GFTU BGCM Minutes 2017

any money or investing any money. So what happened was that in 2010 the

economy under Labour was actually starting to recover a bit, the Tories came

into power, the Coalition came into power and they killed the recovery off.

How does that translate? I think what has happened in this country, in the US

too, which helps to explain Trump, is that ordinary people feel that they are not

really getting a fair shake of the dice here. Where did the crisis come from? It

did not come from trade unionists, it did not come from the public sector, it did

not come from teachers, it did not come from police officers, it did not come

from social workers. It came generally from people in the City of London and

on Wall Street taking ridiculous bets they did not really understand on

derivative products that were so complex that no one really knew how the

system could blow up, but what happened in the aftermath was that the people

who had caused the crisis pretty much got away with it and the people who had

not caused the crisis had to pick up the tab and I think that has led to an

incredible amount of political frustration, hostility, anger at what has been going

on. I wrote a column today in which I talked about a book I wrote 10 years ago

just before the crisis happened called Fantasy Island, which was a pretty

unflattering view of what sort of legacy Tony Blair was going to leave behind

when he left office. I think it is probably about time that I rewrote Fantasy

Island or wrote a book called Return to Fantasy Island, because the economy

as it is now constituted 10 years later, if you think about where we are, we are

back really to where we were before the financial crisis, except that real wages

have seen the biggest fall over a decade since Victorian times. There is a

renewed squeeze on wages this year. We had two or three relatively good

years, because inflation was unnaturally low, but real wages are again being

squeezed.

We have an economy where effectively it is the City of London and the London

and the South East as one geographical unit and the rest of the country as a

completely different country. We have again a complete disparity with what is

going on in the real economy and what is going on in the financial markets

where asset prices have risen to record levels and speculation is again rife.

We have an economy which is only really kept going due to the fact that the

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