GFTU BGCM Minutes 2017

movement of labour. I do not want to sound too much of an economist, but if

you think about the three factors of production tend to be goods, capital and

people which go towards making up an economy. I say to myself, “Do I believe

in completely deregulated, unrestricted, free movement of capital?” No, I

clearly do not. I would want a financial transaction tax to actually throw sand in

the wheels to make it more difficult for capital to move around the world. Do I

believe in completely deregulated trade? No, actually I do not. I actually want

to see the British Government being able to use trade policy to run a more

active industrial policy, so I do not believe in free movement of capital totally, I

do not believe in free movement of goods and I actually do not believe in total

free movement of people either, because I think one of the factors driving down

wages over the last ten or 15 years has been the fact that employers have

been able to actually have access to a big pool of cheap labour which has

made it much more difficult for trade unions to go in and negotiate pay

increases and I think that is a factor. I do not think that people who said they

wanted to control immigration are necessarily racist, some of them are, but

actually some of them are saying it, because they think actually the result will

be that the demand and supply for labour will come into better balance and,

therefore, wages will go up. That is my take on that.

Carl’s point. Yes, we have definitely lost the argument. Let’s face it. We have

to be honest about it. Osborne’s catchy slogans, “We didn’t mend the roof

while the sun was shining” and all that sort of stuff, did capture the zeitgeist.

Part of the reason, I think, was that after the 2010 Election the left allowed the

mythology that the crisis was all down to Gordon Brown overspending to

actually become embedded, so Labour had a leadership election after the 2010

Election, it lasted for about six months during which time virtually nobody in the

Labour Party said a single word about the economy and during that time all the

parties to the coalition just carried on relentlessly hammering away at the

argument that the fact that we had this massive global crisis which saw 6% of

GDP taken out of the economy was all due to the fact that Gordon Brown was

spending too much money on Building Schools for the Future. It was just

utterly absurd, but it did become part of the received wisdom.

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