So today Patricia Hewitt is working with business to open up competition and is investing a billion pounds more in British science and innovation to build modern manufacturing strength;

Estelle Morris is rapidly expanding modern apprenticeships from 75,000 to 300,000;

John Prescott and Margaret Beckett are driving forward regional economic regeneration in urban and rural communities;

Andrew Smith is tightening up the New Deal so with new rights and responsibilities the long term unemployed will be offered jobs they must take; And he, David Blunkett and I are expanding work permits into our country from 45,000 to 175,000 - recognising the economic and social benefits of managed legal immigration showing that we are a tolerant, internationalist people.

Labour values which make us also determined to be at the centre of Europe and which lead us to support:

Economic reform in Europe so British business and British consumers can benefit from a European market

Reform of the Common Agricultural Policy so that we can end the evils of agricultural protectionism

A social chapter so that the single market has a social dimension for employees

And the principle of the single currency that could cut transaction costs lower interest rates and expand our trade

And it is the same enduring Labour values that led us to set the five economic tests on the euro; tests which demonstrate the central importance of economics to our decision: tests on how we can secure high and sustained levels of investment and growth, advance towards full employment and to a prosperity that is not only shared but sustained.

If the five tests are met, we will recommend joining the euro, and the final decision will be put to the British people in a referendum.

And I give this commitment: nothing that is proposed will put our pro-European, pro-growth, pro-investment, pro-employment, values at risk.

Conference, while the Tories want to cut investment in education, as in every major public service, we know that in the modern economy we cannot afford to waste the potential of a single child.

So as Estelle Morris has announced, investment per school pupil will rise from just Ł2,500 a year under the Tories to by 2006, twice as much - Ł5,000 a year.

10,000 more teachers, 50,000 more classroom assistants, 20,000 schools rebuilt. Not just for every four year old but for every three year old, the right to nursery education.

GORDON BROWN’S SPEECH

Continued

.For every three small businesses creating jobs in the best off areas, there is just one, creating far fewer jobs, in the poorest areas - and as every councillor knows - this means reduced income for services and yet more social problems public services need to fund.

So one of the best anti-poverty pro-jobs programmes is to help more people start more small businesses, and ensure that access to capital, advice, skills - once restricted only to an elite - is opened up to men and women in every part of Britain.

So working in partnership with local authorities and Regional Development Agencies we will designate 2,000 new enterprise areas; not the old failed enterprise zones of the 1980s where property subsidies diverted large businesses from one area to another, but 2,000 new enterprise areas that encourage

home grown economic activity by cutting the cost of starting up, investing, hiring, managing the payroll, eliminating stamp duty, making it easier to start and grow a business and create new jobs.

So because enterprise is not just an engine of wealth creation but an engine of opportunity for all we must as a party modernise our attitudes to enterprise. Let our party be the pro-enterprise as well as the pro-fairness party: Labour, the party of small businesses and the self employed in Britain just as much as we have always been and are the party of employees.