Teenage delegate cheered to rafters after speech railing against eduction cutbacks, writes MARK HENNESSYin Liverpool
NEARLY 35 years ago, a youthful William Hague brought Conservatives to their feet with a passionate defence of Thatcherism, before immediately being dubbed a leader-of-the- future – a role he did indeed come to fill – not very successfully – two decades later.
Yesterday a new pretender, perhaps, for such a future role, this time in the Labour Party, emerged at the party’s conference on Liverpool’s rejuvenated docks in the form of Rory Weal; but where Hague used humour, Weal used anger.
Railing against education cuts and tuition fee rises, the 16-year-old told delegates: “Two-and-a-half years ago, the home I had lived in since birth was repossessed . . . I owe my entire wellbeing and that of my family to the welfare state. That is why I joined the Labour Party.
“That very same welfare state is being ruthlessly ripped apart by a vicious, right-wing Tory-led government. I wouldn’t be here today if it wasn’t for that system, that safety net,” he went on, adding, “This Tory-led government seems to have it in for young people.”
The Weal family – single mother Elaine, younger sister Emma and Rory – lost their home, a family trauma that occurred while Labour’s Gordon Brown was still in power, when Elaine could no longer keep up mortgage payments.
Finishing his speech, his first to a Labour conference, Rory Weal was cheered to the rafters by delegates, many of whom came forward to pat him on the back as he came off the platform. Even Labour leader Ed Miliband joined in.
While Weal turned his fire upon Labour’s successors in office and reaped applause, Rhiannon Loughton’s condemnation of Miliband’s promise to cut tuition fees from £9,000 a year to £6,000 was greeted with silence from the top table.
“We shouldn’t be arguing about cutting fees. We should be talking about abolishing them,” she said, a message that clashed with shadow chancellor Ed Balls’s effort to restore the party’s credibility on economic matters.
In his speech, Balls warned: “It will not be enough to expose that David Cameron and George Osborne have got the economy badly wrong. We still know today what we recognised in 1994: we will never have credibility unless we have the discipline and the strength to take tough decisions.”
Before facing voters in 2015, Labour will pledge, he vowed, to live “by tough fiscal rules” – independently monitored by the Conservative-created Office of Budget Responsibility – to get the UK’s current budget back into the black and the national debt “on a downward path”.
Seeking to persuade the audience outside the Liverpool hall by his reasonableness, Balls said that “it’s not right to blame David Cameron and George Osborne for everything that’s wrong with our economy”, even if they have made the wrong choice by cutting too fast and too hard.
“They didn’t cause the global financial crisis. That crisis was a body blow to our economy and our public finances – we went into recession, lost tax revenues, a big deficit opened up. Whoever won the last election faced a difficult task,” he said.
The government parties had hoped that RBS and Lloyds – effectively nationalised in the 2008 economic crisis – could be sold off profitably before 2015 and the proceeds used “to pay for a pre-election giveaway”.
Labour, said Balls, would not do the same. Instead, such windfall gains – more unlikely now to materialise – would be put aside to repay part of the UK’s debt: “That will be Labour’s choice – fiscal responsibility in the national interest.”