74/06
12 October 2006
Speech by the Rt Hon Gordon Brown MP, Chancellor of the Exchequer, to the Donald Dewar Memorial Lecture, 12 October 2006
Check against delivery
Almost exactly six years ago Donald Dewar's funeral took place in Glasgow.
For those of us who were there in the cathedral, and there are many of us here today; those lining the streets of Glasgow - and there were many thousands; and those who watched it on television, as many millions did - it was surely one of the most moving public occasions that has ever taken place in Scotland.
All of us will have memories of that day:
the aching grief and disbelief at the suddenness of our loss;
the silence and solemnity in the great cathedral as the pallbearers set out down the nave bearing the coffin with its single red rose - the silence suddenly and heartrendingly broken by the sound of a lone fiddler - playing a man's a man for a' that;
and the crowds on the streets - Glaswegians of all ages, faiths and persuasions, Glaswegians in their thousands, lining their city's streets - hundreds of students lining the pavements near here -to say their farewells to Glasgow's greatest citizen. Not just Glasgow's, but Scotland 's greatest citizen.
Donald Dewar was a complex, private man, who, perhaps to his surprise, had become an inspiration to thousands of us - his friends, his staff, his colleagues and his constituents. A shy and unassuming man, who led his nation into devolution, and at the time of his death, left as his greatest legacy our first democratic Parliament.
So it is not just a pleasure, it is an honour to have been asked to give the first Donald Dewar memorial lecture.
To do so here in Glasgow - in his city, and in the university which shaped him, and in which he emerged as such a celebrated student debater and future politician; and to do so in the presence of his daughter and his son – in whom he rightly took so much pride.
Donald Dewar left a rich and complex political legacy – and tonight I want to address the contemporary significance of the ideas which brought Donald into politics, sustained him through its ups and downs, and are reflected in his lifelong commitment to social justice; where the ideas that drove Donald on originated, and what they now mean for the generation ahead.
And there is no better place to do so than in Glasgow university - once at the very heart of the enlightenment, and still today very much alive with the values of that remarkable and still influential intellectual flowering that began 250 years ago in a small, cold country in the far north-west of Europe.
But there is also no better place because we are here at Glasgow university among his old university friends who meant so much to him, and at his old university where, you might say, he always felt at home and which he never really left – and which celebrates him now with the kind of memorial that might have met with his approval – the Donald Dewar chair in social policy, held with distinction by Ruth Lister, whose path-breaking work on poverty and social change is known not just through Scotland and Britain, but has an influence on social policy throughout the world.
Everyone knows that from Glasgow, Donald went out to create the first democratic Scottish Parliament. And it was fitting that the task was discharged by someone who understood intimately what Scotland had brought to the Union and how it had benefited from that partnership. His cultural, literary and historical pedigree as a Scot was never in question but nor did that ever lead him to wish to break the Union of almost 3oo years or to diminish the shared experiences and ideals that partnership had wrought. He was a man whose patriotism to both Scotland and Britain were never in question.
But for Donald, constitutional reform with the establishment of a Scottish Parliament was never an end in itself. It was a means to an even greater end: a country of liberty and social justice.
And I know that successful as the author of the first democratic Scottish Parliament was, Donald would prefer to be remembered for his commitment to social justice - and for the difference his policies for economic and social justice made to people’s lives.
And in his all too short time as First Minister he had a clear mission: as Peter Jones writes, "social justice was invariably mentioned first whenever he listed his priorities for action."
In fact, in his St Andrew's Day lecture, appropriately in St Andrews, in November 1998 he set out a vision of devolution as the means to a better and fairer society: "constitutional change was just a stage towards a more equal Scotland."
"The next decade must not be one long embittering fight over further constitutional change," he said. "For me the question now is what we do with our Parliament not what we do to it... The great challenge for Scottish Parliamentarians is to build an inclusive Scotland". What mattered to Donald, as he said, was the agenda for social justice.
What made Donald the advocate of social justice lies deep in his roots and thinking.
Donald was a graduate in law, and a lawyer who never wavered from his core belief in the importance of civil, political and religious liberties as fundamental to the foundation of our society.
And he was a social democrat who believed in pursuing equality of opportunity to its limits, right across the economy, society, culture and politics.
Some suggest that people like Donald, who support equality have to sacrifice liberty in its achievement.
