Julie Morgan

 

  Labour Parliamentary Candidate for Cardiff North

 

ARCHIVE: BLOG – As I See It...

 

September 29th 2009:

 

Money, Money, Money

Gordon Brown has taken a lot of personal criticism lately. This is something that has always been part of the job in politics, but given how close we are to a general election, it has reached some sort of fever pitch lately.

 

In these increasingly media-driven and image-led times, Gordon’s natural shyness has made him slightly less than comfortable in front of the cameras and this has not helped the situation.  But it’s time to look at facts and not personalities, I think.

 

The economic crisis came very much out of the blue. Everyone now believes that it started in the American subprime market and got into fault lines in every other system.

 

When the quake came, Gordon Brown kept calm and was very much the man who put together and led the fight back against the collapse. And we’re now starting to see real signs of recovery around the world and here in Britain. Was this fight back expensive? Yes, but how expensive would it have been not to have taken action?

 

There was talk that this recession could be worse than that of the 1930s, such was the mess that the market had made of itself.  During the Tory-made recessions of the ‘70s and ‘80s, many areas were left stricken and at that time, I heard people old enough to remember saying that they never thought the poverty and pain of the ‘30s could come back, but it did. We had to make sure that this did not happen again. This recession is truly worldwide and it would have hit those least able to support themselves the hardest and for the longest time.

 

Letting banks fail would have been economic suicide. We as a government and a country now have a much larger level of debt than I or any of us would ever choose, but what would be the cost of not having that debt? Financial and social carnage. Which is the better of the two evils?   

It will take time to lower the debt and we will have to cut our cloth to some extent. But with Labour, history proves that what we consider ‘the essentials’ are safe and the poorest people in the land will be looked after.

 

(It also might be worth considering that when we do decide to sell back what we have brought into public ownership, this will bring in a lot more than we paid for it. In the short term, our own investment in the banks will bring in funds, if only by saving so many jobs ).

 

To those who complain that their income tax has risen slightly, I’d ask you to remember that this still does not make us the highest taxing government in Europe and that only people earning at a higher level will be affected. Also, unlike something like the poll tax, Labour believes in a graduated system of taxation.

 

Was the economic collapse any of this the government’s fault? We could spend a lot of time discussing such a question, but let me first say that hindsight is a wonderful thing. Labour has traditionally been accused of being too interfering in matters regarding the Stock Market, but we were trying to follow a policy of as little regulation as possible in this case. Unfortunately, left to  their own devices, some people working in the financial sector did not exactly cover themselves in glory, while still managing to cover themselves in cash.

 

And while all this was going on, can I remind you that the Tories were arguing for even fewer controls. Let’s not forget that David Cameron was part of the financial team who helped let the market off the leash in the first place. I am always in favour of people who create wealth and I feel they should get a fair reward for that, but what we have been seeing is people taking vast profits from schemes that had nothing to do with wealth-making.

 

So when push came to shove, Gordon Brown did not panic and was one of the catalysts of the solution. And when the next set of figures are published, we hear that they may show that Britain is technically out of recession. This is a first step to getting back to better economic times and passing laws to make sure that those practices that got us into this situation are never allowed to return.

 

Greed never was, and never has been, good.