I would be heartbroken if I ever thought that people in the Jewish community thought that Britain was no longer a safe place for them.
If you can work and if you’re offered a job and you don’t take it, you cannot continue to claim benefits. It will be extremely tough.
I mean, I’m a conservative. I believe that, you know, if you borrow too much, you just build up debts for your children to pay off. You put pressure on interest rates. You put at risk your economy. That’s the case in Britain. We’re not a reserve currency, so we need to get on and deal with this issue.
What we’re putting forward is the most radical reform of the welfare state… for 60 years. I think it will have a transformative effect in making sure that everyone is better off in work and better off working rather than on benefits.
It is so important for European countries, post-Second World War, to prove that they can be successful multiethnic and multiracial democracies. I think we in Britain have had great success in avoiding the hatreds and prejudices of the past.
On the one hand we have got to ask, are there some areas of universal benefits that are no longer affordable? But on the other hand let us look at the issue of dependency where we have trapped people in poverty through the extent of welfare that they have.
It’s everyone’s dread to lose a child. You lose someone you love so much, so young. It does hit you like nothing else, and there is a bit of you that thinks, well, if you can face that sort of challenge in your life, then it puts everything else into perspective.
At a time when we’re having to take such difficult decisions about how to cut back without damaging the things that matter the most, we should strain every sinew to cut error, waste and fraud.
Any government I lead will continue with the equality of gay and lesbian people.
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