Donald himself saw no contradiction, indeed, for Donald, often quoting the writings of Tawney the opposite was true.
By tracing the roots of his beliefs, we see the importance he attached to an idea of liberty that did not descend into selfish individualism, but expanded into an idea of individual empowerment. And then, by appreciating the significance he attached to the idea of duty - the importance of not just the rights, but the responsibilities we owe to each other - we arrive at the core of his philosophy and his belief in equality not as an equality of outcome, a uniformity or sameness that might level people down, but a rich and expansive idea of pursuing an equality of opportunity across the economy, education and culture that would genuinely lift people up.
Indeed, Donald and I often discussed what, in the new century might be the right balance society sought between responsibilities and rights, to ensure young unemployed men and women went to work, encourage men and women off incapacity benefit and to help single parents find training and work.
Donald Dewar would have been the first to point to the influence on his thinking of ideas that came alive in the Scottish enlightenment - what he called a light held to the intellectual life of Europe - a light, he argued, important to making Britain the society it is, and can become. And it was of course here in lectures at this university two and a quarter centuries ago, that Adam Smith first laid the foundations of a modern moral philosophy and political economy.
My argument tonight is:
If the challenges of the last half of the last century focused on economic instability and prosperity, unemployment and underinvestment in our public services, the major challenges ahead are now also terrorism and security, global economic competition and climate change, and meeting the rising aspirations of individuals and the yearning for stronger communities;
that these challenges can best be met only by bringing out the best in people, and in their individual potential, and we do so by rediscovering and applying in our generation British ideas of liberty, responsibility and fairness;
and by a partnership that gives full place to the active, responsible citizen, the empowered community, and enabling, empowering government working together.
Indeed we will fully address these challenges only if we rediscover our rich culture of rights and responsibilities, if we remember the state is not master, but serves the people; and remember, also, that we will meet the challenges ahead best when individual civic society and the institutions of government work in partnership.
Let me explain: Britain is rightly identified throughout the world as the country which pioneered ideas of tolerance, and then liberty, and we should be proud that we not only restricted the power of monarchs but that Britain led the way in democratic reforms to restrict all forms of arbitrary power, and, over time, to guarantee political social and economic rights to all people.
But the ideas that were at the core of the Scottish enlightenment tell us why this British passion for liberty did not lead, as it did elsewhere to a cult of self interested individualism or to what Jonathan Sacks calls a 'British libertarianism'?
If we ask, 'what prevented the triumph of the idea of the abstract individual without ties or allegiances, other than those contractually entered into', the answer is that it was seen as a mark of British citizenship that people accepted they had responsibilities, as well as rights, that British people felt they had duties to discharge, as well as liberties to demand.
Adam Smith always believed his most important book was not the Wealth of Nations but the Theory of Moral Sentiments, the book he was revising at the time of his death.
“All for ourselves and nothing for other people” is a “vile maxim” he wrote, emphasising in his Theory of Moral Sentiments the helping hand of individuals supporting other individuals as complimentary to the “invisible hand” of his Wealth of Nations.
Of course, Smith and the Enlightenment writers wanted people freed from the shackles of obedience to monarchs, vested interests and all arbitrary power. That was they called for an end to state mercantilism, and why Smith identified free markets, and the division of labour, and its specialisation, as the route to trade and prosperity.
But while he wanted to remove these arbitrary constraints on citizens, he did not seek to remove all social bonds. The truth is that he wanted people freed from the old commands of the state, but civic responsibilities were a very different matter. Total freedom from them could diminish freedom. Civic duty mattered “whenever we feel the fate of others is our personal responsibility, we are less likely to stand idly by,” he wrote.
So, even when enlightenment philosophers marched under the banner of freedom, they did not argue that their view of freedom gave men and women immunity from the responsibility to serve their society.
And so, for two centuries marching side by side with the British idea of liberty has been that other great British idea of 'the active citizen', the 'good neighbour', and the good society, brought to life in the ideas of Burke's little platoon and in civic pride, in the ideas of a strong civic society and a public realm, and in the twentieth century the idea of fairness to all, founded on equality of opportunity. It was after all Adam Smith - seen by many as the apostle of unbridled free market capitalism favouring no role for the institutions of government - who argued for public works, the relief of poverty and, because he believed passionately in developing the potential of all individuals, “for a very small expense, the public can facilitate, can encourage and can even impose upon almost the whole body of the people, the necessity of acquiring those most essential parts of education. The public can facilitate this acquisition, by establishing in every parish or district a little school.”
