The scandal over Dominic Cummings attending the scientific advisory group meetings revolves around the concept of independent expert advice.
The problem of course is that embedding a very senior government adviser into the scientific advisory group absolutely trashes any claim that the advice they're giving to government is independent from government.
Having a senior member of the government in the meeting changes the entire dynamic, making it much less likely that the scientists will openly criticise or condemn government policy when they think it's wrong.
Everyone knows that people are less likely to speak up freely about institutional problems and mistakes if one of the bosses is in the room, especially when the boss has got a very recent track record of ideologically purging dozens of people who dared to stand up to him, like Cummings did in the Tory mass expulsion in September.
It's beyond obvious that if the scientific advice is to be considered independent, senior government figures should not be embedded in the scientific advisory group.
The official government line is that Cummings was only there to observe, ask questions, and act as an interface between the scientists and 10 Downing Street, which is bad enough for the aforementioned reasons, but former Tory Chancellor George Osborne has openly admitted the actual truth in a remarkable Tweet.
It's absolutely unmistakable that Osborne is admitting that the purpose of embedding Cummings in the scientific advisory group was to politicise the science.
In any kind of functional democracy the scientists would deliver their advice to the government, and then the government would use that advice as the basis for the political decisions they make.
The scientists propose certain measures, then the government combines this scientific advice with the advice they're receiving from their economic advisers to make the political decision whether the suggested measures are justifiable.
Deliberately infecting the scientific advisory group with the politics is clearly the wrong way to go, and one of the main reasons we're now in such a terrible mess, with the highest death rate in Europe, and one of the largest death tolls in the entire world.
The concept of allowing senior government spin doctors to interfere with the scientific or expert advice is an incredibly dangerous one, but George Osborne has come out and openly admitted that this was exactly what the government was doing by embedding Cummings in the scientific advisory group.
The most infuriating thing about this is the absolute non-reaction of people who should be horrified about it.
Recall how every criticism of the government's lamentable inaction in the crucial early stages of the Covid-19 crisis was met with the faux-outrage moralising of "how very dare you politicise this crisis!"
Anyone who has dared to point out how a decade of wanton Tory austerity destruction severely damaged our national ability to respond effectively to the crisis has witnessed the "don't politicise" howling reaching absolute fever pitch.
But then the architect of this austerity ruination comes out and admits that the Tory government deliberately politicised the science, and the "don't politicise" mob say nothing.
Funny isn't it, how their vehement objections to "politicisation" only come into play when people are using facts and evidence to criticise the Tory government, but when a very senior Tory-establishment figure openly admits that the Tory government deliberately politicised the crisis, they have absolutely nothing to say about it whatever!
Almost as if these "don't politicise" screechers are a bunch of absolute hypocrites driven purely by fealty to their Tory lords and masters isn't it?
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It doesn't matter how badly you fail in life, if you're born into the gilded British establishment class then you'll be given once chance after another to completely screw even more things up.
Just look at the state of George Osborne. Only the most brainwashed of Tory tribalists could even try to argue that his six year tenure as Chancellor of the Exchequer was anything but a disaster for the British economy.
- He missed every economic target he set himself, most notably the promise that austerity fanaticism would have completely eliminated the budget deficit by early 2015. It's well over four years past his deadline, he's been gone for three years, and it's still nowhere near eradicated.
- After only a few years of austerity stagnation even devoutly neoliberal economic organisations like the OECD and the IMF were warning against the ideological fanaticism of austerity cuts, but Osborne soldiered on regardless.
After losing his job as Chancellor and quitting as an MP Osborne took up a number of jobs. Several of them look just like the kind of highly-paid corporate directorship bribes you'd expect him to receive after carving up so many public assets to give away to city spivs, and slashing Corporation Tax to by far the lowest rate in the G7. But becoming Editor of the London Evening Standard was quite a surprise given his absolute lack of experience in the newspaper trade.
Within a couple of years in the Evening Standard job Osborne has reduced a slightly profitable news outlet into an extraordinary money-burning pit, losing a staggering £23 million in the last two years.
But now Christine Lagarde is potentially moving on as head of the IMF for a position in the EU, George Osborne and his cheerleaders are promoting him as her replacement!
