“Ordinary people want re-industrialisation of their cities and a skills-based economy. They want stable communities free from the scourge of …”

Oh good, another man of the left who knows what ‘ordinary people’ want, even, presumably if they don’t know this is what they want. Lucky, lucky ordinary people.

I was cheering this piece on until the penultimate paragraph, which seems wrong-headed to me. Yes, we need to reorient the left away from an obsession with increasing private consumption, but a reindustrialization isn’t going to happen and wouldn’t (on environmental grounds) be desirable if it did. More of a focus on increasing free time (and limiting working hours) and on quality of life instead, perhaps?

22 million for Luka. Thats bloody stupid money,no matter how good he is.

Chris,

Before I penned the piece I explicitly asked Ed Mili to “commit to a reindustrialisation of 24 ex coal mining areas of N England”

He said yes.

It’s on his twitter feed if you care to check.

I know the headline might not be chosen by the author…. but New Labour never had a soul to lose. The only surprising thing is that so many people still don’t realise it is dead.

I’m just as suspicious of the aspiration for re-industrialisation as Chris @ 2: what would it mean? What types of industries? Paid for with what?

Re-industrialisation? is this the making of things nobody wants at a price nobody wants to pay? I thought that we had finally given up with the ‘value of labour’ (misquoted but you know what I mean)…

Dudes,

Re-Industrialisation?

The UK can, and should be a global leader in the renewable energy sector.
In the next thirty years we need to house 10m more people
Our country’s transport infrastructure is dire
We can lead Europe in car production..
The scope for bio-tech investment is unlimited..

You have to be a little bit more imaginative than to view industry as coal mines

Éoin

The UK can, and should be a global leader in the renewable energy sector.
Why, what’s special about us?

In the next thirty years we need to house 10m more people
- Sorry, but why, when our resident population isn’t growing?

Our country’s transport infrastructure is dire
- agree. This is investment.

We can lead Europe in car production..
- again, why?

The scope for bio-tech investment is unlimited..
- again, what’s special about us?

S

Stuart,

Resident population is growing I am afraid. It is set to grow by 10m in a generation. If it is necessary I will provide ONS link..

On Car production, under Mandleson at the very end [to his credit] inward investment in the automobile industry rocketed… this should have been harnessed & sustained..

On energies you need to think big.. the potential for exploitation of our wind and tidal energy is massive.. us because we are an island, us because we have leading universities with the expertise….. the potential growth in designing, building & hosting this equipment is both a) necessary to our long term survival b) too big an opportunity to miss

Why is the fact that you could get Ed Miliband to assent to reindustrialization relevant either way?

Chris it is relevant because you said

“but a reindustrialization isn’t going to happen”

I think the leader of the Labour Party disagrees with you. That’s relevant.

Manufacturing contributes nearly a quarter of Germany’s GDP – which is about twice as much as manufacturing contributes to Britain’s GDP:
http://www.tradingeconomics.com/germany/manufacturing-value-added-percent-of-gdp-wb-data.html

There is probably additional potential demand for British manufactured products as the result of the depreciation in the Pound. The basic question is whether there are sufficient indigenous skills to support the requirements of modern manufacturing industries in which computers and computer controlled machines are ubiquitous – and when using computers stresses literacy and numeracy skills. This report isn’t encouraging:

“The number of adults unable to read or count remains unacceptably high in England despite £5bn spent by Labour trying to improve the situation, according to an influential parliamentary spending watchdog.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2009/jan/29/literacy-numeracy-skills

Marginal, hard-pressed manufacturing businesses won’t generate the buoyant tax revenues of a flourishing financial services sector in which Britain – regretably or otherwise – has a comparative international advantage.

Ordinary folk are aspirational; don’t doubt it. But what they aspire to is not what those on the right think they dream of.

what is it that they aspire to, and what is it that “those on the right” think they aspire to?

How did buying into the Mandelson/Blair mantra lead to an emergency for some folk in Northern England? Are you referring to those “ordinary folk” (ugh – you sound like a Tea Party candidate) who did aspire to what those on the right think they dream of? (i.e. buying lots of stuff, getting in debt). So what proportion of ordinary folk have consumerist aspirations?

people want more affordable rental property, but they don’t want that property to be owned privately, because privately owned rental property is a “scourge”? Why is that?

I’d like to know whether turning away from an “obession” with private consumption differs from turning away from worrying about the real wage. You (rightly) point to stagnant wages and inflation, i.e. a reduction in the real wage and a reduction how much households can afford to consume. So, are we worried about consumption or not? Personally, I’d like to see higher wages at the low end of the distribution because I’d like to see higher consumption for those people i.e. less poverty.

we do not all aspire to be filthy rich.