So when I talk of how individual potential can best flourish and speak of a golden thread running through our history I mean that just as the powerful idea of liberty restricted the arbitrary exercise of power, so too the idea of responsibility - the idea that we are more than simply self interested individuals - came alive in the common endeavours of voluntary organisations, community action, faith groups and mutual associations as well as in families: people bound together in a genuinely British sense of personal and social responsibility.
And this passion for liberty for all combined with instinct for duty by all, leading to a belief in fairness to all has produced, over the generations, a uniquely British settlement that has balanced the rights and responsibilities of the individual, civic society and the great national institutions of our country and recognised the importance of them working together.
And this far richer relationship between individuals, civic society, and local and national institutions of government that we have pioneered in Britain, which saw British civic society lead movements from the anti-slavery cause to ‘Make Poverty History’ and led us to create such unique national institutions as the NHS and the BBC, is indeed quite exceptional: somewhat different from the idea of liberty, for example, in America – where liberty is sometimes roughly defined 'as leave me alone' - and different from the relationship between individuals and government in, for example, France where in the nineteenth century the contested power of the monarch gave way to the contested power of the state.
And whatever ideologues on all sides have said, the real issue for the British people has not been that of individual, society and institutions at ideological war with each other, but a quintessentially British and much more pragmatic question, namely how – starting from the potential of each individual – the practical relationships between individuals, civic society and institutions can work best for the people of this country to deliver liberty for all, community shared by all, and fairness to all – the British way a search for the best partnership, the British way that without all working together there never could be the strong sense of national purpose necessary for a nation to succeed.
And now facing new and distinctive 21st century challenges, I want to explain how that partnership can, and should, be strengthened to realise the potential of all, with the new emphasis not on the passive citizen but on the active, responsible citizen and on the empowered community, supported by enabling and empowering government serving the people and communities of the country.
Of course, some might think the right approach for the twenty first century is to promote a self interested individualism against the encroaching power of civic institutions and local and national government - the ‘no such thing as society’ school; others might want to argue that the right approach is to make civic society a cut price alternative replacing – indeed privatising – the work of the local and national institutions of government.
But if we take as an example of the challenges we face in the development of a new modern service like Sure Start – introduced for the under fives only recently - we see how individual potential is best realised in a working partnership involving responsible citizens and empowered community groups and supported by responsive and empowering local and national government.
For fifty years, the British welfare state failed young children in our country, offering the under fives little more than the benefit of maternity services for the mother, vaccination, and then, a demand to attend school at five; and failed to meet one of our great objectives - to bring out the best in children and their potential. Yet as Ruth Lister – Glasgow’s Donald Dewar professor has so eloquently shown us – the most formative months of a young child's life are the months when our public services have offered that child least - the first forty eight months. And in the last few years a transformation of services for the under fives is underway: an enabling government prepared in maternity rights, new children’s benefits, reading materials, nursery schools and Sure Start and children’s centres to support the efforts of both parents and community organisations in civic society.
In developing policy for children’s centres with my colleagues I and others insisted that voluntary associations, parents and charities not only be involved but help run the new services, in other words that we formed a partnership of parents, civic society, and local and national institutions of government. In different areas of the country different kinds of partnerships, as well as a different range of services, from health advice to parenting classes have evolved, but what they have in common is that parents and the local community are at the centre, in the driving seat.
And in children’s centre after children’s centre I have visited, I see parents who themselves often had enjoyed little opportunity in their own early lives, taking responsibility and engaged in running the centres – a great example of partnership at work for the benefit of children.
When I visited Broadwater Farm, one of the poorest areas of the country, I saw how local mothers were not only building a children’s centre, but from that centre they were rebuilding their whole community. And I believe we are creating in the local children’s centre a very British kind of institution, which will rank alongside the local school and the local hospital – not the centre, or even my centre, but our children’s centre.
But Sure Start and children’s centres could not have happened without the investment and the catalytic and coordinating role of local and national government. And so, the way forward in encouraging the flourishing of the individual potential of children is not to assume a divorce between community action and government nor to assume that if you enlarge the civic space you need to diminish the contribution of the public realm, but a partnership where each helps the other: the active parent, the empowered community associations and an enabling government. And it is for these reasons that across Britain one of the greatest changes we will see in the years to 2010 will be the increase in children’s centres from 1,000 to nearly 4,000.
