BRITISH PRIME minister David Cameron’s leader’s address to the Conservative Party’s annual conference yesterday was marred after he was forced to make last-minute changes to the speech. This followed concern that a call to the British public to pay off their debts would threaten to tip the country back into recession.
In a summary of the speech released in advance late on Tuesday, Mr Cameron had been supposed to tell delegates in Manchester: “The only way out of a debt crisis is to deal with your debts. That means households – all of us – paying off the credit card and store card bills. It means banks getting their books in order.”
Following charges that the prime minister was exhorting the public to stop spending, party officials struggled first to argue that the speech had been misunderstood, before accepting that it had not been.
Finally, a section of the speech was rewritten to read: “The only way out of a debt crisis is to deal with your debts. That’s why households are paying down their credit card and store card bills.”
Mr Cameron was speaking on a day when the UK’s first-quarter growth figures were revised downwards, to just 0.1 per cent, less than the 0.2 per cent originally estimated. This is leading to fears that the UK could go back into recession later this year if export sales are affected further by the euro crisis and the slowing United States economy.
Intended as a speech to instil confidence, it will, however, not go down as one of Mr Cameron’s best, despite frequent exhortations to the British public to “turn this time of challenge into a time of opportunity”.
In one of the most passionate parts of the speech, Mr Cameron defended plans to make gay marriage legal: “I once stood before a Conservative conference,” he said, “and said it shouldn’t matter whether commitment was between a man and a woman, a woman and a woman or a man and another man. You applauded me for that.
“And to anyone who has reservations I say: Yes, it is about equality, but it is also about something else: commitment. Conservatives believe in the ties that bind us; that society is stronger when we make vows to each other and support each other. So I don’t support gay marriage despite being a Conservative. I support gay marriage because I am a Conservative,” he declared.
Urging companies “to start, grow, thrive and succeed”, the prime minister said: “When you step off the plane in Delhi or Shanghai or Lagos, you can feel the energy, the hunger, the drive to succeed. We need that here. Frankly, there’s too much ‘can’t do’ sogginess around. We need to be a sharp, focused, can-do country.”
The pessimism about the UK’s future was evident, he said, when he argued earlier this year for military action to stop Col Muammar Gadafy. “It wasn’t that some people thought we shouldn’t do what we did. Of course, it was everyone’s right to disagree. It was that too many thought Britain actually couldn’t do something like that any more.”
Mr Cameron’s speech was not preceded by the usual “warm-up” of a senior colleague.
Instead, cabinet ministers and leading MPs urged Conservatives to donate to the East Africa Appeal, which is working to deal with the drought in Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia. This was followed by a report on the success to date of the Cameron-inspired National Citizens’ Service – a volunteer group for 16-year-olds.
Despite the clear desire of many of his party for overseas aid cuts, Mr Cameron said the UK would pay for 60 million vaccinations over the next few years. “I really believe, despite all our difficulties, that this is the right thing to do. That it’s a mark of our country, and our people, that we never turn our backs on the world’s poorest, and everyone in Britain can be incredibly proud of it.”
