Lord Mandelson speech
[3mins 56 secs]
Download Lord Mandelson’s speech (mp3, 3.6MB)
Ed Miliband MP speech
[5mins 24 secs]
Download Ed Miliband MP speech (mp3, 5MB)
Lord Adonis MP speech
[5mins 5secs]
Download Lord Adonis’s speech (mp3, 4.7MB)
Images to download
- Download Lord Mandelson image (Flickr)
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Transcript: Lord Mandelson speech
I just want to say this: I am really proud of a government that has been in office for just over twelve years that can still generate the interest, the energy, the ingenuity and, if you don’t mind me saying so, the wisdom to produce a low carbon transition plan, a low carbon industrial strategy that can set very, very ambitious targets but, not satisfied with the targets, put in place too the realisable plans and actions and decisions that we have to take as a country in order to realise those very ambitious targets. And I must say, it’s certainly an enormous credit to Ed in particular who has shown great leadership in bringing us to this point. But Ed could not have done this without the pressure, the ideas and the firepower of all the stakeholders, each and every individual represented in this museum tonight.
So thank you very much indeed for helping to bring the Government collectively to this point, but your work is not yet done. You have to take us and help us and stand with us, and take our views and our proposals and our policies out and around the country in order to generate real popular understanding for and support for what we are going to do in implementing this low carbon transition plan. Because we are not going in this country to enjoy a high carbon future. Certainly not one that we can depend on and certainly not one we can afford, with finite supplies of fossil fuels with their volatile prices being driven up by ever-growing demand from fast-expanding emerging economies around the world.
We need a much more dependable, safer, greener, affordable future than that, and that’s what’s contained in the Government’s plans. But now I’m afraid I leave you with this challenge to help us take our plans to the country and make sure that we have the support for their implementation that we are going to need in the months and years ahead.
Transcript: Ed Miliband MP speech
Can I start by thanking all of you for not just coming here this evening but for all the work you’ve helped us do. We have an incredibly wide range of stakeholders here this evening: we have people from the energy community; we have people from the green movement; we have our international allies and friends and people we work with; we have a whole section of people. We even have people here from other government departments, not just the Department of Transport and BIS but across government, and that is certainly a sign of our seriousness of intent. But I do want to thank you for all your guidance, criticism, help, support and, I know we don’t always take it on board but we do try and listen and I do think that’s a very important thing that we need to do. So that’s the first thing I want to say.
Secondly, I just want to say something about the Plan, and you’ll be pleased to hear I’m not going to go into great detail about it. You’ve heard it all, you’ve seen all the documents, no doubt they’re beside your bedsides to read this evening. I just want to make one point about it. I think that this is a very interesting point of unity among all the people with an interest in what Britain does on these questions, and the point of unity is this: that we need a roadmap, a route to the Low Carbon Transition. People have different views about the precise route map of that Low Carbon Transition, and that is inevitable, but the thing I’ve heard most consistently over the last nine months is the sense that people wanted a route map.
We present this document to 2020 not in any sense as our kind of final word but a clear sense of how we want to take things forward and how we want to get to 2020, and we think it is a pretty good route map for 2020. But I think what is important for me to say is that that is important but we know that the route map doesn’t end in 2020, it’s got to go from 2020 to 2050 at least, and it always becomes more speculative going out that far but we also know that, given in particular the need for investment in low carbon energy and given all the decisions that society has to make, we have to take as seriously that transition from 2020 onwards. And so without making DECC officials want to shoot me, I do think they deserve a night off, but I do think that after the night off and perhaps a couple of days as well the work on the 2050 road map begins because it is incredibly important to us.
And at the same time as we begin the work on the 2050 road map we also have to understand that the road map to 2020 is, to use a phrase Tony Blair once used, an instruction to deliver, and we know that we are not just a targets department, not just a commitments department but we’re a delivery department that is something we take very seriously, we have an Office of Nuclear Development, now an Office of Renewal Energy Development and an Office of Carbon Capture and Storage as well, reflecting the importance we attach not just to delivering in those areas but to delivering in others as well.
Let me just end with a couple of final thank yous. Thank you to Chris for the work he is doing at the Science Museum. I used to come here as a kid and the gadgets have got much better, that was a long time ago, but since then. I just want to end with a final thank you, if I may, to the stakeholders in the room, to the staff of DECC, because they have done, in my view, an absolutely outstanding job at producing the Plan. Any faults in the Plan you should lay at my door not at their door. And I think that, if I’m honest about this I think that public servants come in for criticism quite a lot of the time and praise not enough of the time. So I do want to, from the bottom of my heart, say thank you very much to all the people at DECC for the fantastic effort, late nights, patience, tolerance that you have shown over the last certainly nine months, but in particular in the run up to this Plan.