The absolute entitlement of it is staggering. His incompetence as Chancellor will go down in economic history as a lesson in exactly what not to do after a crisis, his tenure at the Evening Standard is an absolute joke, and here he is pushing himself forward for one of the top economics jobs on the planet!
presumably the rest of the world will piss themselves laughing at the idea of the most incompetent British finance minister in living memory fancying himself for such a job, but that hasn't stopped the Tory press from championing the idea as if they actually see him as some kind of magnificent economic genius, rather than a living embodiment of Britain's dangerous subservience to over-entitled and under-qualified Tory toffs.
What a country we live in where poor and ordinary people experience one barrier after another to progression no matter how capable they are (sexism, racism, classism, regionalism, homophobia, lack of old school connections ...) while those born into the gilded establishment class can stumble from one unbelievably catastrophic cock-up to another, and remain perfectly confident that there's always another high profile and lavishly remunerated position for them to waltz into.
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So apparently the UK political scene is so banjaxed that we're actually trusting Lib-Dems again, and it's not even four years since their disastrous coalition with the Tories came to an end!
Maybe Remainers flocking to support the pro-austerity, pro-privatisation, social safety net-trashing Lib-Dems would make some kind of sense if the Lib-Dems had shown any kind of remorse for what they wilfully helped the Tories to do to the United Kingdom. But no. There's no remorse at all.
- There's no remorse over the brutal Tory sanctions regime, nor the despicable disability denial system that has resulted in literally thousands of people dying within weeks of being declared "fit for work" and thrown off their disability benefits.
- There's no remorse over Lib-Dem votes in favour of deeply illiberal policies like secret courts, the gagging law, bedroom tax, dripa, Theresa May's Hostile Environment, and the catastrophic strategy of turning Libya into a lawless terrorism breeding ground like Blair and Bush did to Iraq.
- And worst of all there's no remorse about the way the far-right blamed the collapsing living standards these disgusting policies causes on immigrants and the EU in order to promote Brexit, and the Lib-Dems just bit their tongues, because any effort to explain that the real causes of the living standards collapse (austerity, wage repression, infrastructure under-investment, public service cuts, vandalism of the social safety net) would have illustrated their own complicity. So they just stayed silent and let the far-right win.
And now just look at the delight on the faces of Danny Alexander, Nick Clegg, and George Osborne in the photo above.
These three men impoverished literally millions of their fellow countrymen, and deliberately trashed the future economic potential of the UK in order to fund a disgusting sequence of tax cuts and handouts to corporations and the mega-rich.
They raked in lavish six figure salaries while they were doing it, and now all three have quit politics to rake in even more extravagant salaries from private sector employers.
They don't give a shit about all the people they trampled into destitution, nor the fact that their ruinous economic policies created the dramatic collapse in living standards that led directly to Brexit.
But somehow, even when there are plenty of explicitly anti-austerity options for Remainers to choose from (Green Party, SNP, Plaid Cymru) Remainers are flocking to support the austerity-enabling Lib-Dems.
Assuming that people aren't completely gullible idiots with goldfish-memories, the only possible conclusion is that an awful lot of Remainers are the comfortably well off who never suffered the truly dire consequences of austerity dogma, wage repression, welfare cuts, and public service destruction.
They want to reward the party that enabled all of this malice in the first half of this decade because they were comfortably well-to-do during that period, and quite content at the time because the impoverishment was happening to other people below them on the social ladder.
They want to go back to the way things were before because they were perfectly comfortable when the destitution was being forced on "the lower orders" in order to fund tax cuts and handouts for corporations and the mega rich.
And they certainly don't want to consider that the vile poverty-spreading policies the Lib-Dems enabled were one of the main causal factors in the Brexit chaos in the first place.
They're like lung cancer sufferers dramatically increasing the amount of cigarettes they smoke in the hope that it'll somehow cure the disease they've given themselves.
By supporting a party that enabled so much ideological malice against the poor, working classes, disabled people, local communities, they're actually intent on making themselves look exactly like the aloof metropolitan elitists that the Leave camp always love to portray Remainers as.
Every time they turn up in comments sections to proudly brag that they're voting Lib-Dem because they "don't care about anything else except stopping Brexit", they're displaying their outright contempt for the people who actually suffered under the Tory/Lib-Dem coalition.
If these people can afford to not care about austerity dogma, wage repression, public service cuts, vandalism of the social safety net, etc, then they can hardly complain when left behind communities say that Remainers don't give a shit about them and their problems can they?
