GFTU BGCM 2019 Minutes

help you to have a look at them in the future. He always makes a brilliant and

controversial contribution to stimulate our thought about the economy, so a big

welcome to Larry, please. (Applause)

THE BRITISH ECONOMY – LARRY ELLIOTT

LARRY ELLIOTT: Thank you very much. Thanks very much for inviting me. It is

great to be back. I thought I would just talk briefly about three anniversaries. I

am going to talk about three anniversaries at this time. The first one is 1979. I

was just starting as a journalist in 1979. I was an NUJ member and I came

back off my training course and was straight on strike during the so-called

Winter of Discontent which was kind of a baptism of fire and a bit later that year

almost in my first few weeks I covered the 1979 Election. I had been out

canvassing for my local Labour MP who lost, but took comfort from the fact that

when Labour lost in 1979, got kicked out, I remember saying to a friend of mine

out canvassing, “Oh, it doesn’t really matter, the Tories will be out in four

years”. I never was much cop at forecasting, as people who read my columns

probably realise, but that was a really, really bad call, because that moment 40

years ago changed Britain and Britain’s economy really in a fundamental way.

It changed Britain in a neoliberal way in exactly the same way that the Atlee

Government of 1945 changed Britain in a social democratic Keynesian way

and this was the backlash against the welfare state, against full employment,

against labour rights, against strong trade unions, against egalitarian policies

and by the mid-1980s Britain had changed beyond all recognition. I am

thinking about writing a book about how Britain changed between Barbara

Castle’s In Place of Strife in 1969 and the end of the miners strike in 1985.

Britain was a completely different country. Finance had taken the place of

manufacturing as the staple industry of the economy, the centre of gravity of

the economy had moved from the north and the midlands southwards towards

London, capital had been given the whip hand over Labour, the trade union

movement had been smashed, state industries had been privatised. Britain

had gone from being one of the fairest, most equal countries in the developed

world to one of the most unequal countries in the developed world and so it has

remained ever since, so much so that the IFS have now launched a five year

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