BBC (Proposed Cuts)

Debate between Bill Esterson and Austin Mitchell

Thursday 1st December 2011 Commons Chamber

[Austin Mitchell]

No, I do not. It is true that services are being unacceptably concentrated in those places. We want better services and better staffing in Yorkshire and the Humber, which—dare I say it—are a nation in themselves and deserve to be treated as a nation. The cuts are a serious setback to recruitment and to the transfer of jobs out of London, which cannot be satisfied just by the creation of the monster of a centre in Manchester.

The newsrooms of the BBC and the BBC World Service are going to be merged. There are overlaps there, which will lead to further redundancies. We are told that Radio 4 has been protected from cuts, but its producers have been required to reapply for their jobs.

[Bill Esterson (Sefton Central) (Lab)]

I am pleased that my hon. Friend has raised the issue of Radio 4, which, as he said, is being protected. On Merseyside, more than twice the number of people who listen to Radio 4 listen to BBC Radio Merseyside, yet Radio Merseyside faces a cut of 20% and will lose a third of its staff. Overwhelmingly, the people who listen to it are elderly, disabled or poor. Those people do not have the option of finding other means of entertainment. Does he agree that it would make sense to protect local radio rather than Radio 4?

Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation

Debate between Bill Esterson and Austin Mitchell

Tuesday 22nd June 2010 Commons Chamber

[Austin Mitchell]

My constituents care about the jobs, benefits and growth that borrowing can give them. That kind of threat that the hon. Lady describes is not talked of in the fish and chip shops of Grimsby, nor is it part of any realistic assessment of our economic situation. There is no threat to our credit rating. The idea is absolutely ludicrous. In fact, the Office for Budget Responsibility, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Bank of England as far as I can see, has said that the borrowing estimates are coming down. We are borrowing less than the Government predicted. We can well bear that total of borrowing—we should bear it; we must bear it—to get the economy growing again, because that is the only way to pay off the borrowing and to reduce the overdraft.

The Government insist on cutting spending, but I am not sure about the scale of unemployment that today’s cuts in spending will produce. The figure might be 100,000, but it might be up to 500,000, because that is how many jobs have been saved by Labour’s expansionary policies and stimulus spending. However, if we increase total unemployment, those people will no longer be paying taxes. They will be receiving benefits and all kinds of public support, which is necessary to support them and their families. That means that the deficit will increase. Therefore, borrowing goes up as a consequence of an increase in unemployment. The only way to counter that is for the Government to spend and borrow to stimulate the economy.

The proof of that point is dramatically demonstrated in British history by the situation from 1931 to 1934. Because of the cuts made in 1931, with the Geddes axe and all that, public sector borrowing increased substantially from 1931 to 1934, because the economy was not growing. From 1934, when the economy began to grow under the stimulus of the housing boom and, later, rearmament, the public sector borrowing requirement as a proportion of GDP came down rapidly and substantially. That indicates my point, as did our experience when we came into government in 1997. The Conservatives seem to forget that, when Labour came to power in 1997, we paid off massive amounts of debt in the first three years, because the economy was growing and we could do so.

That is the solution to our problems. Only growth will allow what we borrow to be paid off. It is no use knocking Britain and saying that we are like Greece, Spain or Portugal. We are not like any of those: our credit standing is not threatened in any way and we can adjust through the exchange rate, because of what our previous Prime Minister did in keeping us out. The only way to reduce borrowing is to get economic growth. I hope that I have made that point sufficiently clear, because I have made it pedantically and at some repetitive length. It does indicate to me that borrowing is not a problem, and the panic created about it is something of a confidence trick. It is a smokescreen to allow the Chancellor to do what he wants to do for his own political motives: cut public services, roll back the state, cut public spending, cut benefits, cut provisions, and weaken the protection of the poor and those on benefit that comes from borrowing and higher public spending. It enables him to implement his own prejudices.

The cuts are supported by untrue claims about what Mrs Thatcher did in the 1980s. Mrs Thatcher was able to get away with those cuts, which destroyed so much of British manufacturing and certainly turned us from a net manufacturing exporter into a net manufacturing importer, because of the cushion of North sea oil. The Norwegians invested the proceeds of North sea oil in the future; what we did was waste them on a process of creative destruction of British manufacturing industry, which left us the weaker at the end of it.

The cuts are also justified by the claims that Canada and Sweden were able to carry successful spending rounds, but in both cases, the spending cuts were across the board with no huge chunks of the public sector being exempted from them. Both were carried out at a time when the world economy—including the American economy—was expanding rapidly, so that sustained the Canadian and the Swedish economies. We are carrying out our spending cuts, however, at a time of growing recession. Our ex-Prime Minister was trying to lead the world—he did lead it successfully—to agree on stimulus spending to get the economy to grow. This Government are joining a chorus of cuts that will deflate European economies and the world economy.

[Bill Esterson]

Has my hon. Friend had the same experience as I did in my constituency when discussing how to deal with the budget deficit? Not one person mentioned to me the issue of sovereign debt, yet every single person I spoke to agreed with our analysis that the deficit should be paid off by growing the economy.