Employment

Lord Monks Excerpts

Thursday 27th October 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Monks]

My Lords, I, too, start by expressing my appreciation to my noble friend Lady Prosser for initiating this timely and important debate. It is timely because the whole House must share the worries about rapidly rising unemployment, and it is important because the availability and quality of work is a good test of the health of a society.

By that test, our society has not been doing very well, especially on quality. It is not just the crisis. As a former trade union official, I have to report that wages in the UK grew by 56 per cent between 1978 and 2008. Not bad, you might think, until you know that GDP rose at twice that over the same period and that the share of profits rose very strongly, making a potent recipe for a widening gap between rich and poor.

As my noble friend Lady Prosser explained, there have been more managerial and professional jobs, a decline in middle and skilled jobs and a rise in routine, low-paid jobs. Why has this happened? Clearly, technological change and the rise of a global labour market have had an effect, but the roots of the problem lie in our underlying economic and political philosophy and the shift of power to a new global elite centred in financial service companies, especially, but not only, American ones. They enforced a new business model: the aggressive pursuit of shareholder value based on maximising short-term results. The outcome was successive waves of cost-cutting and retrenchment, designed, so it was said, to lift Britain out of its tepid entrepreneurial culture and to generate renewed dynamism.

It has not worked out like that. Instead, taking the long view, it has brought a slump in productive investment, lower productivity growth than in the 1950s and 1960s, a worsening balance of payments, an increase in debt, a rise in inequality and a capitalism in which the predator dealer has thrived. Now it has brought the mother and father of an economic crisis, termed the worst since the 1930s by the Governor of the Bank of England. The Government hope, indeed we all do, that a surge in growth and job creation in the private sector will absorb the people being displaced in the public sector. It is hard to be optimistic as the cuts curb demand for the products and services of the private sector, and I share the view of those on this side of the House that the cuts are too much, too fast.

One thing is crystal clear: our current economic model, predicated on the view that we are a post-industrial society with an inexorably shrinking manufacturing base, is bust. Reliance on services, financial and retail in particular, and on property and construction has been shown to be extremely vulnerable to instability, as well as promoting a widening gap between rich and poor. There is much talk about the need to rebalance our economy, but less idea about how to do it. Once you have lost leading-edge technology and export markets, it is not easy to make a recovery.

Cheap foreign competition has something to do with it, but how can we explain the relative success of the economies on the other side of the North Sea in keeping strong manufacturing sectors, developing new sectors and running positive balances of payments?

The facts are uncomfortable. The bonanzas of North Sea oil and the explosion of financial services are over. To prosper, we have to compete with the best in the real economy, which are our neighbours on the other side of the North Sea—social market economies, incidentally, with effective collective bargaining and influential worker involvement. Many in the UK might characterise this as a return to the 1970s, but it certainly is not. Unless the UK pulls together and innovates, our prospects are gloomy. That pulling together necessitates a commitment to greater equality. If we are all in it together, as the Prime Minister has said, we cannot have surging riches for a few while the lot of the majority worsens.

We need a better, more long-termist capitalism in which all the main stakeholders have influence, including the workers. We need financial services as servants of the economy, not masters of the universe. As the noble Lord, Lord Skidelsky, and others have argued, we need a national investment bank to support entrepreneurs, especially small and medium ones. We need investment in the green economy, in high grade manufacturing and in the arts, and we need a stronger vocational training system for all our people. We need more real engineering and less financial engineering.

We do not need cuts in employment protection, nor attempts to escape from the modest social obligations of the European single market. Perhaps I may ask the Minister what precisely the Prime Minister means when he talks about repatriating social policy from the EU to the UK. Does he mean repealing the entitlements that derive from the EU, such as the right to four weeks’ basic holiday, the right of workers to be informed and consulted about change, or the rights of part-time and temporary workers to equal treatment, of which we have heard something in this debate? Does he mean EU equality and health and safety standards, many of which are based on UK practice, which is among the very best in the EU and helps to raise standards in the new member states and in southern Europe? Or does the Prime Minister mean that he will block any new EU social measures applying in the UK, in which case I can report that there are very few such measures in the EU pipeline? What do the Government mean?

In conclusion, there must be no false contradiction between more jobs and better jobs. There must not be an approach which sells Britain as a place where exploitation is easy and workers are cheap. That might appeal to Mr Beecroft and any other venture capitalists working for the Prime Minister, but selling Britain in that way should not be the British answer to the jobs crisis. Raising our game must be the way forward.