Mr Chairman, ladies and gentlemen,
You're quite right, Mr Chairman, I have some experience of fighting seats which had been thought to have difficult Labour majorities. But I'm very happy to tell you that although it was not I who won Dartford—I stuck there for two elections—it was eventually won, and so I hope that that will give a lot of faith and hope for all those who are fighting such difficult seats. But whether you're fighting a difficult seat, a not so difficult seat, or an already Conservative seat, I want you to know that I want every single vote for the Conservative party that we can possibly get out of each and every constituency, because at the end of the day, we're going to count them all up and we want a tremendous mandate for a Conservative victory for the next five years [applause].
Now here, in this highly marginal constituency, I'm very pleased to support Timothy Kirkhope, and I notice that he's taken as his motto on the front of his election address, the very good, sound Conservative phrase, “Freedom within the law” . And, ladies and gentlemen, you cannot have freedom without a rule of law. The two go together. Freedom is freedom to do good, but some people will abuse it, and it's because some people will abuse it that it is the duty of the government to uphold a rule of law to protect the weak against the strong, and so what we have to uphold is the rule of law and freedom within the law, and it is one of the most fundamental concepts of the freedom of the British people, a concept that we must honour and see that we hand it on to our children.
Now, as you know, many of you who've fought and taken part in elections before, it's our habit and custom as Conservatives, always to fight them on a positive basis, and I will say something, a good deal I hope, positive, in a few moments. But on this occasion, first I want to deal with one or two attacks that have been made on us. You know, I haven't a great deal of respect for our opponents when they've spent the whole of the beginning part of the campaign, not in defending their record, not in putting forward their policies—it seems as if they daren't do either—but in constantly trying to attack us and smear us with some of the things which they in fact have done. Indeed, it seems to me throughout this election campaign, they've had that as a guiding strategy, and that only, and I think the reason is that they dare not admit the truth about what they've done to this country in their disastrous years of office. So they're just trying to trick their way back to power by raising scares about us. And they [end p1] pretend to tell the nation of the horrors which Conservatives would bring. But I think, Mr Chairman, that the people of Britain know that it's Labour who are responsible for the shameful decline which has put this country, Great Britain, in the league of the less prosperous countries. Because, after all, it's Labour Governments that have been in power for about eleven of the past fifteen years, so if we are in decline, and we most certainly are, a large part of their … the decline must be laid at the door of the Labour party.
Now, I think the true irony is that each accusation that Labour leaders hurl at us is in fact the truth about themselves. And I'll go through them one by one and try to prove that proposition: what they're hurling and saying about us is in fact the truth about what they themselves have done. Let's take the issues one by one that they deal with in that way.
They claim that Labour has conquered inflation. Did the housewives hear that? They claim that Labour has conquered inflation and that the Tories would put up prices. Well, just let's go back and look at that claim, and what they're saying about us. You know, we have Denis Healey 's word for it [laughter], we have Denis Healey's word for it that before the October '74 election, which was the last one, inflation, or as we housewives know it, the rate of price increases was only, you know the figure, 8.4%;. Now that's what he said at the last election. That's what he fought it on, October '74. He said inflation was 8.4%;. He'd been in power for six months, he'd seen the books, and he said, yes, inflation is 8.4%;. Then, but that's not how Mr Callaghan tells the story. He doesn't say, “We inherited an inflation rate of 8.4%; from Mr Wilson 's Government.” Not a bit of it. He tells it this way. He says Labour has brought down inflation from nearly 27%; to below 10%;. Well, you can see that those two claims don't add up. One saying, “Well, it was 8.4%; last time;” the other one saying, “Well, Labour's brought it down from 27%; to below 10%;.” Well, yes, inflation did reach almost 27%;, but not under the Tories. It reached 27%; in August 1975 after Labour had been in office for 17 months, during Labour's term of office under Mr Healey 's Chancellorship. That's who put it up to 27%;, not the Conservatives. And it got to that level, which was the highest reached by any Government in three centuries, because Labour followed its cynical pay pledges in the 1974 election by rushing into wage settlements of 30 to 40%;. Indeed, I think that was one promise they did keep.
