News 2011
Stephanie Tailby, Professor of Employment Relations and Co-Director of Centre for Employment Studies Research speaks to Brendan Barber, General Secretary of the Trades Union Congress (TUC)
Earlier this year Brendan Barber took the time among his many appointments to visit Bristol to contribute to the University of the West of England’s Distinguished Executive Address (DEA) series. The DEA series gives students and staff at UWE and practitioners in the local business community the opportunity to hear directly, from those leading organisations that drive UK economic performance, about the challenges, issues and decisions being made at the highest level of strategic leadership. Brendan’s presentation on April 6 was soon after the mass rally in London, on March 26, that the TUC coordinated as part of its All Together for Public Services campaign. The march and the broader campaign were central in his address and the interview that he gave Stephanie Tailby for the Cesr Review.
ST: The TUC coordinated March for the Alternative on March 26 was impressive in size. What points would you make about its composition, given that much of the press predicted it would rally no more than the ‘usual suspects’?
BB: Well I think the march was enormously impressive, certainly because of the size. Our estimate and I think the estimate of the police too was around half a million people, may be even more than that. It was certainly the biggest trade union march in my lifetime. But it wasn’t just trade unionists. It involved people from every part of the community - members of volunteer groups, local community groups, and trade unionists - passionately concerned about the impact on the services that they value so hugely and the damage the government’s cuts are going to do. So I think it was middle Britain on the march. It was not just the usual suspects.
ST: The march was against public expenditure cuts and in defence of public and welfare services. Critics might argue it was a march of ‘public deficit deniers’. How would you respond?
BB: We’re not deficit deniers. There is a public spending deficit that we have to remedy. We can’t just allow that to hang over our economy indefinitely, requiring interest payments year on year which could be used so much more productively in other ways. So we don’t deny the importance of the deficit. But what we argue strongly is that there is a better way of approaching the deficit reduction challenge than the way the government are going about it. And it’s an alternative that’s based on economic growth. Let’s get real solid established growth in the economy, which we haven’t got that at the moment, and as a part of that let’s get people back to work. There are two and a half million people, 8 percent of the working population according to the official statistics, out of work and forced on to benefits rather than being able to contribute to the economy, to taxes and so on.
ST: What points would you emphasise, to convince the sceptical, that public investment in public services is central to the restoration of growth and industry competitiveness?
BB: Well our public services are vitally important. They are important to our social policy and rights and they are a big, big productive part of our economy. I get very angry when people talk about education, health services, our transport infrastructure as things of no benefit, as if these were things regarded as a cost, a drag on the economy. They are important to our economy and to our quality of life. So sustaining a solid, productive, public realm has to be a part of getting real recovery. The idea that you slash and burn health and public services and that’s going to deliver salvation to our economic problem is just crazy.
ST: The case against the government’s public expenditure cuts includes the damage to public services, the unfairness of the cuts and the negative impact for the economy as a whole. What would you emphasise about these arguments?
BB: Well there’s no doubt that the cuts are going to hit the poorest and the weakest the hardest. I think independent commentators confirm that. All the evidence is overwhelming that that is the case. We know that the increase in VAT is a regressive move in the tax system. We much prefer to see measures that actually look to those who can afford to make a bigger and a better contribution than the increase in VAT, which hopefully the government will change. And as regards the spending cuts, our research shows that the lowest decile, the poorest 10 percent of the population, are hit 15 times harder than the top 10 percent because they rely more heavily on the services that are being cut. They suffer a real material hit because of the spending cuts, the poorest in the community. So it’s deeply socially unjust.
We have to recognise that in a whole number of ways we have got to produce a different balance in our economy; a different balance between the financial sector, manufacturing and other parts of the economy, but also a different balance geographically. And again it is very clear that the poorest regions are going to be hit harder by the spending cuts than the wealthier parts of the country.
