篇一：英国首相布莱尔的演讲(9)
英国首相布莱尔演讲（9）
There are many things about this country which make us proud. But close to the top of any list must come our Armed Forces.
Their professionalism and courage has earned respect right across the world. Their discipline and dedication make them first choice for peace-keeping and humanitarian operations. Again right round the world.
There are many people, in many different parts of the globe, who have reason to thank our servicemen and women. And to that list in recent days can be added the people of Sierra Leone.
From the day of their arrival in this West African country, British paratroopers have helped to bring new stability and hope to a people who have suffered terribly.
It is difficult for us to comprehend what the ordinary civilians of this country have endured at the hands of so-called 'rebels' trying to undermine a democratically-elected Government and trying to do so through a campaign of terror.
This isn't war as we understand it. It is an appalling savagery inflicted upon the civilian population in which rape and slavery and mutilation are the everyday weapons.
It's a campaign of butchery in which - as we've all seen on our television screens - young children have had their arms and their legs hacked off as a warning to others.
When the British forces arrived in Sierra Leone, the rebels were again in full advance and close to the capital Freetown.
There was understandable fear among the civilian population. Government forces were demoralised. The multi-national UN peace-keeping mission faced a worsening situation without the right equipment or manpower.
The main task for the British forces was to help evacuate safely the hundreds of British citizens who risked being trapped in Sierra Leone.
It meant securing the main airport so the airlift could take place peacefully. But the airport was also the key to reinforcing the UN force in Sierra Leone to give them the forces and firepower necessary to restore peace.
And the best hope for Sierra Leone in the long-term is an effective and capable UN force.
So we agreed that we would hold the airport to enable the UN to fly in the reinforcements they needed. It is a task that as ever our troops have performed with enormous skill and courage.
I should emphasise our forces are not there as combat troops. They are not there to fight a civil war. Their task is to get British citizens out - and those UN reinforcements in.
They are also working closely, as part of their role, with the UN forces already on the ground, giving them logistic support and advice.
But our troops do, of course, have the right and equipment to defend themselves robustly if anyone attacks them. It's a right they have already used - and will use again if necessary.
It is an uncertain situation there. There are, of course, risks. But what is certain is that, as I record this, the presence of the red berets has already made a real difference.
They've helped hundreds of British and other nationals fly to safety. Raised morale among the UN forces and the troops of the Sierra Leone Government.
And perhaps, most of all, re-assured the people of Sierra Leone by demonstrating the rest of the world would not abandon them to their fate.
Our forces there are doing a magnificent job. We've every reason to be proud of them.
I know there are those, of course, who believe that we should do nothing beyond offer some words of sympathy and condemnation. But that would be to turn our back in effect on those poor defenceless people in Sierra Leone, when we could do something to help them. It's one of the reasons why Britain counts in the world. Britain is seen to have values and be prepared to back them up.
And Britain's strength in the world matters. It matters not just for what we can do for people but for our influence, for jobs, for investment.
It is also in our national interest to do what we can to support the United Nations and to tackle instability in world affairs wherever we can.
None of it means that we help in every crisis. We can't do that. We can't take responsibility for every conflict. But where we can help, we should. Especially where, as in Sierra Leone, we have historic responsibilities and where our own interests are also at stake.
For instability, even thousands of miles away, can lead, for instance, to fewer jobs back home, to more drugs on our streets, more refugees in the world.
And one of the main reasons for Britain's strength, for Britain's ability to affect stability in the world, is our Armed Forces.
They don't want to stand idly by when they can help. They know better than anyone the risks they run, but they know also that this is what they have been trained to do better than anyone else in the world.
They understand that it was only their swift deployment, their work, that helped rescue our citizens and, by supporting the UN, has given Sierra Leone and the millions of people there, the chance of a better future.
It's why they deserve our support, and our thanks.
篇二：布莱尔首相演讲 Investment
Transcript of the Prime Minister's broadcast on investment
Wherever you look in our country, you can see the result of decades of under-investment.
Children still being taught in cramped or prefab classrooms. Patients treated in wards built long before penicillin was discovered.
Our railways and roads fall short of the standards we need. And that's not just bad for travellers but bad for our economy.
