David Cameron: Labour is anti-enterprise
David Cameron attacks Labour leader Ed Miliband as anti-enterprise, as he delivers his speech to the Conservative Party conference – saying the Tories will deliver a “land of opportunity”.
The prime minister will take to the platform at the Manchester conference at 11am on Wednesday, to say the Conservatives are moving on from “clearing up the mess” left by the last Labour government to “building something better in its place”.
He is expected to say: “I didn’t come into politics just to fix what went wrong, but to build something right…
“I believe that it is the great Conservative mission that as our economy starts to recover, we build a land of opportunity in our country today.”
As a part of this “mission”, Mr Cameron will insist that profit, wealth creation, tax cuts and enterprise are “not dirty words.”
‘Dignity’
His speech will be a rebuttal to that by Ed Miliband at the Labour Party conference last week, in which he pledged to tackle Britain’s “cost of living crisis” and said “we can do better.”
However, Mr Cameron, at the end of a Tory conference dominated by the catchphrase “for hardworking families”, will say that Labour fails to understand that it is business, not the state, that is the driving force behind prosperity.
He will also echo Tory claims that the British economy has “turned a corner.”
You help people by putting up ladders that they can climb through their own efforts. David Cameron
“When the left say you can’t expect too much from the poorest kids, don’t ask too much from people on welfare, business is the problem not the solution, here in this party we say that’s just wrong,” Mr Cameron will say.
“If you expect nothing of people, that does nothing for them. Yes, you must help people, but you help people by putting up ladders that they can climb through their own efforts.
I’ve been working on my conference speech. You can see it tomorrow at 11am. pic.twitter.com/ojOKce3s2Z
— David Cameron (@David_Cameron) October 1, 2013
“You don’t help children succeed by dumbing down education, you help them by pushing them hard. You don’t help people by leaving them stuck on welfare, but by helping them stand on their own two feet.
“Why? Because the best way out of poverty is work and the dignity that brings.”
The Conservatives have made a number of pledges at conference, including tax breaks for some married couples, the acceleration of mortgage support under the Help to Buy scheme and the prospect of a fuel duty freeze lasting until the election.
Mr Cameron has had a relatively incident free conference so far, with the only minor embarrassment being when he was asked for the price of a loaf of value bread – and did not know the answer.
In a round of broadcast interviews this morning, Foreign Secretary William Hague said this was not important.
“It is important to keep inflation down, it is important to run the economy well,” he said. “It’s important to make sure that people out there have got as much money as possible of their own to spend.
“I think that’s what really matters to people rather than whether anybody knows the price of anything that’s variable.”
Channel 4 News will stream the speech live from 11am.