Sure Start children’s centres emphasise the critical importance of another area undervalued in the past – the one to one relationships that are vital for addressing the needs not just of infants with learning difficulties and young children who fall behind, but teenagers with behavioural problems, young offenders liable to re-offend, and adults with basic skills needs, as well as disabled men and women and sufferers of chronic illnesses in need of attention.
Such needs cannot be met without government investment, but can only be successfully met with that investment backed up by one-to-one support, the face-to-face, person-to-person relationships that are at the heart of building personal confidence in the bleakest of areas and among people and places that prosperity has too often passed by: the very relationships that require active citizens prepared to give of their time to help fellow citizens, strong voluntary and community organisations, backed up by public investment.
But when some assume that all that voluntary organisations want is to be free of government, let me tell you of Britain's six million carers, many of whom I meet in every part of the country, men and women for whom caring is not just a profession but a life’s work in support of people close to them, men and women who have few rights and few opportunities to better themselves. Carers are not asking for government to get out of the way, to leave them alone, rightly men and women who are carers want pensions and time off with respite care and an understanding of their financial positions. Theirs is not a call for less action by our great national institutions, whether it be on the health service to on our pensions service: they want us to do more and they are right.
But if you asked people from the 1940s onwards and even to as late as 1997 what the main challenges Britain faced, they would almost certainly have said: economic stability and prosperity, full employment and proper investment in our public services.
Today, everyone would acknowledge that while these will remain a task for all of us, we face new and even more profound challenges ahead:
terrorism which makes it ever more difficult to meet the challenge of creating security for all;
global economic competition which forces us to consider new measures that will ensure opportunity for all;
climate change, where the challenge is how by ensuring responsibility by all we can maintain continued prosperity for all.
And I would identify the next two as two major social forces to which we must respond - rising individual aspirations, not least for public services tailored to people's personal needs, to which we must respond; and, faced with greater global insecurities than ever before, a clear yearning for stronger communities.
So, creating the best possible relationship between individual, civic society and state to ensure individual potential can flourish is even more important than ever in the times to come because of the underlying forces at work – the dramatic and unparalleled speed, scope and scale of change; the increased sense that individuals have of their own autonomy and wanting to direct their own lives; and the growing global interdependence where what happens to the poorest citizen in the poorest country can affect the richest citizen in the richest country almost immediately.
And what the challenges we face – to ensure individual potential flourishes in a new world – have in common is that they cannot be successfully met either by government just pulling old levers; or in a knee jerk reaction abandoning our great modern national institutions, leaving individuals and communities unaided to meet the challenges, using charities as some cut price alternative to government, instead of partners in a shared enterprise.
Most challenges will need both the investment and support of the local and national institutions of government and individuals and communities prepared to take more responsibility for themselves: responsible, empowered individuals in the driving seat, responsive empowering government working with them.
And flowing from these changes is the recognition that the big challenges we face cannot be successfully met and individual potential flourish without evolving a twenty first century constitutional settlement of the relationship between individuals, their communities and government - founded on the responsible citizen, the empowered community and enabling government.
In fact, I am far more optimistic now than I was in 1997 about the power of us working together to shape a new settlement to meet the challenges ahead.
I am optimistic first of all because of the dynamism and power of what I see as the great forces of change today in British civic society: the growing role of social enterprise, the expanding corporate social responsibility of companies, the proliferation of local community and environmental action, the innovation and diversity of the third sector as a whole
And in the next few weeks at a series of events and visits I will to acknowledge the vital and increasing role these great forces for change and improvement play in local and national community life. I want us to champion social enterprise, to champion corporate social responsibility and to champion community and environmental action, including the new national youth community service it has been my privilege to help create –and the forthcoming internet portal for young people that will back it up
In my own constituency - which because of the collapse of mining employment has suffered high unemployment - I am privileged to have worked with people motivated by that driving power of social conscience, who in the highest unemployment community of the constituency have created a school for social entrepreneurs, dozens of social enterprises for environmental and community improvement, a myriad of new local clubs especially new local initiatives for mothers and children, built dozens of new opportunities for youth engagement as volunteers in local community service, and only last week the creation of a new youth development trust using football and sports to undertake youth and community work in the area.
