Dundee

21 April 2010

It is once again an honour and privilege to address the STUC conference as leader of Labour at the Scottish Parliament.

It’s always good to be in Dundee, a city with a proud history in the trade union and Labour movement.

In the boom years mill work brought thousands of women to this city from towns and villages, from the west coast and the highlands and from hunger and poverty in Ireland.

Dundee was known in those days as a women’s town.

Most Dundee men would probably say it remains so today.

The Dundee Jute and Flax Workers Union had an executive committee entirely made up of women.

How many of our unions could come close to that today?

Those trade unionists fought for wages, they fought for conditions fit for human beings, they fought to take their children out of the mills and into school.

They fought the bosses, they fought discrimination and the wicked contradiction, so apparent in their eyes, of a country that they made rich whose laws told them they were second rank because they were women and without rank because they worked with their hands.

Their lesson to us.

Where we have unity there is strength.

When we fight for the colleague at the next loom, the other lathe or the desk beside us, we make all of our lives better.

Dundee’s story is not unique and the fact that we all carry these stories of our towns, villages and cities with us makes that story great.

It is the story of our movement.

Workers standing together and taking the fight from the factory floor to the floor of parliament.

The story of all that we have won.

Because we organised.

The conditions of those mills transformed.

National insurance protecting those out of work.

The NHS healing the wounds of injuries at work and removing the clawing fear that illness would lead to the medical bill that would finally tear the family apart.

Rights to equal pay. To childcare. To maternity and now paternity leave.

And underpinning it all – the right to organise.

Some battles, some struggles never fade away.

We live in a world transformed.

Yet injustice remains.

Our conditions are a world away from those mills.

Yet inequality remains a chronic ailment of our nation.

Steps forward. Steps back.

For thirteen years we have marched in the right direction.

Not always as surely as we would wish and sometimes we have faltered

But never let us forget the minimum wage which we are committed to raising again.

34,000 apprenticeships created in Scotland.

100,000 children lifted out of poverty.

2,000 more teachers in Scottish classrooms

£1 billion to rebuild or refurbish schools.

Doubled investment in the NHS and free nursing and personal care for older people – benefiting 75,000 Scots.

We have tripled the contribution we make to poor countries and reduced our nuclear arsenal by half but kept our country strong.

But as we all know we now live in different and difficult times.

In just over a fortnight we go to the polls in the most important general election in a generation.

A general election that will define the future of our country, the sort of society we live in, whether our future is based on values or valuations.

A general election that will define the future of our children.

A general election in the shadow of the credit crunch and the banking crisis.

When so much that had seemed so solid melted away overnight.

It is the most important election since 1979.

And we cannot afford to repeat the mistake of 1979.

That led to the decade when the big bang in the city unleashed deregulated global speculation whose flipside was the destruction of so much of our manufacturing industry and widescale unemployment that shattered so many of our communities.

A government who not only believed that recession was an adjustment in the economy which had to be allowed to play out….

They also saw it as an opportunity to brutally restructure the whole economy itself –

To allow industries to simply die and with them whole communities

Communities such as the Ayrshire and Fife coalfields

The mining villages of my own East Lothian

Shipbuilding communities on the Clyde

and the Lanarkshire steel communities such as Ravenscraig.

A government who believed that unemployment is a price worth paying.

Barak Obama’s chief of staff famously said we should never waste a crisis.

The crisis of the past two years has shattered the myth of the benefit of unfettered markets.

And the value of government intervention and the public sector are recognised again as essential for a fair and prosperous economy and a just society.

It was the Labour government that got it right with the big decisions.

It was Labour that led the way for the international community to take action to stop a global meltdown that would have had disastrous consequences worldwide.

At every step of the way we were opposed by the Tories.

So the launch our manifesto at Ravenscraig was not a coincidence.

The biggest brownfield site in Europe symbolises the approach which lets industries die and unemployment soar.

But the new college, built by Labour on that Ravenscraig site symbolises the alternative which says invest in our people give them the skills and the chance they need – and we can always rise to the challenge.

An approach which says unemployment is never a price worth paying.

We must commit to a high skills, modern manufacturing economy where the government works as partners with unions and business to invest in jobs.

We have a four-year plan to more than halve the deficit, but first there must be growth combined with fair taxes and cuts to lower priority spending.

But now is not the time for slash and burn cuts to public services.

That would choke off the still fragile recovery.

Jobs must come first and with those jobs the tax revenues to tackle the deficit.

And it is Labour who will achieve this with the creation of one million more skilled jobs and growth in our economy through advanced technology, exports and business investment.

That is why we have created UK Finance for Growth, bringing £4 billion together to provide capital to invest in the growth sectors of the future.

We will create 200,000 jobs through the Future Jobs Fund, create up to 70,000 advanced apprenticeships .

We will modernise Britain’s infrastructure with High Speed Rail, a Green Investment Bank and broadband access for all.

And we will build the two aircraft carriers on the forth and on the Clyde.

In Scotland we will continue to pursue a guarantee of work, training or education for every young worker when they leave school.

The National Minimum Wage will rise at least in line with average earnings and rights at work will be protected and extended.

We will protect investment in schools and hospitals.

We will not sell off Scotland’s water.

We will reform the rules for banking.

There will be no return to the irresponsible behaviour of the past, with tighter regulation, controls on bonuses, and rules to stop one banks collapse spreading to others.

We must grow together as a country, rewarding those who work hard so they can do well and look after their families: returning Britain to full employment, enabling people to get higher-paid, higher skilled jobs.

All over Scotland good employers have worked with their workforces, to be honest both organised and not, to find ways to keep the workforce intact through the hard times to be better placed when recovery comes.

Government should not just support this, but learn from it by working with the TU movement to find the way through.

Intervention now to protect jobs will pay a dividend in faster, deeper, more sustainable recovery.

That hasn’t happened as it should have in Scotland.

For the first time since the Second World War.Scotland had suffered a steeper fall in output than the UK as a whole

In the last quarter Scotland saw unemployment rising by 16,000, at a time when the UK’s unemployment decreased by 33,000.

Two thirds of all jobs lost in the UK in recent months were lost in Scotland.

The Scottish government has taken too many wrong decisions.

The Scottish Futures Trust and its inability to build anything has contributed to the loss of 30,000 construction jobs in the last two years.

Inexplicable cuts to key areas of economic growth including housing, regeneration, enterprise and tourism have damaged recovery.

The SNP cancelled the Glasgow and Edinburgh Airport Rail Links with the loss of over 4,000 jobs.

Projects like the Southern General Hospital have been delayed again and again at the very moment when they need to be rushed forward.

£1.5 billion of reserves have disappeared without any evidence of being used to stimulate the economy.

And in spite of a budget increase of £1 billion, local government suffered a real terms cut in their allocation and a council tax freeze which has been systematically underfunded by the Scottish government.

I do not make these points just to attack the SNP.

No, in every one of these wrong decisions they have been supported by the Scottish Tories and Scottish workers have paid the price.

The Tory way is already costing us jobs right now, right here in Scotland.

But it will be so much worse if they win on the 6th of May.

You know, the links between trade unions and the Labour Party have come under sustained attack in recent months.

The Tories believe that our bond is a weakness.

We know that is our enduring strength.

We are bound together by our values, our history, our vision of a future that is fair for all our citizens.

The obligation we owe those workers in the jute mills and all the others who have gone before us is to work together to continue their struggle for jobs, equality and shared prosperity.

In this election it is the chance to serve exactly that obligation which Labour seeks.

Nothing more.

And nothing less

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