11:38am Tuesday 25th May 2010
By Peter Mullen
OH dear, what have I said? No sooner had I put away my quill pen after writing last week’s column than it started to come true. I predicted “howls of rage...widespread chaos in the workplace and on the streets; civil unrest, wrath and violence”.
Then, last Saturday, oiks and thugs from the Trotskyist Socialist Workers’ Party gatecrashed the talks between British Airways and the Unite union. Up to then, the talks were said to be going well. Quite. That was precisely why the rabble interrupted them.
The last thing those politicised yobs want is a settlement. What they do want is trouble, the more the better. In their own language, they like trouble and social unrest as they see these things creating “a pre-revolutionary scenario”. So, any future talks between BA and the union will have to be held in secret.
That’s the score: democracy nil, yobs one.
The coalition Government has barely started on its programme of cuts to reduce the £163bn deficit and already the howls of rage are deafening. But it is the massive government overspend which created the deficit in the first place.
Official figures just released in a survey of more than 200 local authorities in Britain reveal there are 1,726 public employees being paid more than £100,000 apiece and 50,000 council staff are paid more than £50,000. One public sector executive in Cornwall is paid £410,000. I’d like to know just what he or she does for that sort of money.
The Government is going to have to operate a night of the long knives on this army of superannuated box-tickers. Gordon Brown increased the number of public sector employees by 850,000. And we know why. It was to create – Soviet style – his client state: to produce a whole section of society bribed everlastingly to vote Labour. Even in economic good times, this level of public sector corruption is unsustainable. In a recession, it amounts to national financial suicide.
It’s not as if we were not warned. I have just been reading Winston Churchill’s History of the Second World War. In an early chapter he outlines the conflict’s causes and acknowledges that financial instability played a big part. His words leapt out at me. He was talking about 1929 and the Great Crash, but his words fit our present predicament exactly: “Extraordinary optimism sustained an orgy of speculation. Books were written to prove that economic crisis was a phase which expanding business organisation and science had at last mastered. ‘We are apparently finished and done with economic cycles as we have known them,’ said the President of the New York Stock Exchange. A group of leading banks constituted a million-dollar pool to maintain and stabilise the market. All in vain. The whole wealth so swiftly gathered in the paper values of previous years vanished.
The prosperity of millions of homes had grown upon a gigantic structure of inflated credit now suddenly proved phantom.”
Old Winston has our generation bang to rights as well. The economic cycle done away with? That’s word for word what disastrous Gordon Brown promised us when he claimed to have abolished boom and bust. It wasn’t true in 1929 and it isn’t true today.
Into every economist’s fantastic wishful thinking, reality eventually breaks in. We are at the day of reckoning and a reckoning will have to be made – howls of rage or not. Or else Britain will sink into Third World poverty.
■ Peter Mullen is Rector of St Michael’s, Cornhill, in the City of London, and Chaplain to the Stock Exchange.
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