“This is not a Clause IV moment, it is a Clause I moment” – full text of Dan Jarvis’ speech to Progress conference

You can also watch Dan Jarvis’ speech in full here.

It’s great to be here – although like everyone I hoped to be coming to this conference under very different circumstances.

It has been a sobering week for us all.

And I want to begin by paying tribute to my great friend Jim Murphy, following his decision to step down as Leader of the Scottish Labour Party.

Jim was a fearless campaigner who stood up to lead Scottish Labour in difficult times.

And he deserves our gratitude and applause for everything he’s done for the Labour cause. 

I also want to thank Richard Angell and the team here at Progress.

I know there is nothing you wanted more than a Labour victory and to welcome Ed Miliband to this conference as our Prime Minister.

But let me say this – Progress have done a great service for our party today.

You’ve brought our movement together to reflect on the scale of our defeat, and to think about where we go from here. 

And that’s the only way we can go forward.

Together. Side by side. As a united Labour team.  

Let me start by getting something out of the way.

I’ve been humbled by the generous things people have said over recent days, and the many kind messages of support.

All I can say is this.

I’ve made my decision. 

And I won’t be changing my decision.

It’s the right decision for my family.

I’ll just say this though –  

I never knew there were quite so many babysitters in the Labour Party…

But if I ever needed a reminder about the perils of juggling politics with family, then I got one yesterday, when I sent a text message to my wife Rachel.  

Only I accidentally sent it to Rachel Reeves, our brilliant Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary….!

I think the phrase is ‘hashtag awkward…’

But let me say something serious about this.

Because I was sorry to hear about Chuka’s decision yesterday. 

It’s always horrible see a friend and colleague feeling hounded like that. 

Someone asked me what I thought it said about our public life that we’d both come to the decisions we have. 

I think it highlights that we have a very consuming political culture.

One that’s increasingly remote from people’s lives and is very demanding on all of us.

And I’m not really thinking about the people we’ve heard on this stage – I’m thinking about everyone in this room.

I think about the people not in this room because they don’t have the time to come to a political conference on a Saturday.

I think about the working mums and dads I met on the campaign trail who’ll never make it to a CLP meeting.

And that is the way we need to think now as a Labour party – in re-connecting with the public and reassessing how we do our politics.

Because these are voices that we didn’t have with us at this election.

They are the people we need to reach.

And a party founded to give a voice to working people should not set our ambitions any lower than that.

General Elections are big moments.

They stay with us and shape us for years to come. 

And this result will cast a long shadow.  

It was tragedy for our country and a tragedy for our party.

I remember where I was at the end of the 2005 General Election campaign:

I was on a bunk bed in Afghanistan, listening to the results coming in over the radio, from the UK’s military headquarters in Kabul.

It was the moment when I first began to think seriously that I could make a difference through politics.

All of us will have had a similar moment that brought us into this campaign.

And I look around this room and see familiar faces from the doorsteps we campaigned on across the country.

From battles won and too many battles lost.

We should be proud of the hard work we put in.

We didn’t lose this election because we didn’t campaign hard enough.

All we can do now is use this moment to strengthen ourselves for the road ahead.

So remember where you were when David Dimbleby read out that exit poll.

Remember how you felt when they called Nuneaton, and Vicky Fowler lost. 

Bottle that feeling and hold it tightly for the next five years.

Because this is not a time to mourn.

It is a time for us to start again.

To reflect, renew and reconnect.

And there is much we need to reflect on.

The electoral map has been fractured, Britain’s future place in the world is uncertain, and the very existence of our United Kingdom is in question. 

There is so much that it is right with Britain today, but we know this is a country crying out for change.

Many will now be fearful of what changes lie ahead under a majority Conservative Government.

Because be in no doubt – we now have a Prime Minister chained to the will of his most troublesome and most ideological backbenchers.

And David Cameron is going to keep every promise he’s made to them.

Whether it’s real terms cuts to the schools budget, eroding rights at work, or scrapping laws that protect our basic freedoms. 

So whatever happens over the coming months, we must not let the Tories off the hook.

We will hold them to account and do our duty as an Opposition.

But we also need to ask tough questions of ourselves if we want to get back into government.

Because nine days ago we asked the British people to choose between the Labour Party and a government that had presided over the slowest economic recovery in 100 years, that lost our Triple A credit rating, left thousands of families relying on food banks, ignored victims of crime, inflicted the Bedroom Tax on the most vulnerable, vandalised our National Health Service, left patients being treated in car parks, and failed in its core promise to balance our nation’s books.

And yet we were still defeated.

More than that – David Cameron was returned to Downing Street with a greater mandate from the British people. 

If that does not make us fundamentally question our future direction as a Labour Party, nothing will.

There was a time when people used to talk about ‘Clause 4 moments’ during Labour leadership elections.

But this isn’t a Clause 4 moment. – 

This is a Clause 1 moment.

Our mission is the basic purpose written into our constitution – ‘to maintain a political Labour Party in Parliament and in the country.’

That is what is at stake.

Because our party faces immense challenges ahead.

We were wiped out in Scotland, went backwards in Wales and were rejected in England.

Put London to one side, and as many people have walked on the moon as the number of Labour MPs elected across the South West, South East and East of England.

That’s 12 Members of Parliament across a population of 20 million people.

That’s not good enough. I want those people to have Labour MPs – they need our representation too. 

And we were challenged in our traditional heartlands as well.

UKIP may only have retained one seat, but they cost us constituencies we needed to win and contributed to some excellent Labour MPs losing their seats.

And don’t be fooled by the chaos unfolding at UKIP HQ.