And that when in our generation Robert F Kennedy argued that the future lay in citizen participation and community self government, and foresaw a modern idea of the empowered citizen and the empowered community, he echoed a strong British tradition of civic engagement I would like to recapture.
It is right that local councils, not Whitehall, should have more power over the things that matter to their community from economic regeneration to public transport: neighbourhood charters, community petitions, community mechanisms to trigger action, rights to recall officials, greater community control, with even for the smallest community local budgets for local community facilities that can be voted on by local people.
Two decades ago, if I am honest, I did wonder whether we could ever find a way to realise the full potential of our communities and our country.
And while obviously we dreamt, hoped and planned it seemed difficult in bleaker days to imagine Britain as a country with the potential to lead the new global economy and be a beacon for countries where economic progress and social justice advance together.
And after nine years in government, I am more optimistic we are finding a British way forward - founded on applying our enduring values to new challenges - not just because I see new forces of change at work in our communities, but also because I believe that as individuals and as communities we are ready to take more responsibility and to recognise the importance of active engagement as citizens.
Today, as a society, we are far more aware of the potential of people, and of the range and diversity of that talent – that was never properly picked up in IQ tests that dealt only with one type of analytical intelligence – and how, if potential is not encouraged and developed, both individuals and the whole community will lose out. And if, in the past, too many people have made the mistake of thinking of the passive individual given things by the state, in the future our programmes to empower patients, parents, tenants and citizens start from this expansive idea of human potential - the untapped talents and abilities of people - that can be realised and by us championing the aspirational individual, the responsible parent, the informed patient, the active citizen.
And I am more optimistic of Britain leading the world as a beacon for meeting the great challenges ahead for a third and more fundamental reason - that we can draw upon the very richness of the partnership Britain has pioneered between individuals, civic society and our great local and national institutions of government.
Take the challenge of health care. Good health will need the investment and care of the national health service, and but will also need to empower individuals and families to take more active personal responsibility not just as better informed patients but in giving attention to their fitness and wellbeing - and will need to empower also the wide range of groups in civic society from sports clubs to support organisations that focus on fitness, diet and make public and individual focus on good health a priority.
It emphasises that the politics of the future will be as much about cultural change as about economic mechanisms and the twenty first century will be characterised by a richer debate about the personal and social responsibility of individuals and societies, and how they can change behaviour and apply their values and beliefs to meet the challenges of the time. And that change is founded on the achievement of persuading people of the need for effective investment for the future of our country in our public services. As David Brooks has written: “if the great contest of 20th century was free market versus planned economies, the big questions of this century are how cultures change and can be changed and how social and cultural capital can be nurtured.”
And I am also optimistic because over the last nine years I have seen local and national institutions of government start to change, too often seen as old top down command and control mechanisms, now becoming more responsive and supportive partners in support of the efforts of millions of individuals -----and I can see the potential for much more. We are now embarked upon transforming the culture of government from controlling to enabling, from directing to empowering, work in progress - work to be stepped up in the years to come.
The fact is, you cannot master the challenges ahead the old way with the old political and constitutional arrangements. It cannot be done by the old politics of a political class believing they were born to govern and a passive electorate. If today, each challenge can be met only by people as individuals and in communities working together with our great national institutions, with elected politicians uniquely conscious of their position as servants of the British people in this process, then constitutional change is necessary and urgent. I first spoke about and wrote of the servant state in 1992. And the 21st century insight is that each challenge needs not just investment by the community but also the active involvement of citizens, and so we need not just new policies but a new politics, starting from an active national engagement of the British people: the responsible citizen, empowered communities and an enabling accountable state.
So with changing challenges, different kinds of challenges and now different ways of meeting these challenges, what is new in the partnership is a broader vision of the more active responsible citizen, the empowered community and the enabling accountable state - bringing to life for our modern world the British culture of rights and responsibilities, of a Britain where liberty and duty march forward together - and in doing so modernising for our generation the relationship between individual community and our great national institutions.
Take the most complex issue of security against terrorism - military and security action and policing, important and vital in themselves, will not on their own isolate the extremists who threaten our society and separate them from moderate opinion: our aim is to find partners not terrorists. And we can succeed only if we also win hearts and minds and indeed if we cannot persuade people to enlist on our side in this battle of ideas then we will not win it.
