GFTU BGCM Minutes 2017

NHS spending every year, including 3% a year on average under Mrs Thatcher

and John Major between 1979 and 1997. This has been the first time there

have been no real terms increases in the NHS and quite obviously the NHS is

coming apart at the seams. It is a miracle, I think, that it keeps going in the

way it does, but it is an accident waiting to happen. I think people do

understand that there is a link between constantly cutting back on public

spending and the state of the NHS.

Charlie’s point. I do not really buy that argument. Are we misrepresenting

Europe? I think in some ways Europe has had a pretty easy ride of it, to be

honest. If you look around Europe, Greece has had a bigger slump than the

Americans had during the 1930s. Italy has not had any growth for 20 years in

per capita incomes. France has had 10% unemployment for as long as I can

remember. The only country which in any way is doing well out of the European

system at the moment is Germany. Finland which was booming in the 1990s

has barely got back to where it was before the financial crisis. I think very few

of the problems of Europe have been exposed and should be exposed.

Contrary to what a lot of people on the Remain side think, I do not actually see

Europe as a particularly progressive project. I think mainly it is about making a

big space available for capital to work more freely in with some workers’ rights

the sort of icing on the cake, but generally the project as pushed forward by the

Commission and by the big member states is mainly about deregulation and

about more competition and about freeing markets up and actually removing

powers to regulate those markets, state aid being one of those things, so I do

not actually think that Europe has been misrepresented. I think actually it has

had a pretty easy ride.

THE PRESIDENT: Thank you. Two more people have indicated they want to speak,

Jane and then John Fray and I am going to use the chair whilst Jane is coming

up here to raise my own issue. I agree with you about the euro. It strikes me

as being an undervalued German mark and a grossly overvalued everything

else and a dramatically overvalued drachma, but when you say, for example, to

the Greek left, “So the obvious and logical thing for you to do is to pull out of

the euro”, they react with horror and understandably so, because what you

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