.

We now have the most regionally imbalanced economy in Europe.  40% of our economic output comes from London and the South East alone. And despite the pretence that we have ‘full employment’, we know the figures hide a worrying truth:

an insecure, low paid and ‘casualised’ workforce.

When the Prime Minister called the general election in spring, we were 20 points behind in the polls. The seven weeks that followed saw the biggest narrowing of the polls in British electoral history.

There were many things that contributed to that turnaround. The passion, integrity and strength of our leader, Jeremy Corbyn. The hard work of the Shadow Cabinet, not least my brilliant team Chi Onwurah, Alan Whitehead, Barry Gardiner, Bill Esterson, Jack Dromey, Gill Furniss and Dan Carden. The hard-work and dedication of every single person in this hall and in our movement.

But there were other key factors at play. A country fed up with the dogmas of political and economic neglect that, for so many, had only meant so much hardship. And a Manifesto that showed them that it didn’t have to be this way. When we promised an industrial strategy to end the economy’s reliance on the City of London. To properly fund our public services by making the top 5% pay their fair share. And to invest in our energy, transport and digital infrastructure to make it fit for the 21st Century

When we promised to take the radical action needed to tackle climate change,

and ensure that 60% of our energy comes from low carbon or renewable sources by 2030. To support projects like Swansea tidal lagoon and Moorside nuclear plant.

When we promised to introduce a £10 living wage. And to level the playing field between small and big business. We offered a vision of hope. And we offered transformation!  Because we know what lies ahead.

Conference, we are standing on the precipice of the fourth industrial revolution,

a pace of technological and digital change so immense it will leave you feeling dizzy.

It will transform industry, it will transform our economy. And it has the potential to transform the quality of life of every single person in Britain.

But it will only do this if a Labour Government is holding the reins.

Now I know it’s hard to believe but I was 38 the other day. Just 20 years ago, on my 18th birthday, you had to dial up the internet, you checked your lottery numbers on teletext, my first mobile only received ten text messages, and you taped things off the telly with a cassette, which if, like in our house, you were at the cutting edge of 1990’S interior design, you kept them in those plastic boxes designed to look like books.

But people in their teens today have no idea what most of those things are.

 And the pace of change we have seen in the last 20 years will pale in comparison to the next 20. Over the last few centuries, we have gradually learnt how to transfer more and more human skills to machines. With current technological breakthroughs, we are, for the first time, designing machines that do cognitive and non-routine work.

Machines that think!

But, with some estimates suggesting that half of all jobs could be lost to automation,

and that few businesses are ready to harness change, it also brings the threat of rising poverty and inequality. There is no doubt about what the digital age will look like under the Tories: monopoly profits for the few, and increased exploitation for the many.

Only Labour will ensure that workers and businesses are equipped to enjoy the prosperity this changing economy can bring.  

We’ll restore the rights of workers – rolling out sectoral collective bargaining and guaranteeing unions access to the workplace – to ensure that new technology is not just an excuse for disgraced old employment practices.  Because there is nothing cutting edge about hire-and-fire, casual contracts.

We’ll create the conditions for business to make those really ‘transformative’ discoveries which can change all our lives for the better, with an industrial agenda that is so transformational, it will eclipse the new deal set out by Franklin D Roosevelt in the history books.

We’ll bring investment in research and development in line with other major economies and create national missions to deal with the big issues of our time

And our National Education Service will allow every single person in this country to obtain the skills they need to thrive in a modern economy and ensure real diversity in our workplaces.

But it’s not enough for Britain to innovate. We’ll put Britain at the forefront of industrial manufacturing, so that the ideas conceived in Britain are manufactured and delivered here in Britain. ‘Made in Britain’ will not just be an idealistic vision of times gone by, it will be a source of national pride for future generations.

And finally, we’ll ensure that workers themselves can have a stake in our industrial journey alongside business. 

Imagine if the technology which allows us to hail a taxi or order a takeaway via an app was shared by those who rely on it for work. They would have the power to agree their own terms and conditions and rates of pay, with the profits shared among them or re-invested for the future.

That’s why we are today launching a Report on Alternative Models of Ownership.

To start asking fundamental questions about how we achieve real diversity of business in the digital age, and how to ensure that it’s enormous potential benefits serve the many, not the few.  

Now conference, the fourth industrial revolution is here!  A time of profound economic and technological change. The Tories have had their chance. We’ve seen how they deal with industrial and technological change. And they have failed.

We either seize the possibilities it can bring us, technological advancement,

living standards and leisure time, that even Harold Wilson in the white heat of technology couldn’t have dreamed of! Or we let the Tories consign our heritage as a proud industrial nation to the dustbin of history.

As Klaus Schwab the Founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum once said:

“There has never been a time of greater promise, or greater peril.”

But we are ready! Together we will harness the fruits of the extraordinary changes that are coming. A society with more potential than any before, but built for the many, not the few. Conference, this is our time now!