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Tuesday 2 December 2008

Another Voice

A speech recorded in Hansard on an unspecified day in the near future

‘At the same time they underestimate the principal opposition’s potential to do better. In the media screams which followed the local elections, we can be forgiven, Sir, for failing to notice that the Conservative party are not hugely loved or admired by the electorate. Much of their success is by default: our default. What might they do if given time and space to find their voice properly? Their leader is a shameless — I’ll rephrase that, Mr Speaker — audacious pickpocket of other politicians’ ideas and sympathies, including many of our ideas and sympathies. That his party’s grasp of these is shallow and their commitment opportunistic needs to be exposed. The task is urgent.

‘Yet a mood of despair grips many in my party. They think that all is lost. I have to tell them that it’s potentially worse than that. All is not lost. There’s more left to lose. We could go lower, much lower; and if we drift on like this, then we shall.

‘But if we could find the voice to defy what the media think is our fate — if we could find the moral passion to defend all that we have achieved in the last 11 years — if we could find the arguments to explain how this solid achievement is threatened by the party opposite — if we could find the energy to challenge the opposition and take an axe to their patter and a blowtorch to their flimsy and ill-considered plans — then, I say to my honourable friends, that this year, this month, this week could mark the low point, from which we did return.

‘We are not, in politics, self-defeatingly idealistic and a new national leader could not be asked to call early an election he or she expected to lose. But they should call it as soon as they judged this wise; and accept that only this could offer the full democratic mandate we need.

‘I said “find the voice”. It would have to be a new voice. In their hearts, which of my honourable friends really doubts that? So I have risen in my place this afternoon, Mr Speaker, to tell my honourable friends — and our party’s activists in the country beyond, and the trades unions too, all of whose sympathies I shall have to enlist, that I have no doubt the voice must change. I believe the new voice could be mine.’

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