Because the winds of populism and discontent blowing across the continent are much stronger than the hot air being produced by Nigel Farage and Douglas Carswell.

UKIP are not going away. And we need to take them on.

The Labour Party has no divine right to expect the support of the British people. We have to earn it.

And we won’t come back from this through more of the same or politics-as-usual.

I don’t believe we lost because the public discovered a sudden affection for what the Conservatives stand for.

Labour’s values are timeless.

We will always stand for protecting people from dangers they cannot face alone,

And giving everyone the tools to build a better life for themselves and their families. 

What came under question was whether we could be trusted to govern and whether we had the right vision for the future.

So the most important thing for us to do now is to show the public that we are listening.

We need to show we are listening to women like Jody Hall:

She’s the married daughter of a former coal miner from Nuneaton.

Jody works in admin and she voted Tory on Polling Day.

She later told a newspaper:

‘I’ve voted Labour in the past and I’m from a family that voted Labour before. But I was worried that they left this country with no money.’

We know that we lost millions of voters like Jody because of doubts about our economic competence.

We were haunted by the false charge that Lehman Brothers collapsed because the last Labour government invested too much in schools and hospitals.

Labour did not cause the global banking crisis.

But when we came to sprint for the finishing line in this election, we were hamstrung because we hadn’t set the record straight.

That’s why we need to deal with this now.

We have just fought the most fiscally responsible election campaign in the history of the Labour Party.

And both Ed Miliband and Ed Balls deserve the credit for that.

Our manifesto was costed down to the last penny.

It was based on our own reviews scrutinising every line of government spending.

But can we put our hand on our heart and say we were this focused on looking after every pound before 2007?

Were we applying that same level of rigour?

I don’t think we can say that.

I don’t think any party can say that.

Just ask George Osborne. He backed our spending plans right up until the global financial crisis.

Now of course I say that with the benefit of hindsight because I wasn’t in Parliament at the time.

And it was a different time.

Labour had just led Britain through 10 years of prosperity.

But would the last government have been in a stronger position to respond to the banking crisis if we had been spending less?

Of course. And we should be up front with the public and say so. 

Only then will we be able to move on and regain trust as safe custodians of public money.

It is Cameron and Osborne who have abandoned fiscal responsibility in favour of unfunded and unbelievable promises.

And we will be better placed to hold them to account if we face this issue head-on.   

We should also ask ourselves searching questions about the vision we laid before the British people.

Too often we stayed in our comfort zone and tried to play an unattractive game of ‘us or them’ with the public. 

We pointed to the damage the Tories would inflict on our communities – but we didn’t have a strong enough story of our own to put in its place.

We were right to speak of ‘One Nation.’ But we sought to win power by speaking to only a percentage of the electorate.

And we failed to reach people with words that spoke to their hopes and ambitions for the future.

They knew we would take on unaccountable interests at the top, and that we would fight for the vulnerable struggling at the bottom.

But we left too many feeling left out.

The squeezed middle was itself squeezed out of the story for why Britain needed a Labour government. 

You know a lot’s been said in recent days about ‘aspiration.’

Many have asked what we mean.

Let me give 3 examples of what it means to me. 

First, I think about education – the engine of social mobility.

Only a third of children were getting 5 decent GCSEs when the last Labour government took office.

We transformed education and raised school standards across the board.

But we should never stop talking about how we build on that.

Quote: ‘We cannot be proud of where we are in the education tables of quality education around the world.’

Who said that?

John Major said that.

Two weeks ago.

We should have been saying that – not relying on a former Tory Prime Minister to make that argument for us.

So we should be asking ourselves what more we could have said about giving every young person the best possible start in life.

Our pledge to re-introduce the cap on class sizes for 5, 6 and 7-year-olds for instance was and is a good policy.

But it was the same policy that first appeared on a Labour pledge card 18 years ago.

We need to be the party at the vanguard of fresh thinking and new ideas to ensure every child succeeds.

Second, I think about the 43% of the workforce – some thirteen million people – who say they are not using all of their skills at work. 

They don’t just want a job, they want abetter job.

And a Government who will work hand-in-glove with businesses to create the skilled jobs of the future.

Third, I think about the communities I campaigned in, like Bury, Pudsey and Morecambe.

And then I look at George Osborne’s performance this week as the supposed healer of the North/South divide.

We know this Government has been no friend of the North.

And it was Labour who began the debate about devolving power away from Westminster.

But we didn’t follow through on our ideas.

We let the Tories drop their Northern Powerhouse onto the foundations we had laid. 

And we allowed them to steal the language of innovation and opportunity.

We must never go into an election again giving the impression that Labour isn’t the party with the greatest aspirations for spreading wealth and power across the country.

Final word about aspiration.

Some have suggested that to talk about aspiration is to choose between fighting for those most in need, and others who are getting by but hoping for a better life.

Here’s the thing.

We can do both. We can do both.

And here’s the other thing.

We did do both.

A million children out of poverty.

A million pensioners out of poverty

Sure Start centres

Winter fuel payments

The Minimum Wage. 

Better exam results than ever before.

More young people making it to university than ever before.

We built a better Britain for all.

Not by making false choices between north and south, middle class or working class, but by reaching out to everyone and governing for the good of all.

And we need to get back on that course in the months and years ahead.

Let me end with this thought.

We know it will be a long road back.

But if we know anything from what our party has achieved over the past 100 years, we know this.

That however long the journey, the arc of history bends slowly towards a more just and equal future.

And if we’re willing to listen, learn and walk towards that horizon together, united as a Labour movement, one step at a time.

Then we can build that brighter future that we all want and hope for.

Let’s go get started.