“I have the skill, the values and the vision” – Thornberry’s full speech

Below is the full text of Emily Thornberry’s speech this evening in Guildford as she launched her campaign to be the next leader of the Labour Party.

My dear friends, I’m so glad to be back in Guildford today, seeing so many local activists I’ve known over the years, and so many colleagues who worked with my mum here during her time as a Labour activist and councillor.

And while I will be travelling all over the country during this campaign, and having conversations with people in every region and nation, when I thought about where I wanted to formally launch my campaign for the Labour leadership, I just wanted to come home to the town where I lived until I was fifteen.

And the town where I learned the most important lesson of my life: that whatever challenge comes your way, which threatens the family, friends or community that you love, you need to stand up and fight against it.

When our dad walked out when I was seven years old, leaving us penniless, and at risk of becoming homeless, it was a local Labour councillor – the late, great Bill Bellerby, whose 100th birthday we all celebrated in this very room – who stood up for our family and my Mum, and found us a permanent council home on the Bellfields estate.

And when Bill came and saw my mum quite a few years later, and said “I stood up for you, now it’s your turn to stand up”, while she’d never imagined herself as a councillor, she knew other people needed the help that she’d got, and she felt that urge, that obligation, to stand up and fight for them, which she did for 20 years, including her spell as what she always called the “socialist mayor of Guildford”.

But I learned other things about standing up in my youth too, most of all to the bullies from my school – the secondary modern on Larch Avenue up the road – who used to wait for me every day on the corner of our estate. I could have taken the long way back home each day just to avoid that group of girls, but I never did, and I may have gone home beaten and bruised most days, but I always stood up and fought back, and I never let them make me walk the long way round.

I left Guildford when I was 15 to go and live with my dad. I re-took my O-Levels, started my A-Levels, then dad left for a job interview in New York one weekend and didn’t come back. So like many young people at the time, and sadly even more of them today, I had to stand up and fight for myself again, to avoid falling through the cracks.

I got through my A-Levels, I got to university, and I worked in every odd-job I could find throughout that time to make ends meet. I worked in care homes, in pubs, in factories, and I cleaned the toilets on cross-Channel ferries, which I can assure you was every bit of fun as it sounds!

While at the same time spending my evenings as a teenager going door-to-door in Hammersmith on my own, as a 17-year old member of the party, canvassing Labour voters, and collecting membership subs.

But as I studied law at university, especially in that dark era with a reactionary judiciary at the top and corruption in so many police forces, the more I had that voice in my head, saying: “When are you going to stand up?” Not just for yourself, but for your community. Not just by knocking on doors for the party, but by fighting for its values.

So I became a barrister working under Michael Mansfield, the greatest and most inspiring warrior for justice I’ve ever met. And Michael was clear with me from day one in the mid-1980s: “Your job is to stand up for the workers fighting Thatcherism.”

So I went to represent the striking miners fighting for their livelihoods, I stood on the picket lines with the print-workers at Wapping, I fought for my former P&O colleagues during the sea-farers strike. And when I wasn’t representing strikers, I was defending LGBT men forced to conduct their sex lives in secret, and then charged with ‘gross indecency’ when caught doing so.

And the more I stood up against that kind of injustice, the more I realised that was the true vocation of my life: standing up and fighting for my beliefs; standing up and fighting for others in need of help; and I did that when standing up against section 28, the poll tax, and the war in Iraq. I did it when standing with all our minority communities when we were fighting to stop the rise of the National Front and the BNP.

There is no fight or campaign our movement has waged in my lifetime where I have not been on the front-line. And since coming to parliament 15 years ago, I’ve also been on the front-line in the fights against the climate emergency, universal credit, and anti-abortion laws in Northern Ireland.

I’ve led the charge as Shadow Foreign Secretary against Donald Trump and the war in Yemen, and in the two years I shadowed Boris Johnson as Foreign Secretary, I showed him up every time for the lying, reckless charlatan that he is.

And I’m standing here today, I’m standing to lead our party, because I want to be the woman and I know I can be the woman, who stands up and leads the fightback against Boris Johnson.

And we’re going to need someone tough, someone resilient, someone experienced and battle-hardened to lead that fight. Because we all know this is going to be a long, tough road back to power after the painful and crushing defeat we suffered last month.