Take global economic competition - we know that we cannot compete any longer on low pay but can compete only on higher skills, but we must draw the logical conclusion from this: investment is critical but we need more than investment: our country will succeed best if we actively encourage the potential of people and indeed mobilise the talents of all people and persuade the whole country of the priority we attach to mobilising the talents of all people. If people themselves do not take on the challenge for themselves of upgrading their own skills, then we will not be successful in meeting global competition.
Take the environment - regulation and investment are necessary to address climate change, but not sufficient. We now know that the British people must actively take personal and social responsibility for changing the way we use our resources, so it is about the responsibilities we owe each other. If we could not persuade you that we need greater personal and social responsibility for the environment complimenting new investment in improving the investment then we will not meet and master the challenge of climate change.
Take the building of stronger communities, investment is critically important, especially after decades of chronic underinvestment. But we will not succeed unless we match that investment with people themselves engaging directly in their own communities in strengthening their own community life. If we could not persuade the British people that they should be involved in their own communities as active and responsible citizens then communities will be deprived of what makes them strong - the engagement of citizens.
And the challenge of a new individualism, of rising aspirations, again not to be met just by investment in public services but by putting people in the driving seat and tailoring the service to their needs but also recognising as parents or patients or as citizens we must take some responsibility for meeting our needs.
So, learning from our experience the challenges we face are best met by people taking more responsibility, as active citizens not passive spectators, citizens and communities supported by an enabling state; a 21st century partnership between the individuals, civic society and our great national institutions.
And this is the agenda I will discuss in future months. And I challenge all parties to work on this agenda as a matter of national interest, or if they do not believe it the right agenda to put forward concrete proposals of their own.
But when we explain the rich complexity of the historic relationship between individual civic society and our great national institutions that has been the hallmark of what it is to be British, let us never ever fall for simplistic 20th century caricatures invariably drawn from 19th century models of what never was, and a misreading of 18th century thinkers who were far more profound and rounded than their devotees are prepared to admit.
Let us now draw upon the richness of our history as a pioneering nation - and our pioneering role in forging modern relationships between individuals, our society and the institutions of government - to address the 21st century challenges with 21st century answers and show the world how with individuals, communities and the great national institutions of government working better together we can meet and master the challenges ahead.
Tonight I want to conclude, true to Donald's enduring passions and concerns – by focusing here in Glasgow on two of these challenges always central to Donald Dewar's public service - how by individuals, civic society and government working more effectively together we can encourage employment and the skills for employment we need for the future - and how we can take the next steps to improve the education of young people in our country.
In 1997 the agenda of rights and responsibilities of individuals communities and government focused on our new deal - new opportunities for the unemployed in return for the obligations to take work that was on offer. And I have said that we have not done enough to promote a philosophy which emphasises rights and responsibilities together, and whether it is support for parents needing help; children falling behind at school; young people demanding youth services; adults in need of jobs or skills, I do not think that in government New Labour has yet been New Labour enough in promoting a philosophy which emphasises these opportunities and duties together.
In employment, the world has moved forward quickly even since 1997. The pace of change means that now you will have seven separate jobs in your working life. With China and India producing 4 million graduates - over 10 times as many as Britain - the race is to the top not the bottom and almost everyone will have to continuously upgrade their skills
Today the British economy has just 9 million highly skilled jobs. By 2020 it will need 14 million highly skilled jobs. And of 3.4 million unskilled jobs today, we will need only 600,000 by 2020.
Meeting this challenge demands a new understanding of our all of our responsibilities as employees, employers and government.
Full employment is no longer about pressurising companies to keep you in a job that is redundant; instead it is government's job to help equip you for future employment and your personal responsibility to try and secure the skills you need. In other words no longer keeping you in the last job if it is redundant but helping you acquire the next job.
So we are transforming the New Deal into a New Deal for skills – helping individuals not just to acquire a job, but to retrain and re-skill and to get their next one too. And Scotland is proposing to lead the way with a full employment agency.
And at the heart of the England programme of Train to Gain - which Alan Johnson and I launched last month – the first national employer training programme is a new partnership:
individuals recognising their responsibilities to take up the opportunities to train and upskill;
employers recognising their responsibilities for a skilled and productive workforce through offering paid time off and engaging with their local colleges;
and government recognising our responsibility to fund workplace training for the low skilled, to increase workplace apprenticeships and to create multiple points of entry in college training establishments and even through the internet and high street as we well as the workplace for people to get skills.