And the truth is that the rate of price increases only really came down when a well nigh bankrupt and scared Labour Government was forced by its creditors, the International Monetary Fund, to adopt Tory policies and cut its own spending. What happened then? The Tory policies worked. Even unemployment fell for a time, but the truth is that inflation is climbing again once more. Prices are rising faster, because they've abandoned our policies and are again building up a huge government spending bill. The truth about inflation is not that they've conquered it, but that it's rising again, and that Labour holds the British all time, all comers record of having doubled prices within a five year period of office. And remember, a 10%; rate of price increases now is 10%; of twice the price things were when Labour came back in 1974 [applause]. Do remember—the housewives will know—it's 10%; on last year's 9%; on the previous year's 17%; on the previous year's 23%; on the previous year's 20%;. That's a heck of a lot more 10%; than it was under us in our time because it's on top of everything else. [end p2]
Now so much for them trying to say we would raise prices. If you want advice about how to keep prices down, you don't go to the chaps who are expert in putting them up. You go to people, of course you don't, you go to people, to other nations who've been very much more successful at keeping them down, and that is all the European nations save only one, Italy, who in the same world conditions have been far more successful, done a far better job for their housewives and have, in fact, kept prices down. So they hurl the accusation at us. It is they who are guilty of the things of which they accuse us.
Now, let's have another look at the next one. The next accusation is that the Tories, we plan to increase unemployment, we plan to increase unemployment. But I must say to you that we Conservatives believe in policies that will create real jobs, not just in paying youngsters to do artificial jobs without a future, because such measures can only be temporary. Now, let's have a look at the truth. The truth is that every Labour Government since the war, and there have been quite a number, every Labour Government since the war has left more people out of work when it was forced from office than when it came to power. More people out of work at the end of every Labour Government than when they came to power. By contrast, every Conservative Government since the war has left more people in work than when it came to power. That's a very much better record to have behind you. And the truth is that unemployment under Labour rose from what we left, 629,000 in February 1974, to 1,340,000, more than double in April 1979, five years later. All right, figures tend to be a little bit confusing. Let me change that to something we can understand a little bit better. That's one person joining the dole queue every four minutes of Labour rule. About two since I've started to speak. Now that's why we say Labour isn't working. They're the party of unemployment and we're the party of opportunity. So that's two charges which are totally wrong, two charges. What they are guilty of, they accuse us of. They are guilty of increasing prices faster than any other Government. They have increased unemployment faster than any other post-war Government.
Now, let's have a look at the next one. They've had a go at the National Health Service and what we'd do about that, and, as you know, I had to come in very quickly and say we have no intention of putting charges on going to hospitals or putting charges on going to see your doctor. But they then have a go and claim that we would destroy the National Health Service, but, you know, it's under Labour rule that the National Health Service has really deteriorated shamefully. It's under Labour rule that morale among the staff's declined. It's under Labour rule that industrial disputes have multiplied and some 100,000 more people are waiting for hospital treatment than when the last Conservative Government left office. It's they who've done that to the National Health Service, not we who did it.
Now, they then say that we would deny equal opportunity in education, but it's a Labour Government that has denied the opportunity of free grammar schools to thousands of children from poorer homes who really need it and who could profit from it [applause]. Grammar schools were free to everyone. Many of us climbed the ladder from the bottom to the top by the way of grammar schools. Many of them did the same. Why kick the ladder away from our present day young people, so many of whom could use it, and use it profitably? [end p3]
Now, they then say that we threaten the home seeker by letting council tenants buy their homes. The reason Mr Callaghan and his friends attack us so bitterly is because the dream of families to own their own homes is a threat to the Big Brother state towards which their policies lead [applause]. The Labour party zealots hate home ownership for others [applause]. But, you know, selling council houses to the sitting tenants would reduce local authority housing debts. It would help to keep the rents down to other people who still wish to rent their council homes. But, best of all, it would give the tenants who wanted it the chance of independence from the petty rules and restrictions that the Socialists love. And that prospect alone is a threat to the true Socialist promised land, a land of dreary uniformity in which the only freedom is the freedom to do as the man in Whitehall or Town Hall orders.
So when our people go to vote on Thursday week, I hope they'll ask themselves why a Labour Government, which has been in power for so long and has achieved so little, has based its campaign, not on its own record, but on crude scaremongering about its opponents. Could it be because their own policies have failed and their own inspiration has faded and that the big, big scare is the only thing they have left to offer?
Well now, that's the end of the press release so we can all relax now [laughter]. Well, you know what happens. We put it out. If I said anything different that would be a source of comment. But just let's go through it again. They are the party that has put up prices more than any other Government in three centuries. They are the party that's put up unemployment. They are the party that has damaged the National Health Service. They are the party that's deprived many of our children of equal educational opportunity. They are the party which wants to deprive many people of the only chance they'd ever have of owning their own home and getting a bit of property of their own to make them, set them on the way to being every man a capitalist. That is what they want to do.
