GFTU BGCM Minutes 2017

important as well. It is not just about the economy, it is about lots of other

really fundamentally important human freedoms as well which we think are

intrinsic to the European.

THE PRESIDENT: Can I suggest that we take two or three, three or four

comments/questions at a time, because otherwise Larry will be up and down

like a jack rabbit.

BRO CARL PARKER (GMB): I certainly do not want to challenge what has just been

said, but I do have a question that I will get to. The starting point, I think, for me

is that I think we have lost the long term argument over the economy and over

austerity and I think there are just too many people out there, too many people

within trade unions as well, that have just bought the Thatcher myth that you

run the economy in the same way that you run the household and we are just

absolutely failing to get through. Of course, the Thatcher line that you cannot

spend what you have not got just does not work in an austerity situation and,

as you say, good old fashioned Keynesianism is part of solution, but we are

just not able to win the argument with our members and activists.

So the question which I get to at the end really is how do we win that argument

and how do we start to be able to get people to appreciate that what we are

witnessing under austerity is not an economic act, but it is a political act, that

what we are seeing is an attack on pay and terms and conditions of

employment, pure opportunism that the economic situation has created a

space for that to happen and austerity is about for once in a generation

permanently reducing pay and terms and conditions, not for the betterment of

the economy, but for the betterment of capital and the betterment of the major

employers. So I think we are going to be at a stage where at the end of all of

this we have got double the national debt since 2010, rising inequality and we

are food bank Britain and yet we still do not win the argument, we are still not

winning the argument with our members and our activists that austerity is a

political act and that it is possible to spend your way out of economic difficulty

and to pump-prime the economy and to get back to a Keynesian approach.

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