Mike Tuffrey seeks inspiration from Roosevelt in advocating a four point plan for a sustainable economic recovery.
With all the depressing news about the economy, I can recommend a re-reading of the inaugural address of newly-elected President Franklin D Roosevelt, given in the depths of the Depression on March 4, 1933. Aside from his well-known call to arms against fear itself, he did a nice (and topical) line in banker-bashing too: “Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men”.
Elements of his prescription are highly relevant for us today – us as a country and us as a party. Last month I argued we need a new distinct alternative economic strategy, for jobs and business growth, not just fiscal responsibility.
Since then, the noises from our team in Westminster have been encouraging, though we are a long way from positioning the party with our own ‘sustainable growth’ approach as part of rebuilding the LibDem ‘brand’. This is vitally important at the half-way mark of this Parliament. The focus on getting the low paid out of tax and opposing NHS privatisation is good but not enough.
To advance thinking, I’ve developed a ‘four plus two’ plan as a contribution to a debate (run by London Remade) about what a sustainable economy looks like regionally. It hardly needs saying that the situation is urgent and growing: almost 400,000 Londoners – one in ten, the second highest in the whole country – are unemployed and seeking work.
First are four main pillars for immediate results:
- Housebuilding – a big programme on land that is in public ownership
- Skills for young people – including a role for responsible large firms
- Local jobs and business – especially in the new environmentally-sound industries
- Fair wages – since trickle-down economics can’t be relied on
To these four, I have added two longer term goals – zero carbon and zero waste. Taken together, this would get Londoners to work, improve their housing, health and environment, encourage local business, and give our economy and society much greater resilience.
You can read more about the plan ‘Nothing to fear but fear itself’ here and more about the London Remade debate here.
* Mike Tuffrey is a member of the Green Book team and is a former a council leader, London Assembly member and policy working group chair.
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7 Comments
Thanks Mike, I’m going to the essay right away. Great to have really constructive material to work with.
I agree, that there is a lot of depressing news around at the moment. And the Roosevelt speech was good for the 1930’s, but today is very different. We all want the 50 years of partying to continue, but at some point the punch bowl becomes empty. I would love the next 50 years to be like the last 50, not least for my children, who are young adults trying to make their way in the world. But the sooner we get out of the denial phase, the sooner we can work to adapt to the new reality. I’ve done a line by line analysis of how I see the situation. Please destroy it line by line. I want to be wrong.
……………………
~ The human economy depends on flows of energy and materials extracted from the environment.
~ Those flows of energy and materials are transformed by technology to create goods and services.
~ These flows of energy and materials, are governed by physical conservation laws.
~ Growth of these flows of energy and materials cannot grow exponentially in a finite world.
~ These flows of energy and materials therefore, have limits in terms of accessibility.
~ We are at, or very near, those limits of accessibility to energy and materials.
~ Growth, (around the world), which relies on accessibility to energy and materials, is stalling and going into reverse as a result of the those limits.
~ The emerging paradigm is thus contraction, not growth.
~ We will have to adapt our society, economy and governance to that new contracting paradigm.
…….. J. D. ……….
Yes, John. And we mustn’t wait for all the stragglers to catch up with this necessary thinking. There was a thread a while ago on the Members’ Forum about whether or not being “evangelical” helps or hinders messaging.
The trouble with looking back to FDR is that the US economy did not recover from the depression, that is output did not reach pre-depression levels until World War II. An though WWII was a noble cause, production of weapons and employing people to kill each other is clearly the wrong kind of growth. FDR was great at giving people hope, but he does not provide a good example of economic recovery. Since during the period he was in office, there were various shifts in policy, even before the War, there’s no quick answer to what was bad and what was good in the policies of the time. The polices of the National Government in Britain at the time (which did not include the Liberal Party, but did include National Liberals who later on divided between the Liberal Party and the Conservative Party) would be a better guide. Britain recovered to pre-depression levels by 1938. I don’t have time to search for the best possible graphs of this, but if you click on the following link and go to page 47 of the pdf, you will see a table confirming what I’ve said. http://emlab.berkeley.edu/~eichengr/research/floudjohnsonchaptersep16-03.pdf. Anyway, FDR was admirable in many ways, particularly for his role in WWII, but he was not a liberal, even a social or left liberal in British terms. He turned the Democratic Party into a big government party with a centralising tendency foreign to radical or social liberals in Britain. He was more a statist social democrat than a liberal by any definition, except the definition that has emerged in American which applies more to Labour in this country than to any strand of Lib Dem thought. It’s also good to remember that the Democratic coalition in FDR’s time included a large component of southern segregationists, and a large component of thuggish big city Boss, or Tammany Hall, politics. (sort of like the Glasgow Labour Party).
Very nice. I would be interested in your further ideas on how will these pillars change things?
Take housebuilding. You have to start with some money. Where will it come from? Then you design and buld houses. Designers, planning permissions, objectors, builders. It’s now a year on, you need customers. Estate agents. Where will the customers get the money from to pay you? Then what? Full stop? Has the activity of housebuilding just transferred the pain into the future?
It’s good to acquire skills, but people need jobs to compete for at the end of the training. Local jobs and businesses is ok too, though perhapos not if it costs more to do something locally than to trade the benefits from elsewhere. But also, those businesses have to have customers, who have to have money, who get it mainly from working for wages, which are provided by businesses …. How to get the circle moving?.
Barry, I think it was Roosevelt’s stirring sentiments that Mike is trying to evoke, not an emulation of his policies. We are in a very different place to the US in 1933 (or UK in 1933 for that matter – and the British situation was very different to America’s in 1933). Having said that, Roosevelt’s focus on the banking and finance rings true now.
The challenge for America in 1933 was to complete the transition from agriculture to manufacturing; agricultural employment had collapsed, but manufacturing was not taking up the slack. This Roosevelt largely failed to do – until the war and the manufacturing effort (not just arms) for the war. The infrastructure built for the war effort was then readily switched to peacetime needs.
The transition we need to make in 2012 is to a high-tech, low-carbon carbon economy. Mike has certainly understood that.
Thanks for all comments. And yes, thanks Matthew, spot on: it was very much the spirit of fear (austerity/deficit reduction) limiting our ambition, I was trying to evoke.
And yes, John, your line by analysis is spot on too, save perhaps the penultimate one (contraction): many (eg billions on a dollar a day) need to expand their consumption; the question is whether we can move to a ‘reuse’ economy, allowing for some increased consumption of energy and resources while the ‘haves’ move to a much reduced footprint. My zero waste / zero carbon goal sought to embody that. As an aside, in a very resource constrained world we (LibDems) are going to have to get a lot more comfortable talking about equity issues (who gets the resources) than perhaps we’ve been comfortable with up to now – but that’s a topic for another day!
Just one 1930s reference, though – wasn’t it housebuilding that got the British economy moving again from about 1935/36 (before rearmament took off; good point Barry)? A parallel today, me thinks.