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Health and Education

I am responsible for many things, but they do not include the headlines printed in The Times. My understanding is that that headline does not reflect the evidence, to which the piece refers, of the way in which standards are rising in our schools—and rising even faster, I am glad to say, in schools serving our most disadvantaged areas than in other parts of the education system. The values that I referred to are timeless, but they have to be applied in changing times, in a society in which people are better educated and informed and have higher expectations than in any previous generation. Everybody wants to be treated with full respect as an individual, with their particular needs and abilities properly recognised. So our challenge and our goal, as we embark on our third term in government, is nothing less than to create world-class public services that are fair to everybody and personal to each. That is our vision of public services for all of our people and not, as the Opposition tried to propose in the election campaign, just the privileged few. It was interesting listening to the hon. Member for South Cambridgeshire and reflecting on the election campaign in which we have just participated. In that campaign, the Conservatives did their best to avoid saying anything about their vision of public services and had nothing whatever to say about the economic policy that might enable the creation of world-class public services. They certainly did not want to talk about their policy to take billions of pounds out of public health and education to subsidise private provision for the few. I notice that the hon. Gentleman said nothing about those policies today. Indeed, his speech was, in most respects, a policy-free zone. He will certainly have to do better than that in the next election campaign that he intends to fight—I believe that it will be a little sooner than four years away.