Blog 2023 Malcolm Blair-Robinson

Job Losses

Figures from the U.S. on the job front were disappointing recently and now we have a warning that U.K. unemployment situation, which had been better than most predictions at the start of the recession, is about to ‘stall’. This surely means deteriorate.

Unfortunately this is the inevitable outcome of government funding unnecessary jobs in the public sector by spending money it did not have. The borrowing becomes unsustainable, in our case by a mile. Like a distant thunder cloud hovering in the sky, the inevitable cuts are about to move across to darken the prospects of many loyal and innocent workers. There is no way round this. There will be a good deal of pain. There may even be negative growth or a double dip recession.

There are now more and more monetarist voices flowing across the airwaves. They are  holding their Keynesian colleagues to account. The spending and borrowing works only for a moment to create a false dawn. It does not correct the faults which caused the crisis. These have now to be addressed. The monetarist message is that the process would have advanced further and the pain would be over sooner if the job had not been put off. They have history on their side.

If the recession had been solely caused by events outside this country and beyond our control as Labour, quite wrongly,  inferred, government spending to tide us over until our trading partners recovered enough to buy our goods and services again would most likely have worked. But this was not the case. The crisis was born in London and New York, through systemic failures in the whole Anglo-Saxon economic model. The requirement is to rebuild a better model. We cannot spend our way out. We have to build our way up. From rock bottom.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 9th, 2010 at 11:25 am and is filed under Malcolm Blair Robinson. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.