GFTU BGCM 2019 Minutes

programme into inequality. They announced it last week. So Britain changed

in a really drastic way as a result of those events set in train 40 years ago.

My second anniversary is the anniversary of the great financial crisis and the

recession of 10 years ago. Back in early 2009 if we had been holding this

meeting then it would have been against the backdrop of the biggest crisis of

capitalism since the 1930s. The banks had just had a near death experience

and been bailed out by respective governments across the western world,

trade and industrial production were contracting at a rate not seen since the

Great Depression and central banks had just effectively thrown the kitchen sink

at a failing economy in an attempt to prevent it being another great slump, so

interest rates were cut here from 5% to 0.5%, we had what was known as

quantitative easing, which is effectively just turning on electronic money printing

presses and creating new money and governments had run big budget deficits.

They had actually increased public spending and not bothered about the fact

that taxes were falling as a share of national income. They had run budget

deficits to support the economy in an unprecedented way. This was a stimulus

of a sort never provided before. It was greater than the stimulus provided

during the Great Depression. It did actually just about solve the problem. It

prevented another Great Depression from happening.

At the time I was one of the people who thought this was the moment when

there would be a counter to the neoliberal revolution of the late 1970s and early

1980s. This was, I thought, the left’s moment to say, “Look, this whole

economic settlement really is not working and it has come to its ultimate tragic

end in the banking and financial crisis of 2007, 2008 and 2009” and like most of

the people in this room I assumed there would be a shift to more progressive

politics to a more sensible way of running the economy that was not really just

based on cheap money, large amounts of debts, workers being forced to

borrow their way to higher living standards and work longer hours for the same

amount of money. That, to me, seemed to be where the whole neoliberal

experiment had got us to. Capital had been taking ever bigger share of the

national pie, labour had been taking a smaller share. The way in which the

whole system balanced was by building up excessive amounts of debt and that

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