And what makes it so much worse is that they're so mindlessly optimistic that the Lib-Dems won't just completely shaft them again.
How exactly does electing a load of pro-austerity pro-privatisation neoliberals into the European Parliament do anything to stop Brexit when the only place it can actually be stopped is Westminster?
Voting for the austerity-enablers who helped create the Brexit backlash in the first place is nonsense, especially since boosting the number of austerity-enforcing neoliberals in the European Parliament does nothing practical to actually stop Brexit whatever.
But then the Brexit Party Faragists are ridiculous nonsense on the other side of the Brexit spectrum, so I guess maybe the thinking of these Lib-Dem supporters is as simple as "if Brexit supporters are going to vote for a polarised right-wing nonsense party, then so will we"!
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After I pointed out Vince Cable's pivotal role in flogging off the Royal Mail at miles below its true value a couple of hard-right pro-privatisation astroturfers turned up with a novel argument aimed at defending the sell-off.
Their argument says that Vince Cable and George Osborne flogged off Royal Mail for 330p per share, and after initially soaring to 445p on the first day (because investors realised how under-valued it was) six years later this share price has receded to 260p.
Their argument goes along the lines that 2013 was actually a good time to sell off Royal Mail because six years later in 2019 the share price has fallen by roughly 20%.
What this argument completely ignores is what has been happening at Royal Mail since it was flogged off in 2013.
One of the main revenue streams the new capitalist owners have found is flogging off chunks of Royal Mail land to property developers for £hundreds of millions.
It's estimated that they've already raked in over £400 million in land sales. That's over half of the £787 valuation of the entire Royal Mail property portfolio at the point of sale, raked back in by selling off just a few chunks of inner city prime building land!
For example a 2.7 acres Royal Mail site in Battersea was sold to developers for £101.2 million, but the Tory/Lib-Dem coalition priced it at just £12.9 million.
The neoliberals in government flogged this piece of prime building land off at less than 13% of its real value, meaning the other 87% of the value of this public land went straight to the new private owners.
Another example is the 6.25 acre Mount Pleasant sorting office that was valued at £29 million by the Tory/Lib-Dem government at the point of sale, then flogged off for £193 million just a few years later. A cool £164 million profit for the new corporate owners from Vince and George's deliberately under-valued sale of public land.
That's almost £300 million of Vince Cable and George Osborne's £787 million valuation of the entire freehold Royal Mail property portfolio recovered through the sale of under 10 acres of Royal Mail land!
So did the new corporate owners reinvest these massive property windfalls in the Royal Mail business? Maybe to diversify in the face of collapsing demand for hand delivered letters?
Of course they bloody didn't. They paid it out in bloated executive salaries and shareholder dividends that have exceeded £1 billion since the privatisation!
The last Royal Mail boss just quit with a huge £2.7 million golden goodbye, and his replacement was welcomed with a staggering £5.8 million tax-free golden hello! All paid for not through successful operation of the business, but through selling off public land that was acquired at miles below its true value.
The owners of Royal Mail know that the postal delivery business is not a brilliant money spinner in itself, but that the Royal Mail property portfolio is an absolute goldmine of prime building plots in towns and cities across the nation.
Royal Mail is being asset stripped before our very eyes, with what was publicly-owned land until 2013 being flogged off for massive unearned corporate profits.
They're not doing anything smart, or innovative, or productive to "earn" this cash, they're simply gorging themselves on the vast difference between what the Tory/Lib-Dem coalition said the Royal Mail property portfolio was worth when they flogged it off, and what it's actually worth.
And the incredible thing is that defenders of this maniacal neoliberal zeal for privatisation that sees our public land flogged off at a tiny fraction of its true value will concoct ludicrous little fairy stories about how it was all good, and fine, and proper because the share price happens to have fallen slightly after six years of absolutely brazen asset stripping!
And the sad thing is that some people will be so gullible, and so averse to considering the facts for themselves, that they'll actually mindlessly believe this abject neoliberal nonsense that everything is fine and dandy, and that Osborne and Cable actually did us all a wonderful favour by flogging off our land at a ridiculous fraction of its real value.
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Tory austerity was always a massive con job designed to justify their pre-existing ideological obsession with transferring as much wealth as possible from the majority to the mega-rich minority.
