Damian Hinds blogspot

27 Nov 2020 Green industrial revolution” is a term that we have heard used a great deal in recent years.  The Ten Point Plan set out last week now puts that revolution in motion. I know how many local groups and residents here in East Hampshire are passionate about the environment, and this plan marks the start of the UK’s path to net zero by 2050 and provides an important blueprint ahead of the COP26 climate summit that is due to be held in Glasgow next year. It also comes as the UK prepares to co-host the Climate Ambition summit on the 12th December, marking the fifth anniversary of the Paris Agreement. Covering clean energy, transport, nature and innovative technologies, it is big in scale and ambition, with an aim to create and support up to 250,000 highly-skilled green jobs. It surprises many to hear that the UK is already further advanced compared to other countries on a number of aspects of green energy – an in particular offshore wind deployment.  Now there will be a t...

27 Jun 2019 Speech to NSPCC conference Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon.  Have you ever been in a restaurant where you’ve seen somebody meeting up with old friends and taking a photo of the food in front of them? And it almost seems like the photo of the food is more important than the food itself. Or have you heard a conversation where somebody says, that was a really good walk. It’s just a shame I wasn’t wearing my Fitbit. Or have you ever seen that thing, or even possibly done that thing yourself, standing on the pavement, looking at your weather app, and it says the weather’s fine. And you feel a raindrop on your head, and just for one split second you think, I wonder which one’s right? Well, ladies and gentlemen, if we struggle sometimes with the blurring of reality that we get with technology, imagine how much harder it is for our children. And for kids growing up now, we have come a long way since Photoshop. Now it seems, sometimes that every photo might have ...

17 Jun 2019 Speech at Reform Thank you very much, Charlotte [Pickles]. Thank you very much to Reform for hosting this morning. Your organisation has a long track record taking on the big issues in public policy. This isn’t in the strictest sense a scripted speech. I think it’s probably fair to say that makes my brilliant civil servants a little nervous this morning, but I’ll still ask them and you to bear with me for the next… Well, we never know exactly how long, but don’t worry, it won’t be too long. I wanted to take the opportunity to draw together some of what we know now that we didn’t know a relatively short time ago, about the nature of disadvantage in education and attainment, and then of course in what happens in later life. Why does this matter? Well, I don’t think you would ask that question, because I think to everybody in this room it is self-evident that in public policy, in government, in what all the organisations represented here do, we should be constantly redoubling ...

7 Jan 2019 Extract from a speech  at the Church of England Foundation for Educational Leadership conference [...] Albert Einstein once said: “Most people say that it is the intellect which makes a great scientist. They are wrong: it is character”. But what do we mean by character? Plenty of people have defined it in different and often complicated ways but I would like to suggest four pretty straightforward elements: First you have to believe you can achieve. You have to be able to stick with the task in hand, and see a link between effort today and payback some time in the future, even if it’s uncertain or rather a long way off. Finally, you need to develop the ability to bounce back from the knocks that life inevitably brings to all of us. Those four things would also set you up to a be a pretty good fraudster or bank robber. We want you to use strength of character to be good in the world and that is where virtues and values come in. So character must be grounded in virtues, in ...