Tony Blair's Bornemouth Speech

So when I speak of the need for a new moral purpose and some on the right and left rise up and say this is nothing to do with politics, leave it all to the bishops, I tell you these people know exactly what I’m talking about.

That’s what I mean by fulfilling our potential as citizens as well as workers.

We don’t live by material goods alone.

That’s why today we set out more plans to boost arts, culture, competitive sports in schools. It’s why John Prescott puts his heart and soul in the battle to protect our environment, so we leave to our children a safer, healthier planet than the one into which they were born.

Yes we are three times richer than our grandparents. But are we three times happier?

Ours is a moral cause, best expressed through how we see our families and our children.

To our children, we are irreplaceable.

If anything happened to me, you’d soon find a new leader. But my kids wouldn’t find a new Dad.

There is no more powerful symbol of our politics than the experience of being on a maternity ward.

Seeing two babies side by side. Delivered by the same doctors and midwives. Yet two totally different lives ahead of them.

One returns with his mother to a bed and breakfast that is cold, damp, cramped. A mother who has no job, no family to support her, sadder still – no-one to share the joy and triumph of the new baby … a father nowhere to be seen. That mother loves her child like any other mother. But her life and her baby's life is a long, hard struggle. For this child, individual potential hangs by a thread.

The second child returns to a prosperous home, grandparents desperate to share the caring, and a father with a decent income and an even larger sense of pride. They’re already thinking about schools, friends she can make, new toys they can buy. Expectations are sky high, opportunities truly limitless.