Adam Lent

Kenneth Clarke and Vince Cable have both attacked the Government’s paper yesterday outlining a new industrial strategy.  Cable called it “old labour corporatism” while Clarke went for the thoughtful “platitudinous waffle”.  They are both wrong.

Peter Mandelson, the driving force behind the paper, is genuinely rethinking Labour economic policy for a very different era when the UK can no longer rely on financial services and construction to drive growth and will have to compete in areas that have been neglected for years such as engineering innovation and high value manufacturing.  A shift like that cannot be delivered by the market alone especially when other governments are much less shy of giving their leading industries the odd helping hand.  My guess is that even the Tories would end up pursuing a pretty similar approach were they in power.  The TUC has, of course, argued for this approach for years.

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Adam Lent

Just when the world has decided it’s time to have a crackdown on tax havens, the Government’s review of ”British offshore financial centres” issues a progress report that seems to think the real goal must be to help these territories’ banking sectors get through difficult financial times.

I have written elsewhere of my concerns about the review.  The chairman, Michael Foot, was always an odd choice if the intention was to really interrogate the role of havens, the review itself has been largely invisible, and the terms of reference did not really focus on the key issues in the international debate.  But I’m an optimist, so I kept my fingers crossed.  It hasn’t worked.  The fundamental problem is that Foot is seeing the world through the eyes of the havens themselves – unsurprising given that he has spent his time on a tour of those havens.  How else to explain this bizarre sentence in the report:

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Brendan Barber

This is some of what I have just said to the annual STUC conference in Perth.

“There are two tests that unions will apply to Wednesday’s Budget – one short-term and the other looking further ahead.

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Nigel Stanley

The BBC reports that the Budget will announce £15 billion of public spending “efficiency cuts”.

Of course unions must be careful not to get put in a position where they deny that no bits of the public sector cannot be made more efficient, but it is nonsense to think that £15 billion can be hacked off the public sector without making any difference to services. This is to play into the hands of the anti-public sector campaigning of the Taxpayers Alliance and their media allies.

There are some public sector expansion plans – such as ID cards or Trident renewal – that could be scrapped without that many complaints, but neither of these could these be described as efficiency savings – they too would be cuts.

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Owen Tudor

The announcements from the White House last week about Cuba have excited some interest, but (and Obama’s team clearly planned it this way) not huge waves. Several commentators have suggested that the steps taken – allowing Cuban-Americans to visit the island and send remittances, as well as some liberalisation on telecommunications – have been nugatory. Fidel Castro himself, while welcoming the moves, said that Obama needed to go further and scrap his country’s illegal trade embargo altogether. And of course he should. But this week’s moves make scrapping the embargo – until recently fairytale politics – a realistic prospect. Philip Stephens, writing in the Financial Times, suggested that the US trade embargo was unique to Cuba and uniquely American, and that the steps Obama has taken were very small and mostly symbolic. I think he’s wrong on all counts.

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Adam Lent

I understand that the last seminar in The Guardian’s Capitalism in Crisis series was accompanied by many despairing “but what is to be done?” type questions.  Owen and Nigel have reflected this sense on this blog pointing out that there seems little concrete for the left to offer by way of compelling economic narratives or visionary alternatives.  The right, of course, are simply basking in the rising appetite for political change and so aren’t even bothering to offer anything that makes economic sense (something they may regret if they actually win power next year).

So it was with great relief that I have immersed myself in the work of the economist Carlota Perez over the last couple of weeks.  Perez’s work offers a powerful and original narrative of the current crisis. 

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Nigel Stanley

The FT reports that pay for top quango chiefs is to be held back. I guess that no-one much is going to oppose that. But I cannot help feeling that this is not being done through any sense that the gap between top earners and the rest has got too big but is a more of a victory for the anti-public sector campaign of the Taxpayers Alliance and their allies in the right wing press.

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Alice Hood

Perhaps it’s just me, but I’m still scratching my head after a perplexing news day for George Osborne yesterday.

On the one hand he made a clearer-than-ever statement of the Conservative agenda for drastic spending cuts in the face of the recession.

But on the other hand he launched an ambitious – and expensive –plan for a “green technology recovery”.

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• Compass poll shows over 70% support tax justice
  Compass GS Gavin Hayes writes for LabourList on a new YouGov poll they commissioned, which shows strong support amongst the electorate for action against personal tax avoidance.
  (tags: taxjustice compass)

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