Brendan Barber, current General Secretary of the TUC, is quoted today as saying that the Government should "learn from the Olympics" in creating policies to boost the economy. He has reportedly said that the success of British athletes funded by public money shows that "private isn't always best and the market doesn't always deliver"and is also of the view that the coalition Government has failed to learn the lessons of the 1930s and 1980s.
Which planet Mr Barber is on isn't stated in the reports but it's presumably somewhere pretty far away from the planet on which most of us live. Where he has gained the notion that the expenditure of a vast amount of public money, by itself, proves that private is bad and the market is flawed is a mystery;.how the success of a bunch of athletes can be translated into economic success is another one. If my recollection is correct, retail sales actually fell during the period of the main Games, something diametrically opposite to the claimed economic boost claimed by Mr Barber. In truth, we won't really know what, if any, effect the Olympic jamboree has had on our economy until all of the numbers have been worked over by independent economists, that is those who owe no allegiance to any political party or affiliaited organisation. My own suspicion is that any boost has been minimal at best and almost certainly transitory.
Barber has apparently gone on to compare today's woes with those of the 1930s and 1980s. In the period after the First World War and leading up to the economic disasters of the late 1920s and 1930s, the world was a very different place than it is today. The economic structure of our society was very different and our economy was tied to the 'Gold Standard' until 1931. Arguably, it was leaving 'Gold Standard' that allowed the UK to manage itself out of the problems of the 1930s and laid the foundation for later expansionist policies. That this also led directly to the later problems of the 1970s and 1980s through allowing Governments to simply print money which had no assets behind it is, to my mind, so obvious as to require no further explanation but then I'm no economist.
In his comments, Barber has studiously avoided referring to the near catastrophic consequences of Labour economic policy from 1964 through to 1979, Ted Heath's administration of 1971 - 1974 admittedly doing little to help things. Barber being a good and true 'Leftie' concentrates instead on the measures which had to be taken under the Conservative Govenments form 1979 to 1997 and which he and his ilk dislike so much. The fact that it was the Tory measures of these years which restored the British economy to a semblance of health is ignored; that it was a Labour Government under the management of Blair and Brown which systematically destroyed our economy after 1997 is also ignored, the crash and ongoing recession being blamed on the horrid bankers.
Barber's disingenuous comments are typical of the tripe spouted by trades' unionists and it's frightening to think that anyone takes such people seriously. The very simple truth is that our country has lived off of the 'fat of the land' for far too long and the chickens are now coming home to roost. Our public sector has become grotesquely inflated, with armies of public servants employed in non-jobs; shocking inefficiency abounds. The private sector is more and more cencentrated on 'service industries' which have nothing to do with industry and little to do with service. We make very little and create very little genuine new wealth. We have paid ourselves too much for doing too little, hence our manufacturing industries - cars, ships, aeroplanes etc - have dwindled and all but died. We do still assemble cars, but how many do we make from scratch ? 'Red Robbo' and his like made sure that all of these industries were largely destroyed in the 1960s and 1970s.
Barber is hinting at strikes by public sector workers as protest against current Government policy. Interestingly he hasn't mentioned private sector workers, perhaps because they know which side their bread is buttered. Trades' Unionism in the private sector is all but dead and the TUC's only remaining bastion of power is the bloated public sector; even here, most workers seem to take little interest in union activities and few vote in strike ballots or for anything else. Barber and his kind are an anachronism that needs to be stamped on once and for all.
The true lessons of the 1930s and 1970/80s are that you can't have something for nothing and you can't pay for today by robbing from tomorrow. Limited and controlled borrowing backed by tangible assets and with a clear repayment plan is one thing, unsecured borrowing simply to pay today's wages is quite another. If this means so-called austerity, so be it; any other strategy is plain daft.
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