Taken literally, I’m sure that true. But if “all” was replaced by “the majority of us” and “filthy” with merely “rich”?

If I went out and conducted a survey in the working class neighbourhoods where I live, what proportion of respondant woudl like to be rich, do you think?

My guess is: a high proportion. In which case Éoin youare claiming to know what real working class people really want and you are, in a very straightforward way, wrong. Not in touch with reality.

Also, I’d like to know what the point of all this industrialization is, if not to produce goods for consumption and wages to pay for them? Working in a factory isn’t a recreational pursuit is it?

Someone, somewhere at the top of our party needs to say this loud and clear, ‘It is a monumental achievement to pay your bills on time, rear a family, and hold down a stable job regardless of the colour of your collar.’

Actually it ought to be an utterly banal achievement. Regardless of the colour of your collar. It is amazing that something so routine is now exceptional.

But someone ought to say it. Someone in the Labour Party especially. They ought to say more things – like it is not all right to abandon children you have sired without providing for them, it is not all right to leave your family because you fancy someone new on the side, it is not all right to depend on the state all your life.

But those, of course, are middle class values now even if they were once working class ones. So much the worse for the working class.

I am not sure about the rest of the article. The Left used to look forward to raising the living standards of the poor. It has no future if it becomes the party of telling the workers they should accept their lot. Damn right the Labour Party should encourage people to aspire to more. Not more debt of course, but better homes, better wages, better education, better culture, better lives.

7. Éoin Clarke – “The UK can, and should be a global leader in the renewable energy sector.”

Why?

“In the next thirty years we need to house 10m more people”

No we don’t. We can either decide to let another 10 million migrants into the country and continue down the path of making the indigenous peoples of these isles a minority in their own homeland or we can decide not to. We don’t need to do either.

“Our country’s transport infrastructure is dire”

Compared to? I agree we could do more. We won’t of course.

“We can lead Europe in car production..”

Indeed.

“The scope for bio-tech investment is unlimited..”

Although the scope for bio-tech returns appears to be very limited. Singapore seems to be pissing a lot of its money away on this. We could compete. But why would we want to?

9. Éoin Clarke – “On energies you need to think big.. the potential for exploitation of our wind and tidal energy is massive.. us because we are an island, us because we have leading universities with the expertise.”

So is our potential for Morris Dancing. But that does not mean we should invest in it. Every competent engineer and scientist knows that renewables are an utter waste of time. They will never provide us with a significant share of our energy demand – with the possible exception of solar and I am dubious about that. It is a massive Groundnuts Scheme and we should keep well away from it.

“the potential growth in designing, building & hosting this equipment is both a) necessary to our long term survival b) too big an opportunity to miss”

There is no reason to think that wasting money on schemes that don’t work has anything to offer us for the future. Certainly nothing to do with our survival. And what opportunity? Even if it worked, what benefits would there be?

The best comment on renewable estimates is this:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/05/10/ipcc_srren_pre_release/

Ordinary people [don't] want a “weekly trip to local bistros, casinos and retail cathedrals”.

yes, this is why ordinary people stay away from shopping centers in droves.

[does Nandos count as a bistro? I know "ordinary people" eat there!!]

What, exactly, are ordinary people permitted to afford with your approval?

We can agree on decent housing (but not too nice! that would be middle class! no wasting money on decoration and renovation, you wannabe bourgois) and free child care .. yes! so you can go out to work to earn money for, what? Eating out once a week, clearly not. And what do people buy in all those ghastly retail cathedrals? Clothes, CDs, computers, homeware — ordinary people just don’t want them! They are going to be absolutely delighted when Labour re-engages with their values. I am relieved, I thought that people were consumer drones but it turns out ordinary people are not – I guess just the middle classes are.

Hey, it turns out that if you don’t want to spend money on your home, eating out, buying clothes, entertainment, holidays, furniture, you don’t actually need to earn much money! Good news for those households who are experiencing stagnant real wages.

[n.b. I recognize that many households in this country to not have enough money to even buy the basics Éoin thinks should suffice them, and the reason I still regard myself as left-wing is I regard the main job of government to improve on that - but I discover from Éoin that I ought not worry about things like the stagnant median wage (because that's already enough to eat out at bistros and similar unwanted loathsome consumer frivolities) and that unions whose members are reasonably well paid (automotive, train drivers, communications etc.) should perhaps think about lobbying for lower wages lest they too fall prey to the lure of bistros]

SMFS, what do you actually want? Every single one of your comments on this blog is a tired routine of cynicism and sub-par Fisking with very very few suggestions of what you’d rather happened. If you’re simply so nihilist that you don’t think any improvement for humans is possible then fine but at least be honest about your intentions.

