Budget Resolutions

Dan Carden Excerpts

Tuesday 12th March 2024 Commons Chamber

[Dan Carden (Liverpool, Walton) (Lab)]

It is important to note that, had pre-2008 levels of growth been maintained, GDP per head would be 39% higher than it is today. People are poorer, and so is the state. We are on a long road of stagnation, decline and diminished capacity. It is a disaster for our constituents.

It is easy to tell a story that this is simply symbolic of the dying days of one political party in government, and that it will all be changed by a new Government, but that new Government need a sense of direction and a sense of purpose built around national renewal in a divided and disillusioned country. New management alone will not cut it. We need a transformation that goes well beyond fiscal and monetary tweaks, and that moves into the real economy. A transformation that asks why living standards are declining when employment is at record levels.

The dignity of work has to be at the centre of our agenda. The scourge of in-work poverty bears witness to the failure of the economic model that has now been in place for almost half a century. Full employment, education and training are vital but, without an industrial strategy, it alone will not get to the heart of the matter.

National renewal requires what every Government since Margaret Thatcher’s Government have found unthinkable—an industrial strategy that engages the energy of the public sector and the private sector in partnership with the people of this country. We must think the unthinkable, look beyond finance and the City of London, and look out to the country. We must think about regional banks, vocational colleges and a form of corporate governance that can sustain a partnership between place, workers and capital. The debacle of the Post Office this year is indicative, not anomalous. The model of managerial sovereignty without accountability has well and truly failed. It has left public services, like our NHS, broken, with millions suffering on waiting lists. It has left local government bankrupt and unable to do its important job. Economy, society and Government are rudderless, in decline and diminished.

The British people are capable of inventing, designing and making their own future. We must not be afraid of change and the renewal of our economy, society and politics. That was the task of a Labour Government in 1945, 1964 and 1997. In each of those Governments, Labour won working-class communities to its cause. Those communities have endured neglect, abandonment and contempt for too long. They are not the source of decline, but the key to renewal. They have been despised and patronised, and we cannot understand the Brexit vote or the election of this Tory Government without understanding their disdain or their rejection of the political class now. Labour must put their needs—a decent wage, a decent pension, safe and secure communities—ahead of any progressive demands that often dominate the politics of the left. It is the vocation of Labour, as a party of government and as a movement, to do that. It is vital that Labour rediscovers its own vocation, as well as the virtues of vocation in the economy. The stakes are high indeed.