Now, let's turn round and see what is our policy for the future. We have throughout the entire campaign set our policies on a certain number of principles. One of the reasons, I believe, for the continued decline in this country is because Labour Governments have constantly assumed that someone else has created the wealth and production for them to distribute when they got in power. But they've forgotten that unless you keep incentives going, people don't go on producing more goods or producing more services or building up small businesses. In a free country, people will work if it pays to work, but if it's all taxed away from them, you'll find some saying, “It isn't worthwhile to work and why should I do harder when other people who do less seem to be just as well off?” [applause].
And so, where do we start in our policies? First, what can governments do? Now government has a very, very definite duty as far as trying to keep the currency stable is concerned. The first thing that governments ought to do, and it's where this Government has failed singularly, is to keep its spending within the nation's means. Now, every housewife knows exactly what that means. She has to keep her spending within the family's means, otherwise, if she borrows, borrows and borrows, then the [end p4] whole family will soon be in trouble. But this Government has not kept its spending within the nation's means. It's taxed us extra, we've paid extra rates, and even that hasn't been enough. It has the biggest borrowing Government, borrowing for our children to pay, again of any Government in history. Now, if you are to keep a stable currency and to have honest money, which we haven't had for a long time now, the first thing governments must do is to keep their spending within the nation's means. And that does mean going through each and every spending programme to see that other people's money is well spent. And you will be very, very familiar with the phrase they use. “Oh, government expenditure.” I heard someone on the radio early this morning before seven o'clock saying, “This Government's been more magnanimous about grants to certain industries than any other.” And I thought, “Government's magnanimous? With whose money? With whose money?” Because every single pound they take away from the taxpayer, is a pound that the housewife has less to pay the … to pay the fuel bills, to pay the food bills, to pay the clothes or to pay something for the children. So the duty of government is to see that every single penny is well spent, and that they don't take any more pennies or pounds than they need to. Because, you know the danger. You take away a taxpayer's money, you pump it through bureaucracy and less comes out than went in, and this is one of the problems. So you have to watch the administration and the waste in every single department of government. And that's why we have concentrated so much on saying there is a good deal of waste and extravagance to be proved.
Oh, we've concentrated on other things too. We say nationalisation is very costly. It costs a tremendous amount of money. Let's cut that. Because, you know, nationalisation no more keeps jobs than private enterprise does. In fact, private enterprise can create them, whereas nationalisation tends not to. After all, the nationalisation of steel didn't keep all the steel jobs. Nationalisation of British Leyland didn't keep open the Speke factory in Liverpool. So, of course, we have criticised further schemes for nationalisation. They're very, very costly, and they tend to give the people the idea that they don't necessarily need to have the same rate of productivity or production because the government will always somehow come in and save them whatever happens. But that isn't true. So of course we've been critical of more money for nationalisation. But now let's have a look at some of those examples for waste, because there are a tremendous number. And it so happens we have a specialist committee in the House of Commons, called the Public Accounts Committee, that goes through them. Incidentally, the National Enterprise Board won't open its books to the Public Accounts Committee, which is a source of very great criticism, but most of the other departments do. And in one year alone, that Committee said, estimated that we could save a total of one thousand million pounds, and that's equal to tuppence ha'penny off the basic rate of income tax if we eliminated the errors and the mistakes.
Now, I'm going to give you some examples of waste, not in thousands of millions of pounds, but some in, I think, in more understandable figures on specific projects. They're only examples of waste. They are examples of projects which have been started by governments and I don't criticise many of the projects themselves; what we criticise is the difference between the estimate, estimated cost of the project, and what it turned out to cost many, many years later, because it's our money. Just let's have a [end p5] look. The cost of the Liverpool teaching hospital. Now they had to build it. It was ten years under construction, it rose from £12 million to £60 million. That was one thing which they criticised as, not wrong in concept, it should have gone ahead, but from £12 million to £60 million, ten years under construction. Cost of the Bootle Computer Centre, thirteen years under construction; risen from £2.7 million to £15 million. A recent survey shows that 43%; of derelict land in urban areas is owned, at great continuing cost in interest charges, by councils or nationalised industries. If you hold it and pay the interest charges on it year after year, it comes on your rates and taxes. It ought to be brought into use, brought into operation. There's a Location of Offices Bureau which spent years trying to move firms out of London and is now busy doing exactly the opposite. Another example, Labour's wasted £2 million in employing staff and renting six office blocks for Civil Servants to administer the Wealth Tax that's not, so far, been introduced. Two of the office blocks stood empty for at least two years. The cost of administering our tax and social security systems exceeds £1,200 million a year and there are now more Inland Revenue officials than there are sailors in the Royal Navy. You will, in fact, have examples of very, very costly housing projects. There is one by the Camden Housing Authority where they spent £3 million on building 42 council houses and, of course, the subsidy to the taxpayer and ratepayer is about £150 a week.