I’d approach this from a rather different angle. A Labour leader *could not possibly* go around telling working people to be content with their lot and forget about living the sort of life their middle-class neighbours live: owning their own homes, holidaying abroad, driving a car instead of taking the bus, etc. It would come across as deeply patronising and would just reinforce people’s impression that Labour no longer cares about the aspirations and living standards of working class people.

But of course you’re right that the pressure to consume, to ‘keep up with the Joneses’ even when the Joneses earn twice what you do, is a Bad Thing.

To me this is all about inequality. Tackle that and (if the Spirit Level evidence is to be believed) you start to get away from the situation where people feel they need to borrow just to be a part of ‘mainstream’ society.

There is just no prospect of us returning to a world in which you had one class of people owning houses, cars and TVs and another class of people building houses, making cars and repairing TVs, with each ‘knowing their place’. And nor should we want to.

Ordinary people want re-industrialisation of their cities and a skills-based economy. They want stable communities free from the scourge of Buy-to-Let properties with revolving doors. They want economic stability and a lifestyle that is affordable. Council housing, the living wage, and free childcare matter much much more to people that a weekly trip to local bistros, casinos and retail cathedrals.

Sorry Dr Clarke, but the above just goes to show that neither you, nor Ed Milliband, have a clue about what ordinary people want.

Because, of course, you are extraordinary.

In fact, if ordinary people exist at all, they want to own their own home and to have as much money as possible left over to spend on the best car they can afford, Sky TV, computer games, eating out and foreign holidays.

A bit like the rest of us.

They don’t care a jot about some mythical community paradise of solid altruistic values that persists in the imagination of intellectual lefties whose romantic political prejudices were excited when they once watched a Hovis ad.

Ordinary people care more about remembering to buy their lottery ticket each week than they do about the living wage, which they will never have heard of.

@22 pagar

“They don’t care a jot about some mythical community paradise of solid altruistic values that persists in the imagination of intellectual lefties whose romantic political prejudices were excited when they once watched a Hovis ad.”

I think you’ll find that there are plenty of people who do care about their communities, not as a result of some atavistic urge to be an extra in a Hovis ad, but because they are three dimensional enough to see that it is possible to want both “cargo” in whatever form of consumer goods and leisure they chose, but also to want the benefits of communitarianism in some areas.

Things may have moved on a bit since Beveridge, but don’t understimate the attachment of people to the principle that “enrichissez-vous” isn’t the only way to organise society.

When I am serious I put my serious face on

I think you have a point. The over-imaginative Blair tried to extend his middle-class fantasy over the whole of the UK.

Cafe culture, anyone?

“Ordinary people want re-industrialisation of their cities”

I’ve lived in a number of different cities and absolutely the last thing that anyone in any of them has wanted is a bloody great factory on the corner.

You sound like some Soviet planner getting juiced up over sending 300,000 people to Naberzhnye Chelny where they can all make Kamaz trucks for a living. I’ve been there matey and it’s a shithole that even people from Bradford would flee.

As to manufacturing in general: yes, the UK has a smaller manufacturing sector that Germany. We also have a manufacturing sector which at around 12% or so is just around and about the 12% or so of the global economy which is manufacturing.

We’re normal, it’s Germany that’s weird.

Tim,

Stick to the numbers

@26

But wouldn’t you agree that we are overly-reliant on the finance sector? A sector which is totally out of touch with the concerns & struggles of everyday folk?

Lots of discussion here about intended aims and objectives for the economy but little on how to get to there from where we are.

Instead of grumbling on about Britain’s over-reliance on financial services, it would be more productive IMO to focus on policy to promote business expansion in other sectors and to assess the fiscal impact on tax revenues of doing so.

Blair was correct about one thing IMO – the importance of education, education and education. It’s a shame that New Labour did so little to improve opportunities to bring on industrial vocational skills after GB had campaigned on this in the run up to the 1997 election. Why did nothing come of his proposals for an online University for Industry?