And it's not just the fabric of our country which reveals the signs of this failure to invest.
There was a chronic shortage of people, of teachers, doctors, nurses when we came into Government three years ago.
Even worse, we found that training places and recruitment had often been cut back.
Now I don't go along with those who claim, for example, that we have a third world health service.
That's an insult to the dedicated doctors and nurses who work in the NHS. And it also ignores the fact that thousands of people every day get superb treatment and care.
But we are now the fourth biggest economy in the world. And few people would claim we have the fourth best public services. I certainly don't. That's because for far too long - we haven't invested. We haven't looked to the long-term. We haven't invested for our future.
And that's largely because of the cycle of boom and bust which has gripped our economy for so long.
It meant sudden increases of investment followed by panic cut-backs which made it impossible to plan sensibly for the future.
We were so determined to restore stability to the economy - even if it meant hard decisions and some unpopularity.
We didn't ignore investment in our early years. Indeed we launched the biggest hospital building programme in the history of the health service. The first of these is already open in Carlisle. We invested to make sure
that infant class sizes have fallen. Over 10,000 schools have been re-furbished or repaired. Wherever you live, there'll be a school near you which has benefited.
But there is a great deal more to do. And with inflation and interest rates low, billions saved in debt repayments and a record number of people in work, the country can now afford the sustained investment needed in our health service, schools, police and transport systems.
It means a 150% increase in investment in public transport investment desperately needed for our roads and railways.
Then there's a ￡1.4 billion increase in health spending on hospitals, clinics and equipment.
And extra investment, too, for urgent repairs for 7,000 more schools. But there's little point in having wonderful new schools or hospitals if you don't have the trained staff to go into them.
So we're working hard to tackle the shortage of nurses, doctors and teachers.
We've reversed, for example, the short-sighted cuts in nurse training places. We've expanded medical schools and places.
We are having some success, too - an increase of nearly 5,000 doctors in the health service in the last three years in the health service. An increase of 10,000 qualified nurses too.
And this week we learnt that for the first time in eight years the number of teachers in training has risen.
That is vital because it is the dedicated teachers who are delivering the real progress we're seeing in our schools.
Good teachers can and do make a massive difference to the lives of the children they teach.
Every day, in schools the length and breadth of our country, the hard-work of dedicated teachers give our children the help and encouragement they need to realise their potential.
For far too long however, teachers have felt under-valued and
under-rewarded. And that's wrong when you think that there can be few jobs
more fulfilling, more challenging or more important to our society's future than being a teacher.
So this welcome increase in the numbers of teachers in training is a sign that we are beginning to get things right.
But there's a lot more that we need to do. I want to see the best and the brightest sign up in their tens of thousands to become teachers, to join that education crusade.
We need more teachers just as we need more doctors, more nurses, more modern schools and hospitals.
It can't be done overnight. It takes years to build a new hospital or train new doctors.
But our hard-won economic stability means we now have the chance at least to plan and invest for the long-term.
A chance to end the years of neglect of our public services and deliver the world-class education, health and transport system that this country needs and deserves. It's a chance that we should all take.
篇三：布莱尔首相演讲 Education[1]
TRANSCRIPT OF THE PRIME MINSTER'S FIRST AUDIO BROADCAST ON THE NUMBER 10 WEBSITE. 11 FEBRUARY 2000
Hello and welcome to what I am sure will be the first of many direct broadcasts from the Downing Street website. I'm sitting here at my desk in Downing Street in front of my PC terminal, which I'm just getting to use after many years of not really wanting to come to terms with the new computer technology. I did a course. I'm coming to terms with it. I'm using the new PC terminal and it really brings me to reflect upon what I wanted to say to you this week, which is of course the importance of education and skills-the importance of education and skills for everyone including adults but most particularly for our children. My children, like others, are having to learn the new technology. They have to become expert at it and they are going to be leaving school and going to work in a world in which skill and talent and ability is not just their route to personal fulfilment, it is their route to prosperity. They will need those skills and talents if they have got any chance of succeeding. And the country needs them to be highly skilled as well.
