Friends,

I am so delighted to be here with you in Manchester, the constantly shifting capital of our changing Britain. I want to discuss an important issue today – change. Change for the better. Change for prosperity. Change for our country’s well off, change for our country’s national health service and change of the very nature of change itself.

Our economy must adapt to a new reality if we are to change the fortunes of our nation’s urban poor. Friends, we must turn around our national discourse, amending the very transitions through which change is achieved. We will improve our country through a modification of the very engine of evolution. We must convert the society we have now to an improved one, where change is harnessed to power future change.

Here in the North of England, as we, as friends, watch the seasons switch from summer to autumn, we bind ourselves together to revise our social contract and modify the terms we use to describe the changes we seek.

In so doing, we will recast our relationhip with a changing world; we must reform our relationship with the state – refashioning the country destroyed by people who fear change into a restyled, revamped nation full of people not afraid of progress. We must rework our schools and remould our universities. The national health service must be reorganised in order to reorder the relationship between healthcare professionals and patients. Quite frankly, friends, we must redo the reforms of the past to reconstruct the nation foreseen by Bevan and Wilson. As the planet turns, our world is constantly changing, and we must reorient our priorities, transfiguring our nation into a place where a real, profound metamorphosis can occur.

I set out today to change change – to transmute the lethargy of this government into one positively seething with desire for adjustment; Friends, I speak of bringing fresh blood and a tidal shift to our willingness to adapt the very adaptivity of adaption itself.

We need big adjustments. Seismic shifts. Enormous changes.

And when I am done in ten years time, friends, there will be fuck all but small change in your pocket.

Photo Attrib: Christian Guthier.  Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.