One of the habits
of spin merchants and PR teams is to come up with fine-sounding phrases which
have an immediate appeal but don’t actually say very much. This was always central to New Labour, and
given his background as a lobbyist, we should not be surprised if Owen Smith
follows a similar pattern.
Even so, his call for a new
industrial revolution was something of a classic. It sounds very dramatic, but what on earth
does it actually mean? The Industrial Revolution
was a transition from small-scale craft production methods to large scale
manufacturing; it brought about huge changes in life style and conditions. Yet Smith’s new ‘revolution’ seems, when
looked at in detail, to be about the government giving out a few subsidies to
selected industries.
And that brings
us to a second point - is it even within the power of politicians and governments
to bring about significant change anyway?
It wasn’t governments which brought about the first industrial
revolution; indeed, it wasn’t planned or co-ordinated by anyone. Governments, unless they want to take control
of the “commanding heights of the economy”
as the Labour Party used to argue, can do little more than create the conditions
under which others control and take advantage of events. But the consensus position of Labour and Tory
alike has been for decades that globalisation is inevitable and we have to
adapt to it. It is, of course, that very
globalisation that they so love which has destroyed so much of the manufacturing
industry in the UK.
Whilst I agree
with Smith’s claim that previous governments (including the Blair and Brown
governments of which this claim is an implicit criticism) have been too reliant
on financial services and insecure, low-skilled and low-paid jobs, I’m not at
all convinced that it is in the power of governments to rebalance the economy
back to manufacturing. At least, I don’t
see it as being possible without the government taking a much more interventionist
role in the economy than is represented by throwing a few subsidies around. Perhaps I misjudge him; perhaps he really is
planning to try and control the economy in the way the Labour Party used to
believe was possible. Or then again,
perhaps it really is no more than a sound-bite after all.
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