Austerity is a con
The lessons of economic history are absolutely clear. If you want a quick economic recovery then invest in productive areas of the economy (housing, infrastructure, services ...), if you want a slow drawn out recovery go on a wanton ideological slash-fest, and if you want to really stymie the economy then coincide your slash-fest with a deliberate upwards redistribution of wealth from ordinary working people (who spend and create economic demand) to the mega-rich who are far more inclined to stash the additional wealth you hand them in tax haven hideaways.
Jeremy Hunt knows all of this. He knows that Tory austerity resulted in the slowest economic recovery in Centuries; he knows that Tory wage repression policies caused the longest real terms decline in UK workers' wages in decades; he knows that the Tories have spectacularly failed to deliver their promise of eliminating the budget deficit by 2015 (it's still not gone and it's 2019) he knows that unprecedented public service cuts have choked the NHS and severely damaged the education system; he knows that austerity cuts have vandalised the social safety net; he knows that the Tory 30% cut to the police budget has coincided with soaring violent crime; and he knows that austerity dogma has led to the impoverishment of millions, and the deaths of tens of thousands.
He also knows that the living standards collapse that these policies delivered are one of the main causes of the wave of public anger that drove the Brexit vote narrowly over the winning line in the 2016 EU referendum.
So when Jeremy Hunt praises the "genius" of David Cameron and George Osborne for imposing austerity without causing riots on the streets he's not saying that the policy of austerity, wage repression, public service cuts, infrastructure under-investment, and vandalism of the social safety net was "genius", he's saying that convincing the British public to believe in a package of radical hard-right policies that ruined their living standards, at the exact same time as the Tories were showering corporations and the mega-rich with lavish tax cuts and handouts.
The reality is quite different. Cameron and Osborne were hardly geniuses for pulling off such a damaging con on the British public, they just benefited from a shocking lack of opposition as they did it.
Lib-Dem collusion
The Liberal Democrats played a key role by switching from their warnings about the folly of excessive spending cuts before the 2010 General Election to enthusiastically backing every last Tory cut in order to hang onto their six figure ministerial salaries, their chauffeur-driven cars, and their temporary senses of self importance.
Mainstream media
The mainstream media openly colluded with Tory austerity dogma. Hardly surprising from the billionaire-owned propaganda rags like the Daily Mail, S*n, Times, Telegraph, Express, Spectator ... but a catastrophic failure on behalf of the supposedly "impartial" BBC.
Given that the BBC always love to create artificial "balance" by giving equal airtime to science-denial idiots and oil industry lobbyists to "balance" the debate on humanity's ongoing ruination of the environment, they abjectly failed to "balance" the economic debate with at least an equal number of sensible pro-investment voices on every panel to counter the ideologically driven austerity gibberish of the Tories.
Labour right-wingers
The Blairite right-wingers who controlled the shadow treasury under Ed Miliband were perhaps the worst offenders of all. They saw the mainstream media refusal to question austerity madness, and instead of redoubling their efforts to oppose this wanton Tory malice, they folded completely and decided to offer a sickly "austerity-lite" agenda at the 2015 General Election in the pathetic hope of converting a few thousand "soft Tory" voters in marginal constituencies.
What they didn't factor into their calculations was that for every "soft Tory" they won over by pathetically imitating Tory austerity fanaticism, they drove away dozens of natural Labour voters.
Failure of opposition
This abject failure of opposition across Westminster and the mainstream media left the UK in the frankly ridiculous situation where the mainstream media and all three of the Westminster establishment parties were all simultaneously pushing ruinous austerity dogma, while the only sustained opposition was coming from the widely ignored economics academics, the Green Party, the SNP in Scotland, Plaid Cymru in Wales, and a small bunch of bloggers and independent media sites.
The Public
And the public don't get off without criticism either. Even if the political and mainstream media establishment abjectly failed in their duties to hold the Tories to account and offer alternatives to their malicious and destructive agenda, people could still have risen up in protest.
Since 2008 British workers have suffered an unprecedented 5% collapse in the value of their wages, while the French have seen a modest 6% increase in the same period. Who are the ones protesting in the streets every single weekend, and who are the ones who sit at home with their apathetic "keep calm and carry on" attitude in the face of relentless economic persecution by the wealthy policial establishment class?
Labour offering hope again
Now that Labour has moved decisively away from hard-right Tory austerity dogma things are better, but the damage austerity caused, and the Brexit chaos it unleashed can never be undone. Even if we reversed course tomorrow and began actually investing in our economy, and building our future economic potential, we're now 9 years and a catastrophic brexit mess behind where we would have been without austerity fanaticism.
