GFTU BGCM 2019 Minutes

The real danger, I think, is that every 10 years or so in the past 40 or 50

years there has been a serious recession in the UK. If you think about the history

of

the UK economy since the mid-1970s there was a recession in 1974/75, there

was a recession in 1980/81, there was a recession in 1990/91, there was a

recession at the end of the 2000s. That was quite a long period with a

recession. We have now gone 10 years without there being a serious

recession in the economy and we are due one. We are due one and you have

to say to yourself what sort of state is Britain in politically, economically,

financially, socially to cope with another recession. Economic policy is pretty

much maxed out. We have still got interest rates at 0.75% 10 years after they

were reduced to that level back in 2009. We have tried large amounts of

money printing. All that has really done is to increase the price of assets for

the wealthy classes. It has increased property prices, it has increased share

prices, it has done wonders for people’s pension pots, but it has actually not

really fed through into the real economy. We are still running nowhere near as

big a budget deficit, but still running a budget deficit and pretty much orthodox

policy is now maxed out and socially the country is as divided as I can ever

remember it being. The country is fractured. I was a left Brexiteer. I was

probably the only person on the Guardian that was, because I thought three

things really. (1) The European Union clearly is not working and is not the

apogee of progressive politics that some of its sympathisers seem to think. (2)

The UK economy was not working either and needed a radical transformation

and (3) that radical transformation is more likely to happen outside the EU than

inside it. That is not a widely held view on the Guardian, but it is a view held by

quite a lot of people on the left. What I would say to both the remainers and

the leavers is that if there is no alternative radical policy for recasting the UK

economy for changing Britain in a way that deals with some of the fundamental

problems that have been bubbling away for the past 40 years and have

surfaced much more prominently in the last 10 years, it is quite clear from what

is going on at the moment that if that is not dealt with by progressives of the left

it is going to be dealt with by non-progressives of the right. That is the lesson of

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