Now, I give you these as examples. In private industry, in your own private lives, if you embarked on these things, you could not possibly make that degree of error between the estimate and the final cost. Can it be that somehow, when they're dealing with public money, they do it differently? But public money isn't public money, it's citizens money. And we believe that if we go through each and every department we shall find very considerable examples of waste. Cutting it out will not, in fact, cut the service. Indeed, there have been examples in local authorities, Leeds is one, where when they were taken over by Conservatives they managed to cut out the waste and, in some cases, the efficiency of the service actually improves because the bureaucracy does not get in your way. So, first your government has to have honest money. That means it has to learn to live within the nation's means. That means that it must go through each and every department to cut out waste so that we manage … so that we can borrow less and have something available for reducing the personal tax on income.
Now, I want to come to point number two. It is, wherever I go, whoever I talk to, whether it's a person who is working hard in a factory, a shop, or in one of the service industries, whether it's a person who has spent years acquiring a skill, whether it's a manager, whether it's a professional person, a doctor, whether it's a small businessman or the self-employed, they've all got one thing in common—well, they've got more than one, but the one I'm going to talk about now—they all say, “Too much is taken out of our pockets in income tax by this Government. And unless you take less, there just isn't any incentive to work harder.” But, you know, you won't get the extra wealth created, you will not get the extra production, unless we put back the incentive into Britain, and that we promise to do. We've limited our promises very severely, because I think people are pretty cynical about politicians who make promises with their … with other people's money, but our top priority must be to cut the personal rate [end p6] of income tax at all levels. That I believe is the only way to get people working harder again.
But there is another thing as well. It not only gets them working harder again. We need more jobs, especially for our young people. Within that figure of unemployment which I gave to you, there's a subsidiary figure. It is this. There are half … nearly half a million young people under the age of 25 who haven't got a job. Now, where are those jobs going to come from? Now, you know in the North East the problems of some of the big industries, the problems of some of the old structural industries. They're not going to provide any more jobs. It's as much as they can do to keep some of the people in jobs that they've got now. Where are they going to come from? They can only come from new small businesses which start up today, expand tomorrow, and some of them become the new big businesses of tomorrow. And we're not going to get those unless we give those some incentive to start up and continue, and, at present you know, the small businessman has been very badly and hardly hit by this Government indeed and so have the self-employed.
Now, you'll ask examples. I went to a factory—I'm not going to talk about factories in this part of the world, I've just been to a very good one—but I went to a factory on Saturday which was typical of the kind of factory which we could have in much greater numbers if, I believe, we got our tax system right. It was a success story. It was one, a highly scientific one, it started in 1961 in a garden shed with one man. It now employs 350 people. Well, they have built it up because they passionately believed in Britain, and they hope one day that the tax will be less, but nevertheless, in the meantime they are going on in hopes. But there is a second point about it. They could take on 10%; more employees, that's thirty-five, immediately if they could find the right skills. They get something like ten to twenty people answering every single application and very, very few have the right skills and the right qualifications, and why again? It doesn't necessarily pay some of our skilled people to get the extra skill and the extra qualification, so they're not doing it. And we also have to look at the education system to see if we are getting through the skilled mathematicians, the engineers, the electronic engineers, the people who can be production managers, to see that those are available.
So two points here: less tax, and we must look to see that we're letting what I call the differentials get through with the extra rewards and keep it from the tax. I went round another factory recently, and I can't always visit every part of it, and I was just being taken rather rapidly past one particular shed when a sort of man in a blue overall appeared at the door, put out an arm, said, “Maggie, you can't go past here. You've got to come in here. We're the differentials. You've got to come and see us.” [laughter] So I went in to see the differentials, and the differentials were the people who had spent three, four, five years getting … taking an apprenticeship, taking training and were not in fact really very satisfied with their lot under Labour.
And to return to my Saturday factory, they said to me this: “You know, one highly skilled person enables us to take on ten more unskilled people.” Now, it doesn't make sense what this Labour Government is doing. It doesn't make sense to try to level down your skilled people, or your managers, or your small businessmen, or your [end p7] professional people. They are the people who will produce the wealth of the next generation, and we must not in fact tax our future away. We must release the tax so that our young people have a future and have the same kind of opportunities as we had. So the first thing is government, honest money, the second thing reducing tax to enable people to build up their own prosperity.