The impact of the damage to the public services will be much greater in poorer inner city areas, more reliant on the public sector for jobs and for the services they deliver too. The government’s answer to that is to say ‘well we have a regional growth fund, and that’s a fund of about 1.4 billion pounds to support economic regeneration projects in the regions’. The trouble is that is a third of the budgets that were previously available to the regional development agencies for funding and investing in regeneration. So yes we need to see active regional policies to counter some of the problems that different regions face, but that’s not what the government has delivered.
ST: The government has been criticised (e.g. by the outgoing Director General of the CBI) for not having in place an economic growth strategy. Is that a fair assessment?
BB: Well I think the government realized in the run up to the budget that the emphasis they had put on deficit reduction was leaving them extremely politically exposed. I mean we are not going to produce long term prosperity and the new balance in our economy that we need, simply by worrying about the deficit, important though that it is. So we began to see rhetoric about the importance of economic growth. We were told there was going to be a budget for growth. Indeed we were told there was going to be a white paper on growth. That has never appeared because when the Treasury and the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills and other parts of the government tried to look at what in practical terms they could point to as a growth strategy, frankly they realised that the cupboard was bare. So there is no credible strategy from the government to promote economic growth. They are simply focusing on the budget deficit. And that’s going to make our economic problems worse not better.
ST: What impact might we expect the proposed relaxation of unfair dismissal protection legislation to have on jobs, their quantity and quality?
BB: We have the least regulated labour market amongst the advanced industrial economies by common acknowledgement and the idea that that’s going to be an engine for growth, taking those protections away, there’s not a single piece of evidence to support that.
ST: It has been argued that public demonstration and mass rallies have limited impact on government policy. What in your view has been achieved by the March 26 March for the Alternative?
BB: Well one of the things that came through strongly on March 26 was a recognition that there’s a huge argument here about the cuts and the approach to reducing the deficit, but behind that issue, there’s actually a bigger issue as well, which is the government’s vision of really shrinking the public realm, really changing the nature of our public services and welfare state. We see that most graphically perhaps in the reform of the health service with the idea at the heart of the Bill in Parliament at the moment of ‘any willing provider’ coming in to deliver different areas of current NHS services. In other words everything is up for grabs for the private sector. The same idea is around in every other area of public services too. In six or seven years’ time we could see our public services looking really unrecognisable from what we have now. And I think people have realised that and as they do, I think that we are beginning to see signs of the government just taking half a step back in thinking. They are realising that they are really getting massively out of touch with the British public. I think our demonstration and our campaign has played a part in helping them take that half a step back and we’re going to keep pushing until they start stepping back a little bit more.
ST: How is the TUC’s All Together for Public Services campaign to be continued, following the March for the Alternative in London on March 26?
BB: Well we always thought of the march really as one part of a broader longer-term campaign to really look to apply pressure on the government to change policy. One day in London, however impressive and important, is not a campaign it is only part of a campaign. And what do we see? Well in just about every town and city across the country we see local groups coming together, sometimes via their concerns for particular services, library closures, walk-in centres closing, changes to the support services that the elderly rely on, or leisure-centre facilities - the things that matter to people in their daily lives.
Our campaign is applying pressure on coalition government MPs in their own communities, before they come down to Westminster to vote through these cuts. At one stage we were presented with a kind of theoretical proposition: “do we need the cuts? Oh yes, we need cuts?” Well they need to feel some pressure in their back yard. So a part of the campaign is about local activity of that kind. But beyond that we’ll be campaigning very strongly on the implications for particular sectors. The government has announced a pause or listening period on the NHS reforms. Well we’ll be pressing the Ministry very, very hard. We’ve been encouraging people up and down the country to press their MPs very, very hard, to say before you take the decisive step to put our NHS up for sale you had better start thinking quite how much that’s going to attract massive opposition. So the campaign will be going on in all sorts of different ways and we’re going to make the government see the opposition to the cuts in public services.
Page last updated 19 September 2011