Once the surprise and the shock of Jeremy Corbyn’s election as Labour leader had sunk in, many (including me) became impatient for policy initiatives and membership involvement in policy formation to come to the fore. Clearly cutting through media hostility is a major task but I find it difficult to see that more could not […]
Posts under ‘Industry’
Yvette Cooper is wrong about nationalisation
Feb 25th, 2016 by Phil Burton-Cartledge.This was bound to come back at some point. In a speech this week to launch The Changing Work Centre – a new think tank looking at, you guessed it, the changing nature of work – Yvette Cooper admonished Jez and John McDonnell for talking about re-nationalisation. “Labour must not get drawn into touting yesterday’s […]
Let’s hear it for the “right to own”
Jan 22nd, 2016 by Phil Burton-Cartledge.This is more like it. From the BBC: “The Tories have offered a Right to Buy, Labour would seek to better this. We’d be creating a new Right to Own,” he [John McDonnell] said in a speech in Manchester. He said the “biggest hurdle” facing co-ops and other small businesses was getting initial funding from high […]
Welcome to a constructive critique of Corbynomics from Liam Byrne
Nov 9th, 2015 by Phil Burton-Cartledge.Something more significant than the move against Andrew Fisher happened on the right of the Labour Party last week. It was Tuesday morning, in fact, and the occasion was Liam Byrne’s speech to the Policy Network. Of course, MPs, particularly former ministers, give speeches to think tanks all the time and most float under the […]
On Tory indifference to steel and to human tragedy, and their hatred of solidarity
Oct 25th, 2015 by Phil Burton-Cartledge.It was like the crashing of dominoes, except the toppling was done by livelihoods, supply chains, ways of life. First, SSI in Redcar announced it was going belly up. And after toing and froing with the government, once it was clear state aid wasn’t forthcoming it was as if Britain’s steel bosses huddled together and […]
More than platitudes needed to restore our manufacturing base
Oct 3rd, 2015 by Grahame Morris.We live in a deeply divided country. The gaps between wealth and poverty have never been so pronounced. We live in a country where financial speculators who gamble with our economy are rewarded with excessive incomes many of us could not make in a life-time. Our economy, politics and public investment are all tailored towards maintaining […]
Northern Powerhouse – The gap between reality and rhetoric
Sep 29th, 2015 by Grahame Morris.There is no better illustration of the gap between the rhetoric and reality than the Government’s failure to support our steel industry. The UK steel industry is in crisis. While George Osborne was in Shanghai this week selling the UK energy sector to the Chinese Government, steel production on Teesside could come to an end […]
Crisis hasn’t gone away. Corbynomics will be increasingly necessary
Sep 20th, 2015 by Michael Burke.One of the most widely repeated falsehoods about the British economy is the assertion that it is growing strongly and that the crisis is over. This is not borne out by even a perfunctory economic analysis but it serves a political purpose. In the first instance the assertion was important in order to blunt any […]
Carney’s rose-spectacled survey of the economy as Parliament returns does not convince
Sep 2nd, 2015 by Michael Meacher.The UK economy’s ticking over fine: that’s the view of Carney, Osborne’s man. So that’s alright then. Or is it? With time-honoured spin we were treated to the most optimistic scenario on every count, with the flip-side downturn kept carefully out of sight. His central message was that “there is no clear evidence of deflationary […]
Why the economy is in far worse shape than Osborne admits
Jun 23rd, 2015 by Michael Meacher.Osborne’s portrayal of the British economy as having “the fastest rate of recovery of any advanced nation in the world”, which he again repeated yesterday, is sheer poppycock. He continues to boast that GDP growth can be expected to average some 2.5% per annum over the period ahead, but on every key economic indicator that […]