Credit must be given to the small minority of Labour MPs who refused to jump on board the Tory austerity train when Blairites all around them were clamouring to actually drive it.
Credit also must be given to the Greens, SNP, and Plaid Cymru for opposing austerity all the time, even in the face of outright hostility from most of the the pro-austerity mainstream media.
Conclusion
Cameron and Osborne were opportunists to try such a destructive con job on the British people, but they weren't geniuses, they simply benefited from a near complete lack of political opposition, from the Lib-Dems who enabled them, the cowardly right-wing Labour idiots who imitated them instead of vehemently opposing them, the mainstream media who consistently failed to hold them to account for the economic crimes they were committing against the British people, and a frankly apathetic population who actually reelected the party that did this to them not once, but twice!
But at least we know that Hunt is well aware of the fact that austerity was so bad that it should have triggered 'riots in the streets'.
At least we know that the Tories were fully aware of how evil their agenda was at the time, but they did it anyway because their core ideology has always been to serve the interests of the wealthy establishment class (who completely bankroll their party) at the direct expense of everyone else in society, and they knew that they would probably get away with it due to the compliance of the Westminster establishment club, the complicity of the mainstream media hack pack, and the downright apathy of the British public.
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
In 2016 former Tory Chancellor George Osborne introduced a new 3% Stamp Duty rate for people buying property to rent out, but for some reason he decided to create an exemption for anyone purchasing more than six properties at the same time.
The very next year the Tory Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt took advantage of this loophole by purchasing seven luxury flats in Southampton, saving himself almost £100,000 in Stamp Duty.
Osborne's loophole was obviously designed to benefit the mega-rich with sufficient capital to purchase seven or more properties at once, but to see one of his actual Tory colleagues taking advantage of it just goes to show what a grotesque bunch they really are, designing legislation to benefit themselves and their mega-rich mates at the expense of everyone else.
The scandal doesn't stop there either. Jeremy Hunt also defied parliamentary ethics when he "forgot" to declare this investment on the parliamentary register of interests, and he also broke the law when he "forgot" to tell Companies House about his financial interest in the company used to buy the flats (an offence that could result in a two year prison sentence if it was one of us that did it, rather than a member of the privileged class).
This scandal reveals the sheer self-serving greed of the Tory party by proving that they design legislation to benefit them and their own class at the expense of the rest of us, but don't expect it to dominate the mainstream news because exposing this scandal runs entirely counter to the current primary objective of trying to ensure a poor Labour result at the local elections.
If this was one of Jeremy Corbyn's shadow ministers then we know they'd be hounded from pillar to post over it until they were forced into resigning, and how the scandal would dominate the headlines for days, but because it's a Tory member of the establishment class it'll receive very limited coverage, and Hunt will ride out the storm without even coming close to being under pressure to resign.
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If we set aside our views on Brexit for a moment and try to look at Jeremy Corbyn's decision to sack Owen Smith for publicly criticising Labour's six tests position from a reasonably objective stance, it's obvious that Smith had to go.
Love them or loathe them Tony Blair and Margaret Thatcher were strong leaders, as were Winston Churchill and Clement Attlee in the mid 20th Century.
It's inconceivable that any of these strong leaders would ever have allowed a member of their cabinet to publicly defy the party policy to set out their own personal policy in a newspaper article. Any cabinet member who did that, would have been sacked, and rightly so.
The problem of course is that after eight years of shockingly weak leadership under the Tories, people have got used to the government behaving like a total rabble, where gross incompetence is the norm, and with ministers regularly making up policy on the hoof and getting away with it. So when they see a party leader actually imposing discipline it comes as a shock to them.
Things were bad enough under David Cameron, whose tolerance to the incompetence of his ministers was so extreme that George Osborne and Theresa May survived easily despite six years of endlessly missed targets and hopelessly botched legislation, and the even more incompetent Iain Duncan Smith remained unsacked until he chose to betray Cameron by walking out of the government at the most damaging moment possible.
But under Theresa May things have become utterly farcical. We had the former Defence Secretary Michael Fallon announce the off the hoof policy that Britain was abandoning the "Mutually Assured Destruction" stance to announce the policy of Britain being open to using nuclear weapons as attack weapons. Not only did Theresa May not sack Fallon on the spot for announcing such a reckless abandonment of Britain's longstanding nuclear weapons policy, she actually let this insane new policy stand.