I am filled with sorrow not just for my brilliant parliamentary colleagues who lost their seats, from Midlothian and Bishop Auckland to Heywood and Wrexham, but also the brilliant candidates I met in marginals across the country, from Rushcliffe and Loughborough to Chingford and Chipping Barnet, who worked so hard to win, and will make fantastic MPs in the future.

But I’m sorry more than anything for the activists I met in the fifty constituencies I visited during the campaign in every region and nation of the country who fought with such passion and devotion to our cause. They deserved a better result. And the country deserves better than another five years of Boris Johnson.

A man elected on one issue alone, but now feeling empowered to dictate our country’s direction on every issue. Well we may be hurting, we may be wounded, but we are not beaten, and together we will stand up and tell Boris Johnson: “No!”

Our fight is not over, our fight is just starting. And we will fight with the same spirit we showed in that election campaign, and which our party has shown throughout its history. And when Boris Johnson tries to drive through extreme right-wing policies on Brexit, on public services, on welfare, on workers’ rights and environmental protections, we will stand up and fight him all the way.

And while I have – I believe rightly – criticised the decision to give Boris Johnson the Brexit election he craved, I have been proud to serve in Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet for the last four years, and to do so with unwavering loyalty to him and his leadership, especially at the times he was under most pressure.

I have also been proud to see my friend and neighbour turn our party into a mass movement, defined not just by the size of our membership, but by listening to our members, our unions, and our young and student activists, not by seeking to antagonise them or define ourselves against them, as happened far too often in the past.

We all owe Jeremy a debt of gratitude for the passion he has inspired. But the question we face now is how we can deliver the dream of turning this great mass movement into a great party of government that will change our country, and through our leadership, change the world?

But as we debate that decision over the coming weeks, we must not make the mistake of defining it as a choice between who will take us to the left, or to the centre or to the right, because the only issue that really matters now is who will take us forward.

Who will stand up and lead the fight? Who will give us strength, experience and passion? Who will give us an unashamedly socialist but deliverable manifesto? Who will win back the voters we lost in the last two years? And crucially, who will take us to victory and take us back into government?

And it’s because I believe I have the skill, the values and the vision to achieve all of those goals that I decided to stand up and fight for the Labour leadership.

For me, leadership means many things. It means having the conviction to speak your mind but also the courage to admit when you have made mistakes, and take responsibility for them.

It means having the strength to appoint the best MPs to the top jobs around you, and also the confidence to allow them to make their own decisions, and speak their own minds.

It means having the principles to determine a position based on what is right and what is wrong, not based on what is most politically-expedient.

Boris Johnson has none of these qualities and never has. But friends, it takes more than all those qualities to become Prime Minister. And it definitely takes more than that to be a good Prime Minister.

What that also takes is having the right policies. And during this campaign, I will set out the fresh approach that I will bring to bear on what I regard as the five most fundamental issues facing Britain:

First, we cannot kid ourselves or the country that Brexit is done and dusted at the end of this month, whether Big Ben bongs or not. Boris Johnson has absolutely no idea how he is going to negotiate a trade deal by the end of 2020.

And my fear is that – knowing how he operates and given the majority he now has – I believe he doesn’t really care. So we still have a huge fight on our hands to stop our country falling into a no-deal Brexit. And whatever happens, we as a party will need to decide what we believe should be our future relationship with Europe.

Second, we must remain radical when it comes to our plans to tackle inequality, and stitch back together the welfare safety net that saved my family in the 60s but is letting so many people down today. And we must remain equally radical in our plans to transform our economy, our housing market, and the way our key utilities are delivered

But we must also commit to work with business to achieve our goals, to be the party of credibility on public finances, and always do what is best for jobs and growth in our communities.

Third, we must be what the Labour Party at our best has always been: the party of public services, ensuring proper funding for our hospitals, our schools, and our transport system; for our councils, our youth services, and our social housing; and for our police, our fire services, and our armed forces.

But we must also do what no government has ever done despite Barbara Castle’s best efforts: fully integrating our social care system with the NHS.

Fourth, we must restore pride in our country when it comes to our foreign policy, calling out human rights abuses no matter which country commits them; reforming our arms trade to promote peace; working through the UN and NATO to prevent and resolve conflict; and dedicating ourselves above all to stopping Donald Trump driving us into war with Iran, or destroying forever the prospect of a Palestinian state.

