Labour is making two arguments about the economy: the shorter term costs of living addressed by its policies for energy prices, housing rents, a higher national minimum wage and the extension of the living wage. And the bigger economic goals – a good job and secure income wherever you live; vocational training or a modern apprenticeship and skills that enable an individual to adapt to changes in the economy. Also good quality infrastructure and higher education.
But the Plan for Britain’s Prosperity that Labour is publishing shows that these two elements are part of a bigger whole, the aim of which is not only to ensure a fairer distribution of wealth, but significantly to expand the productive potential of the British economy. When Labour left office in 2010, Britain was on the way to recovery from the banking crisis that had hit us two years before. Of course we borrowed more to keep the economy from free fall and we were right to do so. We needed to accelerate out of the storm and we burned up a lot of costly financial fuel to do so. Equally, we were right to set out clearly how, over the approaching parliament, we would pay down the debt and progressively re-balance the nation’s finances just as now government needs to cut where we have to but invest where we need to.
We did not have the chance to prove our credentials and demonstrate that we had the right plan for recovery. The coalition opted instead for faster, deeper cuts in public spending and in investment than were wise and did not send a balancing message about fairness that limited tax increases on those with the broadest shoulders would have done. These measures not only held back the recovery by excessively reducing demand, but severely damaged public services on which towns and neighbourhoods depend, and weakened the economy’s infrastructure. Despite the current signs of improvement, Britain’s longer term growth prospects are not as good as they should be.
These prospects and what we have to do to improve them need to be at the heart of the election battle. The UK economy, whatever the coalition’s claims, has not undergone the export-led re-balancing they promised and now needs a concerted range of policies to drive up our growth potential.
Rather than greater credit-driven consumer demand, we need to take advantage of lower long-term interest rates to lift the rate of public and private investment in the economy. Instead of pumping up a further rise in London property prices, we need to stimulate higher living standards and investment in the Midlands and northern regions. Funding of our universities must be maintained so that they remain motors of essential research and technological development across the country. The initiatives the last Labour government started – somewhat belatedly, I admit – to boost the commercialisation of the country’s science base and spin off innovation more efficiently into the business sector need to be taken to a higher level.
Other countries have become better than us at government partnership with business and mobilising private and public resources to drive economic growth. Their international efforts seem to acknowledge better than ours that trade in finished goods has been largely overtaken by cross-border production networks and global supply chains specialising in high value intermediate goods and components. This reality makes a nonsense of the idea that Britain should cut itself off from its European neighbours where this business-to-business integration is at its greatest.
So where do these challenges leave Britain’s election choice? First, we need a government that creates the infrastructure, the business environment and the relationship with Europe that firms need in order to be confident to invest. Companies should be encouraged to focus on their long-term strategy rather than on short-term financial quarterly reporting and immediate returns to investment. The banking system, governed by fresh regulation, should share in entrepreneurial risk and concentrate on building sensible, commercial corporate loan books that support business expansion.
Second, we should acknowledge that government interventions in setting wages are about creating national minimums and are not the sum total of our ambitions. Incomes for the overwhelming majority of people have been stagnant for too long and they need to rise. But this has to be accompanied, in the private and public sectors, by productivity growth and innovation.
And third, the idea that economic growth comes from pushing buttons and pulling levers in Whitehall belongs to the past. Of course central government needs to act, but it must intervene strategically and smartly, in particular to safeguard the UK’s knowledge base, as Labour has learned to do since the failed industrial experiments of the 1970s.
Thankfully, one thing the coalition did not scrap were initiatives to boost advanced manufacturing and higher value services that Labour started and rightly says it is going to take forward. But we have to change Britain’s over centralised political system that has always prevented the transfer of real power and resources to the cities and regions where decision-making can and should be closer to local infrastructure needs and investment opportunities.
For those who have yet to make up their minds, it is these and other issues related to our economy’s long term growth that should define the election choice people need to make.