Then Fallon's replacement as Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson embarrassed Britain by saying that "Russia should just go away, and shut up". Theresa May is such a weak leader that once again she didn't correct this nonsense with a firm reiteration of the government's actual position, or ask for Williamson's resignation.
Then worst of all there's the Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, who even set out his own bespoke "Manifesto for EU Withdrawal" in a 4,000 word essay for the Daily Telegraph. This wasn't just the usual foot in mouth blabbering we've all come to expect from Johnson, it was a deliberate and calculated effort to undermine his own government's Brexit negotiating position.
Does anyone imagine that strong leaders like Thatcher, Blair, Churchill, or Attlee would have just sat back and done absolutely nothing when their own Foreign Secretary publicly undermined the official party position?
Regardless of whether you agree with Boris Johnson's decision to publicly undermine the Tory government by calling for a much harder form of Brexit, or with Owen Smith's decision to break collective responsibility to call for a second EU referendum, it's obvious both needed to be sacked, otherwise we'd end up with rudderless political parties full of ministers who feel entitled to just make up policies as they go along.
The reality of the situation is that Teresa May is such a weak and incompetent leader that she allowed a senior cabinet minister to go completely unpunished for brazenly undermining the official party stance.
Meanwhile Jeremy Corbyn behaved in the way any competent political leader would when one of his shadow cabinet ministers publicly criticises the official stance of their party in a newspaper column, rather than raising his concerns within the shadow cabinet, or through the democratic apparatus of the Labour Party.
The remarkable thing is that Theresa May's display of weakness and incompetence towards Boris Johnson's absurd display of disloyalty barely elicited barely a whisper of criticism from mainstream media hacks.
Then just a few months later we've had to endure howls of outrage from the very same hacks who remained silent about Theresa May's weakness and incompetence after Jeremy Corbyn rightly sacked Owen Smith for timing his attack on the Labour Party position just before the local elections in a calculated effort to do as much damage as possible to Labour's election chances.
It's as if eight years of Tory incompetence has done so much damage to the fabric of the United Kingdom that weakness and poor leadership are now accepted as the standard, and any signs of competence and strong leadership are met with furious condemnation and howls of outrage!
Regardless of our views on the important issues of the day (Brexit, austerity dogma, wage repression, rising poverty, the productivity crisis, NHS and social care funding ...) surely nobody thinks it's right that modern Britain is a place where unmistakably weak leadership goes almost completely uncriticised, while displays of routine political competence are attacked and derided as being somehow shocking and unacceptable?
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On Tuesday February 20th 2018 Jeremy Corbyn gave a speech to the EFF confederation of British manufacturers about Labour's economic strategy. The response of the Evening Standard (edited by former Tory Chancellor George Osborne) was to publish a front page hatchet job describing the speech as a "red rag" to the City of London, and Jeremy Corbyn's economic strategy as a plot to turn London into "the last Soviet era city west of Pyongyang".
Shockingly hundreds of thousands of Evening Standard readers will have uncritically accepted this ludicrously hyperbolic appraisal of Jeremy Corbyn's speech without even referring to the source material and judging it for themselves.
So here's the speech so that you can judge for yourself whether George Osborne's minions at the Evening Standard were justified in claiming that Corbyn's speech is some kind of proof of his intention to turn Britain into a Soviet style state where private industry is banned, or the outline of a sensible economic strategy to undo the damage and reduce the private debt mountains caused by four decades of hard-right economic dogma:
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Industrial revolution
Britain was the birthplace of the industrial revolution and many great inventions from the cash point to the jet engine. Manufacturing continues to punch way above its weight accounting for 10% of output, but 44% of exports and a massive 70% of business investment in research and development.
Output per hour is £4 higher in manufacturing than the average for all sectors and the average annual earnings of someone working in manufacturing are nearly £4000 higher than average earnings from across the whole economy.
I know from my childhood the value of manufacturing jobs. My dad had one, as an electrical engineer who worked successively for Westinghouse, English Electric and GC. He enjoyed good, satisfying work with decent pay. The contributions of manufacturing of all of you to our economy cannot be understated, and the case for supporting more manufacturing jobs and industries is undeniable. And yet for too long Government hasn’t done enough to support you.
