Today is St George’s Day and I am delighted that my team at City Hall are supporting events celebrating the day across the capital. On Saturday we are holding a free concert in Trafalgar Square and if you can spare any time pounding the streets it’d be great to see you there.
The real reason my predecessor, Ken Livingstone, wanted to avoid celebrating St George’s Day is because it’s quite clear that he would have been a Conservative. And why, you may ask yourself?
It’s because St George started out as a small businessman, supplying bacon to the Roman Army. So, imagine St George, trying to get ahead and expand his military supply business. Would he vote for Labour’s jobs tax? Of course not. St George would want to recruit new people, especially young people – apprentices perhaps – and do his bit to address the terrible situation of youth unemployment that Labour’s bequeathed us. Labour’s proposed increase in National Insurance would make him think twice about that. He’d definitely have signed up in support of our campaign against the jobs tax.
St George would want to be set free from the stifling bureaucracy that ties up business. Our patron saint would want government to be efficient, to provide the services we all rely on without hosing taxpayers’ money down the drain. He definitely wouldn’t have understood the argument that bearing down on waste by just one percent of government spending would somehow be “taking money out of the economy” and “endangering the recovery”.
I don’t understand that argument and neither will the voters.
We are all in this together. We need to tell the public that the only way to bring about the change that this country so dearly needs is to vote Conservative. Any other vote means there’s a danger of another five years of Gordon Brown. And almost no-one wants that.