As with skills, shared responsibility is also at the heart of how we should address another of the big challenges we face as a country: achieving excellence in education.
From the first session of the first Scottish Parliament, Scotland led the way in the introduction of classroom assistants – controversial at the time - but now hailed as vital step in freeing teachers to teach, raising standards, supporting better learning and instilling aspirations in the next generation. And what followed here in Glasgow was a daring plan in partnership rebuild and re-new every secondary school in the city. Now universally acclaimed as the launch pad for today's plans to refurbish all schools, primary as well as secondary.
In his first report on social exclusion Donald Dewar pleaded that we must ''continually develop new ideas and innovative solutions." And Jack McConnell has rightly made the promotion of aspiration and the pursuit of excellence in our schools the central feature of his programme for government in the next Parliament.
Too many of our children and young people still do not achieve their full potential - wasted opportunities and sometimes wasted lives that we should not tolerate.
For example underachievement among boys has become a particularly acute problem we must address in the years ahead.
Even though results have improved significantly over the last decade for girls and boys, the gender gap which opened up twenty years ago remains stubbornly large - overall, in England 61 per cent getting 5 good GCSEs for girls compared to 51 per cent for boys, and in Scotland 24 per cent getting three or more Highers for girls, compared to 18 per cent for boys. This gender gap exists across all the phases of schooling, but gets larger amongst teenagers. It exists across a wide range of subject areas, though it is particularly pronounced in relation to English where in England there is a fourteen point difference. While pronounced amongst black Caribbean boys, it affects all ethnic and racial groups. It exists across all social classes. Indeed it exists across different types of school - both high-performing and underperforming, both private and state. And it is a problem that is international in nature - existing in countries such as the USA, Holland and Australia.
So this is deep-rooted and complex, revealing not just a poverty of opportunity but often a poverty of aspirations.
Some of this gender gap appears to be due to what goes on inside the classroom - boys and girls appear to learn in different ways and at different paces. But a proper understanding requires us to look beyond the school gate to the far reaching social, economic and cultural changes that have taken place over recent decades.
We have seen a dramatic shift in employment patterns: from manual to service sector jobs, and from low-skill to high-skill labour, just as there has been a shift in the nature of the personal and social skills needed to get on in the modern workplace. So boys who struggle academically or come from backgrounds with low aspirations can easily feel excluded from a young age.
And the cultural and social influences on childhood and adolescence have also changed beyond all recognition over the last generation, with not only the enormous growth in access to the internet - three quarters of children have IT at home - and ownership of mobile phones but the intensification of targeted marketing, making it more difficult to address fitness, diet, obesity and leaving children open to influences from which, in previous generations, they have been sheltered.
One priority I have argued for is what I call a fathers’ revolution – with more fathers becoming directly involved in their children's learning and schooling. And this is more important given the threefold increase in one parent families over thirty years and too often boys' loss of contact with male role models.
And we must do more to encourage dads' role in the home;
build from the near threefold increase in three years in the numbers of dads working flexitime following the birth of a child;
and, as the UK Social Exclusion Action Plan proposes, intervene early where there is indiscipline, anti social behaviour and chaotic family life.
Let me be clear. Many of the changes we have seen are positive and many children will not only be coping with them but thriving. Indeed, in many ways, this is the best ever time to be growing up for both boys and girls - with higher living standards, better school results, more opportunities to get involved after school, higher numbers staying on in learning after 16 and then going on to university, and greater access to information, culture and ideas from all over the world than ever before.
But for many boys and young men this is a time of uncertainty; too many under-perform and some risk falling into the margins of our society, unable to play their full part as citizens, employees and future fathers. We must never accept the existence of a wasted generation of boys.
Schools alone can't solve this problem. Nor can parents. Aspirations, expectations, the whole frame of reference for a young boy also come from the wider community that they grow up in. So the role of local leaders and voluntary and community groups all matter as well.
We need responsible parents and empowered local communities working in partnership with our great public institutions - schools, colleges, children's centres - to provide a shared response.
And as Jack McConnell has also said, we need to change what we do both in the classroom - and beyond the school gate.
