Half-inspired by Forgesian Thinking’s recommendations…. if I was Gordon Brown’s speechwriter, I’d be tearing up the current guff about stability and experience in a period of ‘financial turbulence‘ and drafting something like this for conference next week….
“Comrades/colleagues
I have torn up the speech I was writing the week before last. In that draft, I referred to the current ‘financial turbulence’ and the need for stable and experienced government to see us through a difficult time. We still offer a stable and experienced government, but after the events of last week we can no longer justifiably talk of ‘financial turbulence’ – the phrase on everyone’s lips, from the venerable Alan Greenspan to the Daily Mail’s and the Morning Star’s leader headline writers, is ‘meltdown’. The comparisons with the stock market crash of 1929 (ht: Dave T at Harry’s Place) and the subsequent decade of recession are coming thick and fast.
Let us then be clear about this. Last week, the world changed. Last week, the ways in which governments can and should relate to that world changed. Last week, many of the comfortable late twentieth century certainties about the victory of free market capitalism came to an end. The demise of late twentieth century capitalism offers many threats, but as a Labour prime minister I can stand here and tell you that it offers many more opportunities. Since the other 9/11 – the day in 1973 when violence was used to overthrow a socialist and democratically elected government in Chile (ht: Dave’s Part) solely in the interests of ‘capital’, a free-market economic psesudo-philosophy has held sway across the globe. In the US, that meant Reaganism, – mass unemployment across vast swathes of the industrial heartlands, and inner cities so plunged into abject poverty that violent crime and ultimately riot came as a reaction.
In Africa,
(Audience participation ensues and Gordomn shows of some witty and nifty improvisation skills while the audience shouts out stuff about Thatcher).
Overall, this new free market ideology, propagated by those who controlled the markets, endured by the rest of us, did change the whole environment in which governments could operate, until now.
Globalisation and the free market did reduce the level of autonomy that governments thought they had to meet the needs of their own people. Rightly or wrongly, even governments with socialist aspirations were constrained by the threat of the ‘flight of capital’ to the monetarist polices demanded by the now-disgraced financial ‘system’, operating in league with the biggest corporations.
This meant reducing the tax burden on wealth to the minimum ‘acceptable’ , for fear that if it was too high, that wealth and the jobs created by it would simply leave the country. The race to the bottom had started and we, like most other countries, were caught up in a spiral of economic one-downmanship, where stability of capital became more important than the lives of working people – the very people this Labour party was set up to support.
During the ‘good times’ of the last 10 years, when growth has been steady, the stock market generally on the rise, house prices booming, inflation AND unemployment low, these free-market constraints – and that’s not an oxymoron – have been endurable. Yes, I know that many of you in the audience today would have liked to have seen more progress on our poverty goals, and have been concerned about rising inequality of income – I have listened to you, and I share those concerns. Yes, I know that many of you have expressed concern about reductions in pension terms, and I share those concerns.
But on the whole, families did become better off, public services have improved – not immeasurably – but measurably – because of the steps we took to not just to invest in them during the good times, but to make sure that that investment paid off. Those ‘good times’ are coming rapidly to an end. We ARE faced with a recession caused by those very factors which for thirty years have given us the illusion that the free-market was the best way, the only way. But, with the shattering of the façade of the new liberal ideology, comes a new opportunity. Now that the banks, who until recently told us ‘the market know best’ and that ‘big government is bad government’ are coming to those very governments to be bailed out, the paramaters within which governments can operate has changed.
There is an alternative to free market non-government, and it’s called social democracy. I am proud to be a social democrat, and am pleased, in spite perhaps even because of the current crisis, that the time has now come, the space in now clear of free market hokum, to put social democratic principles into action.
The time is now ripe to move on from the narrow idea of the ‘stakeholder society’ – a temporally laudable but always awkward attempt to embed some form of equality within a free market system which allows of no principle of equality.
The time has come for the rise of an equal society – a society at the heart of which lies justice for all.
Not the pale, insipid ‘social justice’ promulgated by a Tory party desperate to seek a foothold upon our natural territory – a social justice which is fine as long as the status quo is retained, fine as long as nothing actually has to be done to create it.
No, the social justice of a reinvigorated social democracy is about government being big, bold and brave enough to make it happen, now that the opportunity is there. So which government can do this? Simple – it’s a Labour government, backed by and in unity with a Labour party for whom the notions of justice, equality and responsible government to get is there are not just figments of the latest focus group, but are deeply rooted in a 100 years of struggle and solidarity.
The party that will NOT bring us towards social justice and equality is a Conservative party led by people, still wet behind the ears, whose only intellectual reference point is a free market philosophy that will soon become ‘of yesteryear’ – A Conservative party whose whole background and grooming would lead them inevitably enough towards Thatcherite policies as a proposed way dealing with recession, because in the end, THAT IS ALL THEY KNOW.
Does the British public really want a government who will seek to tackle the current economic downturn in the way the Thatcher government sought to tackle to downturn of the 1970s? Need I say more?
I look forward to the coming election victory, so that we can put our newly reinforced unity, our newly strengthened principles of social democracy into action on behalf of ALL the people of this country.
(Big cheer from conference crowd and journalists run outside to phone stories to shout ‘hold the front page’ into mobile phones)
So this is what we will do: ……….
(Well, I’ve not got time to do the next ’specific pledges’ bit right now, but if Gordon’s people want to get on to me, I can do it late after football practice…)
