Cameron: your country needs you

In his first speech as Prime Minister at his party’s annual conference in Birmingham, David Cameron said the coalition government had “inherited public finances that can only be described as catastrophic” and that was why action was vital.

“I wish there was another way. I wish there was an easier way. But I tell you: there is no other responsible way.”Reducing spending would be difficult, he said.

“There are programmes that will be cut. There are jobs that will be lost. There are things government does today that it will have to stop doing.

“Many government departments will have their budgets cut by on average 25 per cent over four years. That’s a cut each year of around seven per cent. Of course, that’s big. But let’s remember, a lot of businesses have had to make the same or bigger savings in recent years.”

Child benefit
Despite criticism that the government’s plan to cut child benefit for higher rate taxpayers was unfair, the Conservative leader said fairness would be his guiding light when it came to cutting spending.

I wish there was another way.

“Fairness includes asking those on higher incomes to shoulder more of the burden than those on lower incomes. I’m not saying this is going to be easy, as we’ve seen with child benefit this week. But it’s fair that those with broader shoulders should bear a greater load.”

Child benefit was only mentioned once, and Mr Cameron did not elaborate on proposals to partially compensate higher rate taxpayers through marriage tax breaks, which the Conservative manifesto said would be introduced for basic rate taxpayers.

It’s fair that those with broader shoulders should bear a greater load.

He said fairness could not just be measured by how much money was spent on welfare, “as though the poor are products with a price tag, the more we spend on them the more we value them”.

He added: “Fairness means supporting people out of poverty, not trapping them in dependency. For too long, we have measured success in tackling poverty by the size of the cheque we give people. We say: let’s measure our success by the chance we give.”

Big Society
The Prime Minister said government could not do everything. What was needed was the spirit of the big society.

He added: “Your country needs you. It takes two. It takes two to build that strong economy. So come on: let’s pull together. Let’s come together. Let’s work together in the national interest.”

A mother's view
Mother-of-two Jessica Ormerod, from south-east London, was not impressed with what David Cameron said about child benefit. She stays at home to look after her children, but her husband is a higher rate taxpayer and the couple will lose their child benefit in 2013.

She told Channel 4 News: "I think that higher earners in society should pay more tax. That is a sign of a civilised society."

But Mrs Ormerod said taking the axe to child benefit would make stay-at-home mothers more reliant on their husbands. "I just think that child benefit is the wrong way to tax because it's not taxing the rich, it's taxing the poor."

She said she did not believe Mr Cameron's Conservatives were really on the side of single mothers, as the Prime Minister said in his speech. "I've never known a Conservative government to be on the side of single mothers before. From a child benefit point of view, I think single mothers and all women lose from taking child benefit away."

On Mr Cameron's statement that those with the broadest shoulders should bear their fair share of the cuts, Mrs Ormerod said: "The very high bonuses that bankers get and are expecting to get this year, that is a huge amount of child benefit."

Labour had left the country “with massive debts” and “a legacy of spinning, smearing, briefing, back-biting, half-truths and cover-ups, patronising, old-fashioned, top-down, wasteful, centralising, inefficient, ineffective, unaccountable politics, 10p tax and 90 days detention, an election bottled and a referendum denied, gold sold at half price and council tax doubled, bad news buried and Mandelson resurrected, pension funds destroyed and foreign prisoners not deported, Gurkhas kept out and extremist preachers allowed in”.

Wealth creators
To applause, he talked of his admiration for wealth creators.”It will be the doers and the grafters,the inventors and the entrepreneurs, who get this country going. Yes, it will be the wealth creators – and no, those aren’t dirty words.

“I can’t tell you how much I admire people who leave the comfort of a regular wage, to strike out on their own. I’ll always remember what the owner of a small business told me once.

It will be the doers and the grafters,the inventors and the entrepreneurs, who get this country going.

“He said: ‘When I was starting out, the Government didn’t lift a finger to help me. Then as soon as I started making money they were all over me trying to take it away.’

“That’s completely the wrong way round. We need to get behind our wealth creators.”

Trident
On defence, he said the ongoing strategic defence and security review would take account of the public finances, but the nuclear deterrent would be renewed.

“I promise you this: I will take no risks with Britain’s security. That’s why, when more and more countries have or want nuclear weapons, we will always keep our ultimate insurance policy, we will renew our nuclear deterrent based on the Trident missile system.”

FactCheck: David Cameron's speech
The FactCheck team scrutinise the big speech about the big society

Coalition government
Turning to his post-election deal with the Liberal Democrats, Mr Cameron defended the formation of the coalition government.

“I know there are a few who say that we should have sat tight, waited for our opponents to fall out and brought in a minority government. But a minority government would have limped through Parliament, unable to do anything useful for our country.

“The voters left us with a hung parliament and they wanted us to respond responsibly, to do the right thing, not play political games.”

He talked about the forthcoming referendum on replacing the first-past-the-post voting system with the alternative vote. “Next May, there’ll be a referendum on electoral reform. I don’t want to change our voting system any more than you do. But let’s not waste time trying to wreck the bill – let’s just get out there and win the vote.”

Reaction to the speech: 'Vintage David Cameron'
"It was combative, it was humble, there was a political philosophy there, there were some great gags," Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt told Channel 4 News at the Conservative Party Conference.

"But the most important thing that he was saying was that the cuts are the biggest challenge we face - but there's more to this government than just cuts.

"There was a huge vision there how we can create a much better partnership between government and the people to tackle some of our long-standing problems."

Universities and Science Minister David Willetts also called it an "excellent" speech and agreed that the speech set out "clearly and persuasively" that there is more to the government's agenda than cuts. "We really are trying to produce, at the end of the day, a more enterprising economy, a stronger society," he told Channel 4 News.

Mr Willetts said that the cuts to child benefits was "a tough decision that we've had to take this week". But, he said, David Cameron's speech was "looking beyond the financial decisions that have got to be taken over the next few weeks, to a picture of how at the end of this we have a Britain that's growing, a stronger society, reformed public services.

"It's the role of the Prime Minister to set out the big argument, the direction in which you want the country to go," he said.