Scotland is leading the way in vocational education, creating opportunity and choice for all young Scots. Jack McConnell’s plans to create 100 Skills Academies in schools and colleges across Scotland will give Scottish teenagers the chance to learn a trade or a skill, but more importantly to give the opportunity for young people to excel at something they enjoy and which Donald would have approved - boosting aspiration and lifting confidence.
And Alan Johnson and I have asked Christine Gilbert in her review of personalisation in England to focus in particular on those boys who are most at risk of falling behind: whether and how in the classroom we need to do more to personalise boys’ learning to their needs; and given that it is known that some boys get bored easily, tend to respond more to activity based learning, flourish where there is access to computers, and need clear targets, what action we should take.
Across the whole of the United Kingdom we need to examine what more we need to do to harness the contribution of boys themselves, encouraging a stronger sense of discipline, ambition and personal responsibility whether from sports, community service or other activities. And given that we know the most powerful encouragement for younger boys can come from older teenagers, we will consider doing more, as we did in the last Pre Budget Report, to encourage mentoring.
And in Britain we already have 400,000 schools board members or parent governors – and new powers for parents to shape their children's schools. But building on the thousands of extended schools already opening longer, many here in Glasgow, we need far more parental involvement and far more of our schools extending and deepening their links with parents and their community:
whether it be breakfast and after-school clubs, run by volunteers and parents, as well as by professionals;
weekend schools and summer schools, putting schools at the centre of community life;
or offering boys structured activities from sports and arts to community service and cadets that they may not find elsewhere;
and at all times mindful of the need for parents, for the wider community and for schools to encourage the cultural change we know we need: that boys are challenged to reach higher, fulfill their potential and bridge the gap between what they are and what they have in them to become.
For Donald Dewar no child should be born to fail. And no one should be left out or left behind
For him, every single child was unique and irreplaceable
for him every single child had a talent and had potential;
every single child had the right to the best possible start in life;
no child’s hopes should be dashed or potential lost, their talents squandered;
no-one should have diminished dreams or lesser lives simply because of where they were born.
Today he would be calling on us to do things about children
to recognise the untapped potential of children by increasing investment in pre school education;
to give children the best chance of using their talents by raising the child tax credit to take more children out of poverty;
to make sure we bring out the ability in every one by raising state school investment per pupil to those of private schools;
and surely he would be the first to say that we needed both government and education, health and social professionals to work together, and to help parents take more responsibility.
Did he not challenge in that great speech in the opening session of the Scottish Parliament to do more for those born on the wrong side of the social arithmetic, so that we could meet our goal of halving child poverty by 2010 and abolishing it in a generation?
So here in Glasgow six years on from Donald Dewar’s tragic death we recognise his heritage and celebrate it.
But of course Donald being Donald he would not have though much of that. He would have demanded more: “what are you going to do about it? What are you going to do about child poverty? The lack of opportunity? The wasted potential?”
For Donald politics was about action, action in the service of those who most needed action.
Donald believed passionately in the usefulness of politics: as he said to one of his staff in what were to be his last few hours: “couldn't you be doing something more useful than just sitting here talking to me?”
So we can see Donald Dewar as a thoughtful and committed inheritor of the values of the Scottish enlightenment;
one who needed no reminding of our moral duties to each other;
a man who with Lincoln was determined to listen to the better angels of our nature;
who with Sir William Beveridge sought to liberate the driving power of social conscience;
who held the belief that there is some impulse even greater than enlightened self interest: call it as Smith did the moral sense, call it as Winstanley did the light in man, call it the soul of man – a moral sentiment that animate us as human beings – even human beings in the most comfortable and sheltered of places, to sympathise with those in need and can inspire us even to anger at injustices and at inhumanity when it blights then lives of people in the remotest and harshest corner of the Earth.
and at all times shining through would be Donald’s sheer indignation at the persistence of preventable inequality.
So Donald Dewar’s true legacy here in Scotland and more widely across the UK is that passionate commitment to fairness, a ceaseless restless drive to eliminate injustice, and his continuing anger at the inequality of life chances even within his own constituency here in Glasgow.
These are the values he championed even unto death;
back to topvalues of liberty, responsibility and fairness that resonate loud and clear across our country;
universal values that reverberate across the world;
values that as long as we remember the life of Donald Dewar no one in Scotland will ever forget.