We need a completely new deal with Europe A few weeks ago I answered a detailed letter from a constituent about all the cost and financial pressures the country is facing. Couldn't the NHS develop all its own drugs, he asked, so that the country and not the big drug companies could receive the profits from doing so? As I replied, I realised that his letter highlights a danger for a country facing old Labour reborn. This was a 24-year-old man, dealing with his own financial challenges, but also realistic about the bigger financial challenges that the country faces. He is too young to remember the worst horrors of socialism in government and overbearing state control. Late 1970s Britain was a sombre place. Left-wing politics dominated. Most major industries were controlled by the Government. It seems extraordinary now, but Labour ministers ran car-making, shipbuilding, road transport, airlines, telecoms and more. And they did so disastrously badly, with little regard either for what people wanted or for the competitive reality that was building up elsewhere. Step by step, business went to other parts of the world and jobs were lost. Mass strikes were a normal part of daily life, and the intransigence of a group of hardline union leaders with privileged access to Downing Street forced factories out of business and brought the country to the brink of ruin. People talked of a brain drain as punitive tax rates that went as high as 98 per cent drove the best and brightest out of the country. Britain was known as the Sick Man of Europe. Now, 40 years later, like a BBC repeat on Boxing Day, Ed Miliband wants socialism all over again. Just look at the way that the Unite union keeps getting its own people selected for Labour seats. Or the way in which union officials at Grangemouth preferred to threaten the plant management and their families rather than trying to help turn round a business losing hundreds of millions of pounds. Or the plans to go back to the days of wealth taxes, even though we know that they don't work and cost jobs. And it's not just about the economy. The last Labour government didn't go for old-fashioned socialism. But what it did do was unleash mass immigration at a level that was wholly unsustainable for Britain. And it abandoned all of our European opt-outs and signed a series of new treaties that handed over swathes of new powers to Brussels in a way that has massively undermined our national sovereignty. Does Britain really need more of the same? Britain needs Conservative policies that attract wealth creators, and continue our long-term plan to create a strong economic future. Labour wants to borrow more money to bribe you with quick fixes that will solve nothing - and then they will put your taxes up to pay the bill. Our welfare reforms need to go further and faster to deal with the problem of endemic benefit dependency. Labour want to reverse what we have done and go back to the days of a dependency culture in Britain. We need a tougher strategy to deal with unsustainable levels of immigration in the future. Labour remain in denial about the mess they created in the first place and want more immigration, not less. We need a new approach to human rights laws. Labour say they want things to stay as they are and to have our laws made in Strasbourg. Britain needs a completely new relationship with the EU, sorting out issues like benefits, migration and employment laws, or to let its people choose whether to leave. Labour wants the status quo, with more and more decisions taken in Brussels. Ed Miliband would sell this country down the river. 2014 is the time when that battle begins in earnest. When we need to set out for the British people are the stark choices that lie ahead. Sixteen months from now one of two men will be standing on the steps of Downing Street. If you don't want it to be Ed Miliband, and you don't vote Conservative this year and next, you only have yourself to blame if the worst comes to pass.