![]() ![]() This might be a new line from the head of the CBI, but simply saying the market will fix this is simply not good enough. ![]() Noting the “shot of redemption” new industries give to deindustrialised regions, here he is on making “levelling up” work: The contrast with Danker’s argument could not be clearer. When Gordon Brown, as Chancellor the Exchequer, told the CBI conference in 2005 he wanted business regulation to be “ not just a light touch but a limited touch”, he was simply repeating the neoliberal commonsense of the time – and no doubt his audience would have nodded along with it. Labour was more expansive in its spending the Conservatives, and the Conservative-led Coalition from 2010-15, rather less. At most, it could compensate for “market failures” in the provision of some essentials – basic infrastructure, say, or education. ![]() But the swap of typically better-paid, more secure manufacturing work for typically lower-paid, less secure (private) service sector work was keenly felt and, despite some efforts at geographic redistribution under Labour – whether directly via the old Regional Development Authorities or indirectly via public sector employment – the relative weakening of economies outside of London and the South East became all too apparent once the boom of the 2000s ended.įor the entire period, however, until the last few years, the general direction from government has been consistent: that government itself should, as far as possible, “j ust get out of the way”. Overall employment remained high until the Great Financial Crisis, in striking contrast to the searing rises in unemployment under Thatcher. Of course, under New Labour these lost manufacturing jobs were (in effect) replaced with service sector employment, in both the public and private sectors. The second wave of deindustrialisation in the West, apparent from the mid-1990s onwards but accelerating from the 2000s, then helps account for the loss of jobs under New Labour.Īn overvalued pound – itself the symptom of government monetary policy – is common to both experiences, with recovery in employment being particularly tied, in the 1990s, to the crash in the value of the pound following Britain’s exit from the Exchange Rate Mechanism. Thatcher’s destruction of industrial employment was more dramatic than elsewhere, but not completely out of line with the general experience. The big picture here is well-known: deindustrialisation from the late 1960s onwards was common to the developed world, with major industries, from coal mining to car manufacture, shaking out jobs on a huge scale. The only periods of sustained increase in manufacturing employment occurred under Conservative Prime Ministers: rather weakly, rising around 200,000 in the nine years from 2010 to 2019 and then more dramatically under John Major, rising 190,000 in just four years from 1993 to 1997. But then between 1997, when Labour’s Tony Blair became Prime Minister and Gordon Brown’s exit from No.10 in May 2010, manufacturing employment fell by 1.7m. It’s not something Labour like to talk about, but if deindustiralisation under Thatcher is notorious today – informing, still, how much of the North of England is perceived – its second round, under New Labour, was also far-reaching.īetween 1979, when Thatcher entered office, and 1990, when she left, employment in manufacturing fell by 1.8m. And although reported as an attack on Thatcher, Danker picked his words more carefully: “Since the 1980s, we let old industries die… We have spent the past decades living with these consequences.” Greeted with pearl-clutching in the Daily Mail, rentagob Tory backbenchers providing the copy, Danker has taken careful aim at forty years’ worth of neoliberal economic policy in Britain, specifically calling out the loss of manufacturing jobs under successive governments. But far more interesting than the party leaders’ paeans to profit or to Peppa Pig were the comments made the same day by the CBI’s new Director General, Tony Danker. Both Boris Johnson and Keir Starmer chose to address the Confederation of British Industry conference this week. ![]()
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