Lagging behind
Businesses are crying out for infrastructure investment. We are lagging behind other leading countries, but the Government simply isn’t delivering. That’s why we have pledged to create a National Transformation Fund to upgrade our transport, energy and digital infrastructure so that it is worthy of the 21st Century.
We must also invest in our people as well as our physical infrastructure. We have, on the one hand, university graduates who can’t find a suitable job while thousands of underemployed workers can’t get the skills they need to advance. And on the other hand, businesses are struggling to recruit workers with the right skills.
Time and again, businesses tell me how difficult it is to hire employees with the skills they need. And that far too often school leavers are unprepared for the workplace. Life-long learning Labour’s National Education Service will tackle that problem head-on, providing free, life-long learning to all, so that anyone can retrain or upskill at any point in their life.
We will put vocational education, too often the poor relation of our education system, at the heart of the National Education Service ensuring that science and technical learning starts early in primary schools.
Children should engage in practical learning from a young age not just in the classroom, but through play and activities.
And we will build links with industry into the National Education Service, to make sure that our education system keeps pace with the changing needs of our economy, expanding the type of training that qualifies under the Apprenticeship Levy so that businesses can actually use it for the skills they need.
The Tories’ approach to Brexit is threatening to turn our skills crisis into a catastrophe, especially for manufacturers who rely on recruiting skilled workers from overseas.
Labour said from the start; we would give an unconditional guarantee to EU citizens of their right to stay in the UK. Not just now but during the transition period as well.
This is not just because of the valuable role EU citizens play in our economy and in many of your businesses, but because they are people who have built a life here.
Unlike the Tories, we will not use people, mothers, fathers, neighbours, friends as bargaining chips.
Brexit position
Brexit is for many an emotive subject. But for business, it is first and foremost a practical matter.
To make decisions about where, when, perhaps even whether to invest, you need to know what markets you will have access to, what regulations and product standards you will be subject to, who you will be able to recruit, what will happen to our supply chains, which we all know are currently integrated across many national borders. That’s why Labour has from the start taken the practical position of accepting the result of the referendum and insisting the economy must come first.
We are leaving the EU, but our businesses must not withdraw from European markets. Business needs clarity and with four out of six of the Government’s “Road to Brexit” speeches already delivered, the Tories approach to Brexit is if anything less clear.
It’s time for the Cabinet to stop fighting and the Government to say where it wants to take the country.
And it’s not just in its approach to Brexit that the Government is failing to put the economy first. For too long manufacturing has been undervalued.
Those who make things
For all their warm words, whether Osborne’s “March of the Makers” or this government’s new-found enthusiasm for the words ‘industrial strategy’ for decades now, the Conservatives have created, encouraged and sustained a system that rewards those who lend and speculate over those who make things.
Thatcher’s progressive abolition of restrictions on financial trading culminating in the ‘Big Bang’ deregulation of 1986 placed the needs of speculative finance at the helm of British economic life.
When Thatcher took office the ratio of private debt to GDP was 60%. In the 30 years that followed, that trebled.
That increase wasn’t due to banks supporting a healthy and productive economy by lending to businesses represented here today. It was because banks started lending to households and inflating asset prices on a scale never seen before. At the same time, investment banks began trading new kinds of financial products, packaging up debt in increasingly opaque ways and becoming ever more removed from the real economy.
Now let me be clear, finance has a central and essential role to play in a functioning economy.
Oiling the wheels
Without access to finance, how would the entrepreneur or business person just starting out find the means to get their idea off the ground?
How would a growing company afford new equipment that will make their business more productive and more profitable? Or expand their activities by opening new premises?
Finance is the grease that oils the wheels of our economy, and without it, economic activity would seize up.
But when private debt is twice the size of the real economy, when traders no longer understand the products they are trading and banks are funding speculation, rather than productive investment, something has gone grossly wrong.
Banks should be helping the real economy not suffocating it. Let me remind you of the words of John Maynard Keynes when he said: “There cannot be a real recovery . . . until the ideas of lenders and the ideas of productive borrowers are brought together again . . . . Seldom in modern history has the gap between the two been so wide and so difficult to bridge’.
“ Keynes was writing about the Great Depression of the 1930s but the gulf between finance and the real economy may be even wider today.
Money flows away
We know the results, money flows away from the productive activities that you are engaged in that create jobs and exports to instead inflate asset prices, concentrating money in the hands of a few owners, not producers, while households become more reliant on borrowing.
