GFTU BGCM 2019 Minutes

We had the 1945 economic settlement, then we had the counter-revolution by

Thatcher in 1979 and I think the time is right now for a new economic

settlement and that new economic settlement has to be around public

investment to make sure that we grow our economy, it has to have an industrial

policy that we have lacked for decades now. Our GDP/manufacturing

continues to shrink and it is unsustainable in the long term. You cannot pay

your way in the world without producing more goods and a balance of trade

deficit is just completely out of kilter.

But the real issue here, just to pick up on Ronnie’s point and I am going to stop

very shortly, is this idea that we can borrow. Actually we need to borrow and

borrow much more. When Labour stood in the 2017 manifesto the only

criticism I had of it was that they were slightly conservative on how much

money they were going to put into investment. John McDonnell said they were

going to put £250 billion over a 10 year period and I said that we need at least

£500 billion within that period and it is about taking the challenge of a new

green deal and growing our economy in a different way. Look, the first country

to decarbonise will enjoy a strategic advantage over the rest of the world’s

economy in the same way that Britain enjoyed when it was the first one to

industrialise.

LARRY ELLIOTT: Yes. I have been supporting a green new deal for the last 10

years. Back in 2007/8 a few of us got together and formed the Green New

Deal group and we said at that time that what was different about this crisis

from the one in the 1930s was that it had an ecological environmental element

to it that actually you could not just reflate the economy, but reflate it in a way

that actually tackled this existential problem of climate change. It did not really

catch on 10 years ago, but now it has actually started to get some political legs,

partly because it has been taken up in the US, but the whole basis of a green

new deal is that you raise the money, either by borrowing or by printing it

through green quantitative easing and you push it into a renewal of Britain’s

manufacturing in an environmental way, so you do it through retrofitted

people’s homes solar panels, wind turbines and you maybe use the big centres

of university excellence as new green economy hubs in all the northern

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