There’s just one final person I want to thank who is also someone who’s not normally thanked on these occasions, and that’s my speech writer, Dominic Maxwell, who is here this evening. He has been with me for three years or so, and he has made the, I think, ridiculous decision to go to Harvard and to better himself. You can sort of understand it. But I do want to thank him because without him I wouldn’t have been able to make the speech I did today and do many other things I’ve done over the last three years. So thank you to all the DECC staff for the work you have done. Do take some time off – I was joking – and then we’ll get on with both delivery and the work to 2050.
Transcript: Lord Adonis speech
Can I first of all echo all that Ed said in thanking all those who’ve made today possible. If I may, I’d like to thank all the officials in my department too. Can I also pay personal tribute to Ed who has shown bold and courageous leadership in taking forward the low carbon agenda. He has huge respect in all of the communities that are represented here today, and rightly so.
We’re here to celebrate British technology. Let’s be clear what the Science Museum is about. This phenomenal museum, the 150th anniversary of which is celebrated this year, celebrates all those things that made Britain the workshop of the world in the Victorian era, which led the world in terms of technological development. You see it most starkly two galleries back where you have the phenomenal gallery with all of the original steam engines, including Stephenson’s Rocket which, of course, was the path-breaking breakthrough into the commercialisation of steam engines which opened the way to the whole of the Victorian railway boom both here in Britain and, of course, internationally.
Now I’m told that when the First Secretary of State, who has sadly left us, came here a few weeks ago to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the Science Museum, he had himself photographed on the Rocket on the footplate holding the lever and announcing to the world’s press that at long last he’d got hold of the lever of power. Well, I’m not sure what the lever of power is, Ed and I have spent some time trying to find it, it’s a very, you know, you think you’ve got it and then it disintegrates in your hand. However, Stephenson himself was an extraordinary character. In Christian Wolmar’s book on the History of the Railways he says this of Stephenson: “He was self-educated and barely literate,” so, of course, he had nothing with the modern civil service. “He was an obstreperous character who did not suffer fools gladly,” well he has nothing in common with any Ministers then either.
It said, “Whilst some laud him as the father of the railways, others are ready to pour scorn suggesting that he merely copied a few good ideas and exploited the skills of others,” well politicians know nothing about those characteristics at all. “However,” and this is what Christian says, which is the core of my remarks, “even if that were the case” he says “of the father of the steam age, there is no doubt that his role in developing the technology was vital. It is not so much that without Stephenson the railways would not have happened but rather that they were built earlier and faster as a result of his drive.”
Now let’s be clear, the move towards a low carbon economy, a low carbon society and low carbon technology will happen without much doubt at all, given all of the facts that we’re aware of, the big international trends and the huge political momentum that’s now behind it, and technological development. It will happen. The issue before us, which makes this venue so fitting as a place to celebrate the low carbon strategy today, is whether we are ahead of the game or behind the game, and whether we lead the international technology or we follow the international technology. And what we should all dedicate ourselves to this evening, and all of those communities that we’re a part of, is making Britain a leader in the development of low carbon technology. In my own area of transport, we need to be a leader in the development of ultra-low carbon and electric cars, a leader in the development of electric and ultra-low carbon vans and buses, we need to be a leader in the development of the next generation of electric traction on the railways.
Alas we can no longer be a leader in high speed rail, which is a cause dear to my heart because the Japanese started 45 years ago, the French 30 years ago and we’re busy catching up. But at least let us not be in the position that we’re in at the moment when a visitor to the National Railway Museum, a great sister organisation of this great museum in York, goes into the Great Hall and they look at the Bullet Train which arrived as an exhibit in the National Railway Museum a few years ago, they look at it, they all have their photograph taken by it because it is now a historic exhibit, 45 years old, and we don’t have an equivalent here going between the north and the south of our country.
So what we’re celebrating this evening is not simply a low carbon future but the opportunity which we have as a community, our technologists, our scientists, our engineers to be in the vanguard of developing that low technology future, and as we do so we will reap the benefits, not only of a low carbon future but of much greater prosperity too, so that when our grandchildren come here they don’t only look at the founders of the steam age which, of course, was terribly carbon unfriendly, they look at all of those innovations and inventions that drove forward the low carbon society of the 21st Century.
Thank you very much.
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