And we end up with an economy with more risk, more volatility and more instability.
It was a “heads I win, tails you lose” gamble for the banks, not my words, but those of the Governor of the Bank of England. And we’re all still paying for the inevitable crash.
When the last Labour Government stepped in to shore up our major banks as they stood on the brink of collapse it prevented a total meltdown. But the public should have been given a say in how the banks, propped up by our money were being run.
And there should’ve been a much more concerted effort to rein in banks’ speculation to refocus on productive lending.
We need a fundamental rethink of whom finance should serve and how it should be regulated.
Sluggish economy
There can be no rebalancing of our distorted, sluggish and unequal economy without taking on the unfettered power of finance.
For forty years, deregulated finance has progressively become more powerful. Its dominance over industry, obvious and destructive; its control of politics, pernicious and undemocratic.
The size and power of finance created a generation of politicians who thought the City of London could power the whole economy.
Out of control financial wizardry and gambling were left barely regulated, while the real economies in once strong industrial areas were put into managed decline.
The welfare state was left to pick up the slack with sticking plaster redistribution to the people and places held back by the finance-led boom of predominantly the South East of England.
For a generation instead of finance serving industry, politicians have served finance.
We’ve seen where that ends, the productive economy, our public services and people’s lives being held hostage by a small number of too big to fail banks and financial institutions.
No more.
The real economy
The next Labour Government will be the first in 40 years to stand up for the real economy. We will take decisive action to make finance the servant of industry not the masters of all.
The reign of finance doesn’t stop at the gates of the City of London. Its extractive logic has spread into all areas of life with short-term performance and narrow shareholder value prioritised over long-run growth and wider economic benefit.
Take GKN, one of the world’s oldest and most prestigious engineering firms with a big factory in Telford where I grew up. It employs 6,000 workers across the UK, contributes an estimated £1.3 billion to the economy, paid a healthy £174 million in tax each year and invested £561 million in Research and Development in the UK alone.
And yet GKN is currently facing a hostile, allegedly debt-fuelled takeover bid by Melrose, a company with a history of opportunistic asset-stripping.
A quick buck
It’s an all too familiar story like when Kraft took over Cadburys. A valuable company could be sacrificed so that a few can make a quick buck.
We rightly praise the growth of companies like GKN and their location in the UK. And yet when we are faced with the possible destruction of that company, the Government refuses to act.
That’s why the next Labour government will broaden the scope of the ‘public interest test’ to include explicit consideration of the needs of our economy taking advantage of new freedoms outside of the EU to allow Government to intervene to protect our industrial base.
An important step towards reprogramming the economy, so that it works for the many, not the few.
Reprogramming our economy; to reward good business practices, reining in speculative finance so that it serves – not distorts the whole UK economy – backed up by a strong industrial strategy, as well as investing in our physical infrastructure and our people. This approach is vital if we are to develop our manufacturing strength. That is what the next Labour Government is committed to working with you to achieve.
Thank you very much.
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Anyone with a grain of sense should be able to see that Corbyn isn't outlining a plan to abolish private industry or the financial sector, he's just calling for a better, fairer system that is geared more towards those who make things than those who recklessly gamble with other people's money.
He's not saying there's no place for speculative finance, but that finance should be used to fund new businesses, new infrastructure, and better services, rather than for unregulated gambling on extraordinarily complex derivatives that even most of the traders don't even understand.
You could see why city traders who have enjoyed four decades of enriching themselves at the expense of the real economy would object to any effort to get them to invest in the real productive economy rather than gambling away with impunity, knowing that they'll be bailed out by the taxpayer again whenever they next fail.
But Corbyn's speech should be music to the ears of anyone who values the real economy above the selfish interests of a tiny clique of city speculators who see it as their right to live off the backs of the rest of us, and have us pay for their economic crises through austerity dogma while the government actually lavishes handouts on them.
And even if you think that the interests of city speculators should trump the needs of the real economy, you'd have to be absolutely clueless to accept the idea that a call for more financial investment in private sector manufacturing is some kind of Soviet style communist plot.
Sadly though, there are actually people thick enough to accept such brazen Tory propaganda at face value, hence eight years of ruinous Tory austerity dogma damaging the future economic potential of the UK, rather than anything even remotely resembling an actual plan to make sure the financial sector insolvency crisis can never happen again.
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