I doubt that media reports such as these helped to attract new business investment to Doncaster:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/1999/aug/08/1
http://www.at-large.org/top-10-worst-crime-areas-in-uk-%E2%80%93-doncaster-tops-the-list/12

@ Tim W

“it’s a shithole that even people from Bradford would flee”

Bradford might have some grotty areas (like most cities), but at least smug Tory twats like you are thin on the ground. Thank you for reminding me why I choose to send my children to a Bradford comp rather than the public school full of ignorant, sneering Worstallikes I attended.

New Labour is what happened when the soul was torn out of the Labour Party.

Ordinary people want re-industrialisation of their cities and a skills-based economy. They want stable communities free from the scourge of Buy-to-Let properties with revolving doors. They want economic stability and a lifestyle that is affordable. Council housing, the living wage, and free childcare matter much much more to people that a weekly trip to local bistros, casinos and retail cathedrals.

This is a good summary of what Lewisham People Before Profit stand for.

http://www.lewishampeopleb4profit.org.uk/downloads

Between 1996 and 2008 manufacturing’s share of GDP fell from 21.1% to 13.2% while financial services grew from 6.6% to 9.4%. The “City”, accounts for less than a third of this (between 2% and 3% of total GDP).
(David Smith http://www.economicsuk.com/blog/2008_03.html)

The jobs lost in manufacturing have not been replaced by one in financial services – as a sector it just doesn’t generate many jobs.

Of course people who understand this want the re-industrialisation of their cities and a skills-based economy.

49% of C2 women voted Tory at the last election… only 19% voted Labour..

This was a net loss of 36% on 2005..

we actually gained net +9% if the A/B women and more upper middle class women voted Labour than Tory…

Why do you guys think that this was the case?

My hunch is that New Labour got its priorities wrong..

@26: “We’re normal, it’s Germany that’s weird.”

True enough – but many want manufacturing in Britain to flourish again and to shrink reliance on financial services. The question is how to do that. We don’t seem to have any sharp policy ideas about getting there. Just why is the percentage contribution of manufacturing to Germany’s GDP about twice the contribution that manufacturing makes to Britain’s GDP?

As for boosting Britain’s car-making industry, it’s doing relatively well right now but the industry is small compared with the car-making industries of Japan and Germany:
http://uk.cars.yahoo.com/09062011/36/massive-uk-car-production-boost-0.html

What rationale did Ford have for closing down its car-making capacity in Britain at Dagenham and Halewood to consolidate assembly operations in its European continental plants – and doing that while the Japanese car makers – Nissan, Toyota and Honda – were creating manufacturing capacity here?

By many accounts, car assembly capacity in Europe was well in excess of demand even before the financial crisis and the deep recession the crisis brought.

@33: “My hunch is that New Labour got its priorities wrong..”

We tend to overlook that the flourishing financial services sector generated those buoyant tax revenues which were applied to finance expansion of the public services – especially healthcare and education. Spending on the NHS tripled during the New Labour government.

There are unresolved fundamental questions about whether switching policy priorities to bring on the relative importance of manufacturing will generate such buoyant tax revenues. The facts are that by world standards, Britain has a defintive comparative advantage in financial services (? why) but only an average advantage in producing manufactured products (? why). Could that have something to do with skill pools?

Between 1996 and 2008 manufacturing’s share of GDP fell from 21.1% to 13.2% while financial services grew from 6.6% to 9.4%. The “City”, accounts for less than a third of this (between 2% and 3% of total GDP).
(David Smith http://www.economicsuk.com/blog/2008_03.html)

So when people say we’re over-reliant on the financial services sector, are we even more reliant on the manufacturing sector?

As for boosting Britain’s car-making industry, it’s doing relatively well right now but the industry is small compared with the car-making industries of Japan and Germany:
http://uk.cars.yahoo.com/09062011/36/massive-uk-car-production-boost-0.html

What rationale did Ford have for closing down its car-making capacity in Britain at Dagenham and Halewood to consolidate assembly operations in its European continental plants – and doing that while the Japanese car makers – Nissan, Toyota and Honda – were creating manufacturing capacity here?

By many accounts, car assembly capacity in Europe was well in excess of demand even before the financial crisis and the deep recession the crisis brought.

Germany, France and Italy (and the US) subsidise their car industries in various ways (I don’t know about the UK, my guess is that we do).

One of the amusing things about the manufacturing vs. financial services sector ‘debate’, and the complaints about the explicit and implicit subsidies provided to, say, banks, is that people don’t mention manufacturing sector subsidies. There is something distasteful, unsavoury, perhaps even ungodly, about the financial services sector, isn’t there?

