May will appeal for the support of ‘working class’ voters today
PRIME Minister Theresa May will deliver her flagship conference speech today with a bid for the support of “ordinary working-class people”.
The Conservative leader will attempt to park her tanks on Labour’s lawn and claim the centre ground for her party.
Mrs May will challenge both the “socialist left” and the “libertarian right” and insist that Government can be a “force for good”.
She will pledge to put the “power of government squarely at the service of ordinary working-class people”.
Turning her guns on Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party, she will say: “The main lesson I take from their conference last week is that the Labour party is not just divided, but divisive, determined to pit one against another.”
Rejecting the politics of “pointless protest”, she will say: “So let’s have no more of Labour’s absurd belief that they have a monopoly on compassion. Let’s put an end to their sanctimonious pretence of moral superiority.
“Let’s make clear that they have given up the right to call themselves the party of the NHS, the party of the workers, the party of public servants.”
Stating her intent to position the Conservatives at the heart of the political mainstream, she will say: “I want to set our party and our country on the path towards the new centre ground of British politics – built on the values of fairness and opportunity – where everyone plays by the same rules and where every single person, regardless of their background or that of their parents, is given the chance to be all they want to be.”
Arguing that in the past Governments have not always delivered for Britain’s working classes, she will say: “Just listen to the way a lot of politicians and commentators talk about the public. They find their patriotism distasteful, their concerns about immigration parochial, their views about crime illiberal, their attachment to their job security inconvenient.
“They find the fact that more than 17 million people voted to leave the European Union simply bewildering.”
The Tory leader, in her second major speech of the conference, will say that a “change has got to come” and tell her audience it is “time to remember the good that Government can do”.
Mrs May will say the “state exists to provide what individual people, communities and markets cannot” and the “power of Government” should be employed “for the good of the people”.
The PM will outline her hopes for a Government that “steps up – and not back – to act on behalf of the people”.
She will describe her hopes to lead a Government that provides security not just from crime but from “ill-health and unemployment”.
As well as supporting free markets, she wants the Government she leads to step in “to repair them when they aren’t working as they should”.
She will say: “[If] we do – if we act to correct unfairness and injustice and put Government at the service of ordinary working people – we can build that new united Britain in which everyone plays by the same rules, and in which the powerful and the privileged no longer ignore the interests of the people.”