Speech on Conservative Party policy (extract)

              CONSERVATIVE AND UNIONIST CENTRAL OFFICE
RELEASE TIME
6645   14.30 hours / 6 July 57
Extract from a speech by The Rt. Hon. D. HEATHCOAT AMORY, M.P., (Tiverton, Devon) Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries and Minister of Food, at South Molton, Devon on Saturday 6th July, 1957
We are fortunate in having, as Prime Minister, a man of the highest possible calibre. At a time when our country is having to reshape its policies and outlook in order to maintain and enhance our influence in a rapidly changing world, it is fine that we have at our head a man who has, throughout his career, shown himself to be forward-looking and interested in shaping policies to the needs of the future.
Britain cannot live on the glories of our past - great as these have been. We must be young and vigorous and dynamic. Wide and stimulating opportunities are before us in plenty if we have the enterprise and the will to grasp them. When one looks ahead at the scope and the opportunities, there are no possible grounds for the defeatism which one finds in some quarters to-day.
I believe we are on the threshold of challenging developments. Britain's influence in the new world which is unfolding can be immense and far greater than our physical resources alone would indicate. In this situation, we require something much more robust and dynamic than the Welfare State which has been a fashionable concept since the war. That is why the modern Conservative Party is basing its policies not on a society based on the Welfare State, as we have come to know it, but on a society in which the dynamic force will be the widest possible opportunity regardless of an individual's start in life. A society in which the fit and able-bodied will take a pride in standing on their own feet and carrying their own proper individual responsibilities instead of throwing all their troubles on the State - but a society which accepts its responsibilities to the elderly, the young and the unfit. A
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Issued by the Press Department, Conservative Central Office, Abbey House, 2-8, Victoria Street, Westminster, S.W.1.
(Telephone : ABBey 9000)