Carryfast:
Rjan:
[…]
Let’s get this right.First you correctly inferred that it was the oil crisis that did it thereby kicking off a ‘price led’ not ‘wage led’ inflationary spiral and not the fault of the workers and their unions ?.
Now you’re saying that it was actually the fault of the unions by them not being prepared to compromise on incomes in real terms,which is actually what they are supposed to do
The two things are related. If the cost of external raw materials goes up, then somebody internally has to pay for it. In the first place, it would normally be consumers. But because workers are also consumers, they insisted on a pay rise to offset it. And who as it turned out paid for that? Consumers. So the workers asked for another pay rise the following year.
What the unions were unsuccessfully trying to do was get the bosses to pay for the increased oil price from accepting reduced profits. I’m not exactly sure (even in his own terms) why Callaghan had a wages policy and not a profits policy, but needless to say that was why workers felt that Labour had turned on them.
i suspect it is because Labour politicians, not themselves revolutionaries, started to feel that if they went much further in attacking the bosses - when reported rates of profit in the mid-70s were already the lowest in British history and not far above zero on average - then they were posing the question of either revolution or civil war. Soviet-style communism had alienated even communists after Czechoslovakia in 1968, but some union leaders were certainly Stalinists who wanted to see capitalism overturned, and much of the union membership were barely socialists but simply workers accustomed to demanding (and getting) “more” from the bosses.
The key point I was making though is that it was not unions that caused the initial inflation by excessive wage demands - they were simply a part of the mechanism that perpetuated it, by demanding that their pay stay the same in the teeth of inflation.
Almost certainly, any solution would have required workers to accept lower real wages for a year or two (even if only to create room for bigger capital investments in oil efficiency or something like that), and that’s why I return to my case that what set the British apart from the Germans was the matter of trust and cooperation. Industrial conflict had been so deeply entrenched, and Heath himself had tried to attack the working class just a year or two before the oil shock (with some militant shop stewards ultimately being sent to prison), that the case simply couldn’t be made for such moderation or cooperation that involved workers losing out.
and not the fault of Callaghan for effectively giving away our own oil and flogging it here at home at a world market price to us.When the muppet could have kept it and used it to insulate us from all the resulting economic problems in addition to slowing down the depletion rate.
As I say, Britain was already a big oil exporter, and oil exports did decrease under Callaghan (ultimately balancing as he left office). That is, oil exports never grew under Callaghan but shrank.
Then to add insult to injury you’re defending the situation of the Germans having a good laugh,in it not being them facing any issues of wage cuts from an already lower level,let alone them being the ones going begging to the IMF,at the expense of the Brits.All that based on a bs notion that the Germans were superior.Not to mention the economic illiteracy in that the last thing that our economy needed was more foreign cash in exchange for oil pumped into it.When what it needed was cheap oil,you know our own oil not Germany’s,to reduce inflation.
The sort of policy, indeed the mentality, you advocate would be followed by ■■■-for-tat responses from other nations - increasing inflation in its turn. And using North Sea oil to subsidise British industry would not solve the problem indefinitely, because the country would lose the value of the oil sales (which it would desperately need to afford other imports suffering from inflation elsewhere in the world), and if the oil became short or ran out (as it mostly has), the problem would strike again of “who pays?” for the inflation.
There simply is no way around it - someone has to swallow the cost.
Then you’ve got the nerve to say that if we don’t keep up the same scam they’ll hit us with trade sanctions.When it’s us who buy more stuff from them than they buy from us.To the point where we are Germany’s third most important export market while we don’t even make it into their top ten for imports being behind Belgium.
I think the most appropriate response to this is an analogy. I buy lots of food from farmers, whereas farmers buy nothing from me (at least not directly). Who do you think will suffer more if the farmer embargoes my food supply? Yes, the farmer loses his profit from me, but he has a thousand other customers, whereas I lose the means of life.
Of course I’m not suggesting the result will be so dramatic, but the idea that a moderate trade imbalance in itself gives more power to the buyer is ludicrious - usually, to buy in more goods than you sell out, is a sign of increasing weakness, rather than strength, because it shows that foreign economies are already able to undercut your domestic production (and therefore, even if you go into business for yourself to replace your lost imports for the domestic market, you won’t be able to gain any share of the export market, because your domestic industry already isn’t able to compete, and if you lack market share then your production will lack scale, and it’s fixed costs will loom larger).
On that note you’ve absolutely confirmed to me that you’re just following the same old Callaghan line in pretending that you’re for the workers when you’re actually all about looking after the interests of foreign workers at the expense of our own.
I’m not looking after foreign workers. I’m simply acknowledging the things they have done right, and suggesting we emulate them rather than declare war upon them. British industry is in the sh!tter because the British national government for decades has refused to make the same investments in productivity, machinery, and worker skills, but has instead tried to low-road the French and Germans by cutting pay and conditions, cutting taxes, cutting investment, and generally assaulting its own citizens long-term interests so that the British boss with third-rate management skill can squeeze out an easy profit and unearned income from a tin-pot operation.
So there we have it as expected vote Corbyn get Callaghan and the type of back stabbing zb’s that made up most of his cabinet who mattered and by implication Blair.All being Socialists/Globalists who actually despise this country and its workers preferring to look after the interests of Germany,among others,instead.Which explains why all you could do when questioned on if Corbyn is pro Brexit why did he appoint remainer Starmer as shadow Brexit minister was to make a lame excuse along the lines that Hoey is too ‘controversial’.Yeah right because,like Shore and Benn and Heffer,she believes in the Nation State and putting our interests first.In which case I’m not disputing that Benn was left wing just like Hoey is.My point is Nationalist is no less ‘left wing’ than Socialist and possibly even moreso.Also bearing in mind that no left winger worth their salt would want a situation of excessive unnecessary automation and resulting mass job losses.
Yes they would want automation, because (so long as the state manages the process, and workers control the machines) it means the same things can be produced and purchased with far fewer hours worked.
I always quote Rupert Murdoch on this, who moaned that the print unions were so strong that, by time his presses were fully automatic, the union had skilled men whose only residual responsibilities were to man the emergency stop buttons at a three-to-one ratio (and of course in practice, they probably took turn-to-piece to spend the day in the pub).
And even farmers, when they first started to use engine power in the fields, bemoaned that they had to hire far more people than before with more diverse skills (the benefit was that the job was finished earlier in the day, so each person worked fewer hours, and farm productivity was massively increased, in excess of the extra hands hired).
And the advantage today is that virtually nobody has to be involved in agriculture. The majority of the jobs that still exist in fields are precisely the low-pay makework that you have in mind.
Leading to the less employment,less consumer spending and less tax revenues,situation that you seem to be supporting.While I worked with and knew plenty of those who fought in WW2 and all of them agreed that we were deliberately stitched up by the post war economic programme to the deliberate advantage of Germany and in fact shaped my views on the subject.
There isn’t a single instance in history where economic development has led to mass unemployment - totally the opposite in fact - but even if we are finally facing previously unheard of circumstances, the fact is that the abolition of compulsory work will be a good thing for workers.
Unless you’re suggesting we simply make unnecessary work for ourselves, like monkeys who are given a puzzle to solve before they get their banana out of the box, so that we can be seen to have worked for our wages even though we didn’t have to (and could have done something else with our time).
The reality is that there is no dignity in unnecessary work. Because those who monopolise the real, necessary, well-paid work will simply sneer that “anyone can do your job, even a computer”, and if you demand reasonable wages they’ll refuse and threaten to automate your job.
