Check against delivery…

Thank you to Phil and the SW Labour team for organising such an impressive event. Thanks also to High School and the church team for the catering - it’s been marvellous!

We’re meeting today just down the road from Rolls Royce, one of Britain’s most successful companies, who have just announced record profits, have full order books and have recently taken on over a hundred new apprentices.Figures out this week show a record number of apprentices in the South West and the biggest increase in their number in a single year.

Gordon Brown visited a local health centre with Doug Naysmith today. New GP Health centres are opening in every part of the country, providing people with access to primary health care, 8am – 8pm, 365 days a year. More than 70% of GPs in the country are now open at evenings and weekends, more than meeting the promise Gordon made before he became leader, and meeting it early.

The latest MORI public attitudes survey shows satisfaction with the NHS at a record high, and dissatisfaction lower than at any point since the early 1980s.

Thriving schools, growing Universities, the beginning of the Severn Barrage Project, a record number of social houses built in the South West last year. You probably won’t have read or heard much about this but we need to keep reminding ourselves, reminding the public and warning them of what the Tories would do if they had the chance.

On health, they would cut spending, stop the health centre programme, and give GPs a veto over their opening hours.

They would relinquish all responsibility for running the NHS to a new independent, unelected and unaccountable quango: a completely mad idea for a healthcare system funded by £120bn a year of taxpayers’ money.

And if we need a local example of what a Tory Government, or any Government involving the LibDems would mean, look at the fiasco this week of their voting down the budget tabled by Bristol’s excellent Labour Group, under its leader Helen Holland, over the issue of the Avonmouth Energy To Waste Plant.

I know a little bit about waste policy, having looked after waste while at DEFRA for four years. Landfill is the least environmentally friendly option. This is why Bristol’s Labour Council had come together with the surrounding authorities to back the waste to energy scheme.

The grossly irresponsible and opportunistic behaviour of Bristol Conservatives and Liberal Democrats in pulling the rug from under this scheme will cost the local authorities involved £75m of investment and leave the populations of Bristol, South Gloucestershire and North Somerset liable to have to pay millions of pounds in landfill taxes, which the waste to energy plant would’ve helped to avoid.

But it’s hard to get the media and public to focus on these things, when everything is dominated by the economy.

Here too, we must contrast what a Labour Government is doing with what the Tories and Liberal Democrats are saying, or doing locally.

We didn’t save the banks in order to save the banks, but to protect real people, their savings and businesses.

My message to Sir Fred and the other bankers who appear not to get it: we will not tolerate you rewarding yourselves for failure. We are prepared to see you in court. And we should change the law if necessary, to prevent such disgusting excess.

Another tricky issue exercising many of us at the moment is the Royal Mail. I’m very pleased to see the CWU delegation here today - the CWU are great friends to my constituency, and to me, and I hope that this continues.

It’s important we have a debate on the future of the Royal Mail, but let’s have that debate based on facts and evidence, in the civilised and constructive way we are today.

Labour is committed to a publicly owned Royal Mail.

I say to Billy Hayes, our CWU friends and some Labour colleagues: if we don’t put the Royal Mail on a sustainable modernised footing, the alternative is not the status quo, but slow continued decline and if, heaven forbid, there is a future government that is not committed, as we are, to a publicly-owned post office we would get exactly the privatisation that people rightly fear, with devastating consequences for jobs and the loss of the 6 day universal service.

This is not the time for the Labour Party to duck difficult decisions, nor to give the impression that we are tired of Government; not the time to retreat to a comfort zone, or dream about the ideological cosiness of opposition.

The global economic crisis, and the impact it is having on Britain require a Labour Government to take the right decisions to see the country through and help individuals and businesses affected.

And we are taking the right decisions on the banks; on l ending; on our economic stimulus.

We are in a difficult period right now, because Government is taking a lot of decisions but people are not feeling the results of those decisions on the ground, in their lives, in their workplaces.
Inevitably, with some of the measures we have introduced, there is a time lag before their effect feeds through in to the real economy. But be in no doubt we are taking the right decisions.

From Barack Obama in America, to Angela Merkel in Germany, Japan, Australia, everyone agrees with the importance of a good old Keynsian shot in the arm, to prevent a global recession turning into a global depression.

Everyone, that is, except the British Conservative Party – and George Bush’s Republicans.

Tories and American Republicans, in denial about the fact that their Reagonomics, their Thatcherite ideology of rampant free markets, deregulation and their celebration of greed are what got the world into the mess it’s in, in the first place.

Which international leader has been arguing for tougher, transparent and co-ordinated regulation of international financial markets for 20 years or more – Gordon Brown.

No other world leader is as well placed or as well qualified to work with Obama, Merkel and others to make the changes to global regulatory institutions that are necessary.

So this global crisis is a huge challenge for us, but it’s also a big opportunity.

It demands centre-left values – an active state, fairness, environmental sustainability.

The Tories, still locked to their monetarist dogma, cannot provide these values and responses.

Instead, they advocate swingeing cuts, at the very worst time for our economy; cuts that would repeat the mistakes of previous recessions and would turn a recession into a full-blown depression.

How could a party whose economic policy mirrors that of America’s Republicans hope to work effectively with Barack Obama? How could a party with no friends in Europe hope to mould the collective European response that the economic downturn requires?

In the run-up to this summer’s European elections in which every one of us must play our part in Glyn Ford’s re-election, and in which every vote in every part of the South West counts, we must remorselessly expose the Tories’ isolation in Europe and remind people of the importance of the European Union in these uncertain times.

I remember George Osborne praising the deregulatory laissez-faire policies of the Republic of Ireland and advocating that the UK followed in Ireland’s footsteps. Well look what’s happened to Ireland now? Look at the consequences of those Tory policies and consider the fact that had Ireland not been a member of the EU and of the Eurozone, the impact on that country’s economy would have been even worse.

Iceland, who has resisted the idea of EU membership for decades, is now pleading to be let in. And countries from the Atlantic to the Russian border see the EU as a bulwark of stability and security in the global economic storm.

So the months ahead provide us with vital opportunities as well as difficult challenges – now is not the time to abdicate those responsibilities and turn in on ourselves.

It is not the time for individual ambition or jostling.

We must be united as a Government, united as a party, we must take the fight to our opponents - Tories, Lib Dems and yes the BNP, proud of our achievements and confident in our ambitions for this, our country.