And finally but perhaps most importantly, as a member of the UK delegation at Copenhagen ten years ago, we must also be not just a world leader but the world leader when it comes to fighting climate change, and ensure that every country across the globe signs up to the vision and promise of a green new deal, accepting that this is a crisis none of us can solve on our own.

Like Beveridge’s Five Great Evils, I believe these are the Five Great Challenges that will define Britain’s next decade, at home and abroad: battling the impact of Brexit; fighting for economic justice; strengthening our public services; standing up to dictators abroad; and saving the world from climate change.

On those five great challenges, I will make speeches across our country over the course of this leadership campaign, and announce specific policies so people know exactly what agenda I will pursue as leader.

But there is one further issue I will emphasise in this campaign, which for me must be the priority when we draw up our next manifesto, something I first said in Blackpool more than two years ago.

If we are going to win power back at the next election, we can’t continue drawing up our policies and our priorities in a back room in Westminster. We need the involvement of our MPs, and candidates, and local members in English towns and smaller cities, and the same in Scotland and Wales, the constituencies where the next election will be won and lost.

We need them dictating the policies we need to win their seats: on transport, on jobs, on investment, and on housing; on poverty, on young people, and on the hollowing out of high streets. We need to start prioritising the issues facing the most neglected areas of our country, put their needs first, and stop them falling even further behind.

And if I am elected leader, I will not just start that process, I will guarantee to make those issues the key domestic priority in our next manifesto, our key domestic priority in government, and end the shameful neglect of our towns, our smaller cities, our regions and our devolved nations.

But friends, we can only achieve any of those ambitions if we’re actually in government. And we can only get there if we’re standing together, and forming a united front against the Tories. So the divisions in our party need to end. The anti-semitism in our party must be rooted out. And the online abuse between different Labour factions has to stop.

Because every day we spend with those issues as the only Labour issues in the public eye is a day utterly wasted when it comes to our real goal, which is fighting this Tory government and getting our party back into power.

And that new start for civil discourse in our party must start with this leadership contest. So whoever ends up winning, we must all agree to rally as one behind them. And I make that pledge today.

And there is another pledge I want to make, friends. Not something I believe any leadership candidate for any party has been prepared to say in the past. And it’s simply this. I said earlier we can’t achieve anything if we’re not in government.

So if I’m elected leader, and if I believe at any point, or you tell me, or my colleagues tell me, or the polls tell me, that I can’t win an election and take us into power, I will always put the Labour party first.

I will do what I believe is best to ensure we get a Labour government. So in those circumstances, I would stand down and give someone else the chance to achieve the only goal that counts for our country: getting a Labour Prime Minister back in power.

But first, I want that chance myself. And finally today, I want to tell you the biggest reason why. I spoke earlier about my mum, Sallie, who so many of you knew. I am the person I am because of my mum. I am Labour because of my mum.

And I know how much I owe to her. Even before Bill Bellerby persuaded her to stand as a Councillor, she was a fearless, passionate woman, who campaigned at Greenham Common with her own Mum.

And after she’d become a councillor and I’d become a barrister, she burst with pride when I started representing striking miners, while she was going door-to-door here in Guildford collecting food and clothes to send to those mining communities.

Throughout her 20 years as a councillor, she worked tirelessly for local people in this area, she fought to keep the safety net intact for the next family who needed it.

Because if you’ve been saved and supported, if your kids or people you care about have been saved and supported, you’ve got a responsibility to do the same for everyone else who’s struggling, not just in your town, not just in your country, but all around the world.

Social Justice. Solidarity. Internationalism. And Peace. That’s what has always defined the Labour movement. That’s what defined my mum. That’s what defines me. That’s what will define my leadership. And that – for me – is what defines a socialism that everyone can support.

To paraphrase another campaigning lawyer, I am the best trained, best equipped and best prepared candidate to stand up and lead that fight. Because I have been doing it all my life. And I’m the only candidate who has gone toe-to-toe with Boris Johnson in Parliament, and beat him every time. But we need to do this together. We can only do this together. I need you with me in this fight. We all need to be in this fight.

So join me in moving our party and our country forward. Join me in taking on the Tories. Join me in exposing Boris Johnson for who he is. Join me in showing that the Labour Party is never stronger and never tougher than when we’re pinned against the ropes. So together, let’s stand up straight and start to fight back.