In Britain, we've always been excellent at educating an elite well. The top 20 per cent have always been pretty well educated. But for the majority, the standards just haven't been high enough. We've had a poverty of ambition and aspiration which has meant that large numbers of people leave school either without qualifications or without nearly the qualifications they need. Our vision for the education system is really like this. We need education throughout life. Everyone understands that.
It has to begin at a young age so the first stage is nursery education for the four year olds and three year olds. And we're pretty well on the way to achieving that. The four year olds have now got the chance of decent nursery education. We've doubled the numbers of three year olds who get the chances of nursery education and will extend that further over time. Then after that, at the second stage, we need primary schools that really focus on the basics - getting literacy and numeracy right and I'll come back to that in a minute.
And then the third stage is a comprehensive system. That isn't
comprehensive in the sense of being so uniform that everyone gets the same type of teaching in the same way as if they were all of the same ability. But is comprehensive in the sense that everyone gets the chance of an equal opportunity dependent on their ability, to do the very best that they can.
And the fourth stage is a university system where we're opening up access to more people and where we're building up really high class, high quality universities.
So, going back to the primary school system, this week we had a report from OFSTED - which is the body that inspects all our schools and says how they're doing - we had a report which was good news in many ways and showed where we still have to improve.
On the primary schools they've pointed out that, thanks to the reforms of the literacy and numeracy hour, then results of English and Maths for the test for 11 year olds had shot up to the best ever. And that's good news. It's a great tribute to the people and of course the teachers. And it's important in other ways too because what it meant was that we could see that the reforms introduced, which many people resisted at the time, have actually yielded good results, I think we're well on the way, with the reduction in infant class sizes and the new money that's going into primary school buildings to make our primary schools a place where kids can pretty much be guaranteed the very basics they need for later life education.
What we've now got to do is turn our attention to the secondary schools. And here, in a sense, we've tolerated bad results and low expectations, particularly in some of the inner city comprehensives, for far too long. Now when I said we wanted a comprehensive system in which there was equal opportunity but where we didn't have a uniform system, what I meant by that was we need schools that all have strong headteachers, good
discipline and ethos of hard work and learning, high quality motivated teachers, parents that get involved, good facilities - all these things are vital, and you can tell a good school the moment you walk through the door. Those things are, if you like, common to all good schools. But then we also need to recognise that children are of different abilities and we also need to recognise that schools can specialise in different types of subjects. So what we are now doing is, as well as trying to raise standards generally in the schools, developing specialist schools and, in fact by the year 2003, about a quarter of our secondary schools will be specialist schools. That means that they will specialise in science or languages or technology and they'll offer something particular, and a bit more in those specalties that don't just attract children to the school but also raise the standards in the school generally.
Now along with all the other investment that we're putting in-with the changes in teachers' pay so that teachers can get an increase above the ordinary increase but related to standards of performance, along with the measures we're taking to train headteachers properly and to set up a new
college of leadership for our schools where we're trying to develop the headteachers of the future - along with all these things, I think we will be able to build a secondary school system for the future that isn't about either returning to the old system where we divided kids up into successes and failures at the age of 11, but is getting away from, if you like, the 60s or 70s concept of the comprehensive school. So I think again there the OFSTED report said that we were making improvements. They said that the majority of schools were doing better than they were last year but we've got some way to go. And we've acknowledged that and I hope that the reforms that we're putting in place will help us get there. So, yes we've got a long way to go, but there's nothing more important in Britain than the sort of teenagers that emerge from our schools. And our aim has got to be that more and more of them get high quality, high class education that enables them to go into university or to develop their skills in a way that gives them the chance of fulfilling their own potential. And I think that's within our reach. We need the investment in our schools, but we need the reform and the modernisation too. So it's a long haul but this week's OFSTED report is important because it shows we can make a difference.
I'm the first to say that we have to go even further. That education is my passion, the passion of this Government. We said it would be our number one priority. It is our number one priority. And I think we can say as a result of this report this week that, yes, there's much still to do but a lot has been achieved. Britain's schools are getting better step by step, and, as those reforms take root, and as people start to see the results of those reforms, then I think we can build the notion of high quality excellent education for all as the national purpose for Britain as we begin the 21st Century.
《布莱尔首相演讲》出自：百味书屋
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