We tend to overlook that the flourishing financial services sector generated those buoyant tax revenues which were applied to finance expansion of the public services – especially healthcare and education.

Quite – but you’re getting into a nuanced argument, there, and we can’t have that – no, we must have a simple narrative.

49% of C2 women voted Tory at the last election… only 19% voted Labour..

So they switched from Labour to Tory, because Labour were too right-wing, and if only Labour became left-wing again they’d switch back?

There’s a flaw in the logic there somewhere.

@eoin

“Stick to the numbers”

Any plans to answer the questions about the numbers on your Housing article last week?

@36: “Germany, France and Italy (and the US) subsidise their car industries in various ways (I don’t know about the UK, my guess is that we do).”

Quite possibly true about various implicit or explicit subsidies for car manufacturing in Germany, France and Italy (and the US) but the subsidy here is via “regional assistance” in government designated regionally assisted areas. That didn’t stop Ford from closing the Halewood assembly plant on Merseyside. The Honda plants in Swindon are not in a regionally assisted area and nor is the Toyota plant at Burnaston, Derby. Nissan in Sunderland usually gets regional assistance for job expansions or safeguarding projects.

Car plants are regarded as “politically sexy” in many places besides Britain. The tough policy question is whether to subsidise expansion of the motor industry in Britain given the overhang of substantial excess capacity in Europe. IMO it would make better sense to consider other options but the challenge of confronting skill shortages (as well as adult literacy and numeracy issues) will be a constraining factor.

Candidly, it makes little sense to talk about promoting manufacturing without saying what kind of manufacturing, how to promote that kind of manufacturing and where the expected market will materialise.

The source of unsustainable housing bubbles in the UK was not just the hot air coming from New Labour. Lifestyle programming and merchandising – from Changing Rooms and Groundforce and House Doctor in the late nineties and early noughties, to Location, Location, Re-location, Re-location and Grand Designs, the US show shown here Extreme makeover Home edition, and current daytime programmes like Homes under the Hammer and A Place in the Sun…there is a much wider cultural phenomenon.

Likewise American shows like Friends creating the demand for Starbucks cafés and loft-living is something that imprints on the brain. There is a commercial/media/mainstream cultural feed here that is nothing to do with the Labour party. Amen to that, but it will be difficult to declare war on the very same stuff that fills up the pages of The Guardian that are not news journalism. Labour should’ve spoken up when it became popular to pour scorn on ‘Chavs’. I remember Julie Birchill did, in The Guardian. But that horse has bolted now.

The culture stuff is doubtless fascinating but it doesn’t address how a government is to shrink reliance on financial services and promote that switch of enterprise with resources into manufacturing.

If you want to re-industrialise then maybe you have to look again at the political consensus on free trade. You can have new industries but you would need to protect them, either from inside the EU (as it was originally intended) or from outside. Otherwise why would anyone invest in industry in the UK when they could choose China or other low wage countries? Mind you if you took this action you would find yourself in conflict with the City very quickly. In fact to re-industrialise commits you turning your back on neo-liberal economics and so far we have seen no real sign of the Ed Miliband or the shadow cabinet going down that road, except for some of Ed Balls’s ideas.

Why this article? The Labour party are completely irrelevant now. The Conservatives and Lib Dems are doing a tough but great job at tackling the problems inherited by the previous government. When the deficit is wiped out, what will you say then?

@44 Neville

I’m no fan of the Labour party, but buying into the dodgy narrative of the right wing nutters that the current situation is all Labour’s fault is facile. Do you really believe that things would be better had the Tories been in power when the recession hit? If anything they would have been even softer on the financial sector and regulation, so chances are things would be a lot worse.

The LD’s are the one’s responsible for throwing a lifeline to Labour, despite the nauseating aspects of New Labour, which sadly appear to be very hard to kill. We’ll see how irrelevant the Labour party is come the next election…. but the existential threat has to be to the LD’s, not Labour.

You may feel that the Coalition are “doing a great job”, but there is more than one way to skin a cat. As was pointed out yesterday by Ed Balls (whoever thought I’d find myself agreeing with him… it makes me feel a bit dirty….) those applauding the scale and speed of the Coalition’s cuts and tax rises may very well be proven wrong, as has happened all too often in the past.

Come election time, if enough people agree with that assessment, the Coalition and the Tories haven’t got a hope…. Labour won’t even have to do too much; it is much more likely that the Coalition will lose the election than that Labour will win it.

In this morning’s news:

LIB-DEMS leader Nick Clegg revealed a somewhat disarming candour for a politician when he conceded yesterday that many of the supporters who had previously voted for his party might never return, now that they were in coalition with the Tories.