Now, in this part of the world a number of people will work in companies which have been in considerable difficulty, so let me say this. The purpose of subsidies is not to be permanent. It is to help a firm that is in difficulties through to profitability. And of course we regard it as part of the duty of a government to mitigate the problems of transition from old industries to new. You cannot keep them perpetually doing yesterday's jobs. If we did, we'd still live in a hansom cab society. The object is to help them through to tomorrow's jobs and for that purpose, we not only have to help them through their existing company, but in fact you must stimulate the formulation of new companies and new businesses, and you do that not so much directly as by the tax relief. Now, I'd better just make it clear that we shall still leave in operation a strong regional policy. Of course we shall. Indeed we should have opportunity all over the United Kingdom in so far as it can possibly be provided. And where government agencies therefore are providing a valuable assistance, that will be continued. But none of us can accept that the North East is a permanent invalid. It is not, you know. People like George Stephenson didn't need the National Enterprise Board to help him to develop a railway [applause]. The great shipbuilders' firms on Tyne and Tees didn't need any boards or commissions to help them to lead the world. The future for the North East lies in a new generation of businessmen, not in a new generation of state-builders. The talent and the ability are here. It is that this Government, I believe, just does not know properly how to use it. That is the economic basis of recovery which we offer for the future.
Of course, there are other things. Man doesn't live by bread alone. You cannot have a stable society without what your local Conservative candidate is offering, a strong rule of law, firmly honoured and upheld by government and by all the institutions in the land. I'm very proud that no Conservative ever used the phrase “the quicksands of the law” . To us the law is a rock on which our freedoms were built [applause]. We were a free people long before we had one person one vote. That only happened in 1928. We were a free people long before then. We built up the common law, a system to be proud of, which was taken the world over. It is the duty of governments to uphold it on behalf of law abiding citizens and the duty of everyone to support the police in carrying out their difficult and arduous duties [applause].
And then, of course, every single person is interested in the education for their children. I've referred to this briefly, but you know education ought not to be run as a system by saying, “We only have certain sorts of schools. All children must fit into them.” It ought to be run with the state, the local authorities having a duty. Each and every child will have some talent and ability. It is the duty of the education authority to bring out that talent and that ability in that child, regardless of his background. So that a child from the poorest background has access to the best educational opportunities that this country can provide. We shall, of course, bring back the Direct Grant Schools. We don't believe they deprived anyone of a good education. They [end p8] gave a tremendous opportunity to young people who would never have had it, and our purpose is to see that they get that opportunity.
The housing programme you know, and I gather from your applause that many people here think it absolutely right to give our council tenants the opportunity to purchase their own homes. All of these are positive things, but they illustrate something which the Labour party can never do. Conservative policy is built on the belief that we really want responsible individuals, individuals as far as possible independent of government by building up their own means, their own homes, their own savings, their own insurance schemes, so that they have a bit of extra independence of government and do not have to rely totally on the state for jobs, houses, pensions and everything, because the moment you have to do that, it would seem as if you've almost sold your soul to the state and haven't the requisite degree of freedom of action which is typical of a democracy.
Finally, may I say this, Mr Chairman, we shall talk a lot, and have been talking a lot about solving inflation, prices, jobs. We have to keep and preserve in this country a free society as well. And, you know, every single free society in the world is a free enterprise economy, if you think about it. Every single free nation has a free enterprise economy. If you extinguish free enterprise, you extinguish freedom. And so, if you look beyond the Iron Curtain, they've practically extinguished free enterprise and there is no freedom. In the West we have free enterprise, which is the economic basis of freedom. And our fear is, that if you get more and more Socialist Governments in, they will go gradually toward more and more dominance of the state by the state, and less and less a role and less and less power to the citizens of our country.
That is not the road for Britain to take. We must preserve both free enterprise in business and therefore preserve the free society and all the institutions we have known. That is our role for the future. It is a totally different direction to the one in which Labour is taking us. We must take the fresh road, the new road, and ladies and gentlemen, we'd please like a big enough majority to have ten or thirteen years in which to do it [applause].
This, I think, is the most crucial election that I have fought. Please don't think—since 1945 which I wasn't in—please don't think that I've said that at each and every election. I haven't. I know some leaders of parties have, but I haven't. This is the one when we have to turn back from the Socialist state and its greyness and its drabness and its lack of opportunity, its lack of spirit, its lack of inspiration, its lack of morale, turn back from the Socialist state and tread the path once again towards the free society which is characteristic of our British people. Ladies and gentlemen, there is no substitute for victory, and we must have it on May 3rd [applause].