Mending our Broken Society

This week the Conservatives are focusing on our party’s central task: to mend our broken society. The crime, the disorder, the drug addiction, the alcohol abuse, the family breakdown, the entrenched poverty, the educational failure, the sink estates – we can’t go on like this. We need change to put our country back on its feet.

To mend our broken society, four areas of policy will be subject to our unremitting focus: fixing the criminal justice system, school reform, strengthening families and stimulating social action in our communities.

On Monday, we published our plans for school reform. Yesterday, we published our plans to tackle crime and antisocial behaviour. Today, we are publishing our proposals to make Britain more family friendly.

We can’t go on ignoring the importance of strong families. They provide the stability, warmth and love we need to flourish as human beings, and the relationships they foster are the bedrock on which society is built. But under Labour, Britain is one of the least family-friendly countries in the developed world. They have ignored families for 12 years, and even today they have no new ideas for how to support families. Their one headline today – greater rights for grandparents – was first suggested by David Willetts at our Party Conference.

This will change with a Conservative government – Britain’s families will get our full backing. A Conservative government will:


· end Labour’s couple penalty in the tax credit system;

· recognise marriage and civil partnerships in the tax system in the next Parliament;

· take Sure Start back to its original purpose of early intervention, increase its focus on the neediest families and better involve organisations with a track record in supporting families;

· provide 4,200 more health visitors to give all parents a guaranteed level of support before and after birth until their child starts school;

· extend the right to request flexible working to every parent with a child under the age of eighteen, and introduce a new system of flexible parental leave which lets parents share maternity leave.

For more information, or to view the families section of our draft manifesto, please click here.

Comments

Tim said…
"This week the Conservatives are focusing on our party’s central task: to mend our broken society."

Ah, how I love this ! Society, remember, "There's no such thing as society"

The pitiful window dressing listed here is going to make no difference. What this country needs now is JOBS. Even the fiddled figures put out by HM Government are shocking. Families fall apart and disintergrate because there are no breadwinners in the house. 50 years ago we used to make things, we used to mine coal, we built ships and we made cars. Many young people became apprentices, today this has all but disappeared.

Middle aged people like myself with 20+ years in IT are on the dole because it's cheaper to do the work in India whilst politicians sit back and do nothing about the wide scale visa abuses that have let this happen.

Money should be spent on training in new technologies and resources diverted into great public works programmes. Who can't have noticed that our roads are in a shocking state, that our Victorian sewers are crumbling away and that so many former industrial heartlands have been left to rot ?

The money is out there to fulfil these goals, even in these lean times, it's all a question of priorities.
Chris Whiteside said…
However frequently your quote from Mrs Thatcher is taken out of context like that, it is completely misleading. The full quote was a call for men and women to help other human beings, not to ignore them.

David Cameron put it much better when he said "There is such a thing as society: it's just not the same thing as the state."

This country does indeed need more jobs. There is no single magic bullet to achieve this, but one of the most effective ways is to get government off the backs of the small and large businesses and individuals so they have more opportunity to create new jobs and services.

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