Lots of people might suspect that, and many ex-supporters might feel betrayed by the Lib-Dems’ partnership with a party they would never have contemplated voting for – but it is a surprise Mr Clegg has so candidly confessed to the shortcoming that puts his party beyond the pale for many lapsed stalwarts.
http://www.liverpooldailypost.co.uk/views/liverpool-daily-post/2011/06/17/lib-dems-left-in-electoral-limbo-92534-28892943/

Candidly, it makes little sense to talk about promoting manufacturing without saying what kind of manufacturing, how to promote that kind of manufacturing and where the expected market will materialise.

Wholly agreed.

45. Galen10

I’m no fan of the Labour party, but buying into the dodgy narrative of the right wing nutters that the current situation is all Labour’s fault is facile.

Problems would have to go back over 13 years for them to be the fault of the Tories. I don’t think it is facile to say the people who ran the country for a decade before the bust were mainly responsible.

Do you really believe that things would be better had the Tories been in power when the recession hit? If anything they would have been even softer on the financial sector and regulation, so chances are things would be a lot worse.

Except the f**king up of Britain’s banking regulation was all Gordon’s doing. We had no bank runs under the Bank of England going back to the 1890s I think. Gordon removes them from the supervision of the banks, gives the jobs to some of his mates at the FSA and they run the financial sector into the ground. The Tories may have been softer, but it was Gordon wot did it.

As was pointed out yesterday by Ed Balls (whoever thought I’d find myself agreeing with him… it makes me feel a bit dirty….) those applauding the scale and speed of the Coalition’s cuts and tax rises may very well be proven wrong, as has happened all too often in the past.

Or they may well be proven right. Labour’s economic management has improved enormously, but let’s thank God we are out of the Euro – thanks to the Tories.

@ 30 G.O.

“Thank you for reminding me why I choose to send my children to a Bradford comp”

I’m sure they’ll be thanking you no end in the future.

“Labour won’t even have to do too much; it is much more likely that the Coalition will lose the election than that Labour will win it.”

Except that there’s no historical basis for claiming that that is the case. Parties which just expect to win by default have always failed to do in recent history — see Labour after 1979, and the Tories after 1997 — because if the voters dislike the government but don’t trust the Opposition with power, they’re going to stay with the government by default.

I honestly think this is one of the best articles I’ve read in months.

We have no jobs that drive our economy in a lot of towns up north and this is exactly why Eoin is right about the aspirations of most ordinary working people. Whilst some will always have a nostalgic vision of coal-mining and other industries, most know that these aren’t going to come back. But what we need, that we have never had, is something to replace these industries. Hence the rage that can be induced about southerners whining about our reliance on the public sector for employment – what the fuck do you expect if you systematically remove all the other jobs from areas?

Whether that comes from renewable energy (which by the way as much as the Labour government supported – it didn’t support job creation in that area) or other industries is another question but some way or another Eoin’s vision of sustainable employment in new areas is one that I guarantee you will chime with a lot of northerners whether in old mining villages, mill towns, seaside resorts, shipbuilding cities or areas that used to have big steel industry. And let’s not forget – as much as everyone talks about winning over middle England a very good tranche of seats up north are currently in Tory hands and Labour will need to take many to win the next election.

48 SMFS

My point was not that we’d have to go back 13 years to be able to blame the Tories (although we shouldn’t forget the monstrous mess they made of things… remember one of the reasons New Labour won in ’97 was the fact they looked a better bet to the city than the Tories at the time). My point was that had the Tories been in power at the time of the more recent financial meltdown, it would have been no better, and probably significantly worse.

As to the “it was Gordon wot dun it” line…. it’s pretty weak frankly. If by some happenstance the Tories had gotten into power pre-recession, what exactly would they have been doing differently? You honestly think they would have been firmer with the financial sector…. honestly?

The Tories can’t take all the credit for staying out of the Euro… there was very little appetite elsewhere for it either. Again, the point of my earlier doubts about the Coalition trotting out IMF experts applauding their programme is not that they may not prove right, it is that we should be very suspicious of Coalition claims that “there is no alternative”….. there is.

Lots of moaning here but little hard analysis and few constructive policy proposals.

Try this recent government command paper: Trade and Investment for Growth (Cm 8015), published in February this year by the Department of Business, Innovations and Skills – Vince Cable is the Secretary of State:
http://www.official-documents.gov.uk/document/cm80/8015/8015.pdf