GFTU BGCM Minutes 2017

How do you win the argument? What I do is just carry on trying to make the

argument in clear, easy to understand ways. I think there are two things to say.

One, and I do not know why people on the left do not make this argument, is

that most people in this room or a lot of people in this room will have borrowed

money to buy a house, so if it is okay for you to borrow money to buy a house

for an asset which is going to be useful to you or grow in value over the long

term, then surely it makes sense for the Government to borrow money for long

term capital investment which is going to generate assets for the economy over

the long term. That is the first point.

The second point is that the Government’s austerity plan has spectacularly

failed. The progress being made on the deficit reduction is actually far, far

slower than the plan proposed by Alistair Darling when he was Chancellor at

the time of the 2010 Election. Austerity does not work, even in its own terms,

because what it does is it makes the economy grow more slowly and because

the only form of growth that we have seen in the labour market or the large part

of it has been low paid work and people who are on those low paid jobs are not

paying very much tax, the tax base is being eroded and deficit reduction is

taking a long, long time. So what was billed as a one Parliament project, by

2014/15 it had become a two Parliament project and now we are told it is not

even going to be finished in two Parliaments. It is going to take until well into

what would have been the third Parliament, at least into 2022/23 in order for

the books to be balance. I think what the anti-austerity people have to say is

borrowing for investment is good economics and cutting public spending at the

wrong time is really bad economics. That is what I would say. I think what the

left needs to do is actually boil the argument down to just simpler arguments

that resonate with people. You could bang on about how it is the paradox of

thrift, but people’s eyes glaze over when you start talking about that. You just

have to say to people that austerity has not worked and the third argument, I

suppose, is look at the state of the public sector. There are going to be big

cuts in per pupil spending in education. The IT problems in the NHS are just

one manifestation of a bigger problem which is that for the entire period of the

NHS’s life from 1948 up until 2010 there have been real terms increases in

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