What about the water industry?

Congress then considered its policy on the Water industry. This took place in two debates.

an outdoor tap in front of a green bush

The first was on a composite motion, C13 p169 in the final agenda document, entitled, “Public interest environmental reporting, GMB seat on new water super regulator, and trade union representation on water company boards. “

To me the purpose of the motion, is well summed up as follows, when decisions are taken behind closed doors, accountability & transparency suffer! This debate was followed by a guest speech by Fergal Sharkey.

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Later in the day, we debated, M222, p122 in the final agenda document,  222. Proposal to design oil and gas exploration contracts in the UK for the benefit of British citizen .

This argues for nationalisation and/or the adoption of the Norwegian model,

When people criticise motions on trivial grounds, which I am about to do, I often claim we are not writing legislation, that he direction of policy is good enough, which is so for this motion. The motion does not recognise that Norway has a special petroleum industry tax, and that it also acquires value through its state ownership of the industry and its supply chain, but writing and designing fallback positions is very difficult. Zak Kahn’s moving speech is very good. The debate is published on the video stream, and since the CEC supported the motion, I have clipped the moving and seconding speeches.

There followed a debate on investment and infrastructure, which was well informed, arguing to protect farm land, yet reinvest in manufacturing, I fear we’ve missed the boat on renewable energy as a manufacturing competitive advantage, the failure of the giga factory and the windmill company. Google AI perspectives tells me, “The United Kingdom is a global leader in renewable energy generation and deployment—particularly in offshore wind—but lags significantly behind major global competitors in domestic manufacturing of clean tech hardware.” I also fear that we are starving the universities and  the NHS of research funding, so it’s unlikely that the next technological breakthrough will occur within the UK.  Greater access to Horizon Europe would of course help in the development of ideas on which growth can be built. (The more I examine the question of industrial policy, the more I can see the damage that the Tories did to the UK’s productive capability. Brexit of course is one culprit, but their refusal to engage in an active industrial policy is another, illustrated by permitting the further collapse of British steel and as identified elsewhere within this report the ceramics industry. ) …

On Labour’s industrial policy

a factory billowing smoke into a cloudy sky

I wrote an article on Industrial Policy which was published in Chartist Magazine. In the article, I try to describe the white paper, and probably my conclusion is best summarised with this quote, which I lifted from an article in this blog,

The big unasked question is whether investment/innovation industrial policies can work. Some economists including Meadway, Graeber, Dillow and Edgerton question the effectiveness of industrial policy, especially that aimed at innovation and start-ups, not least because of the need to combat climate change. Meadway & Graeber argue that the climate crisis is or should be changing the nature of the questions of economics. Dillow argues that the multiplier effect of investment is low and that identifying the successful future is too hard. Edgerton argues that the goal of policy should be a better life, not more jobs and that investment needs to be directed at health and education, both of which can offer comparative advantage.

I also comment in my review of the Autumn statement.  …

LOTO speaks to GMB23

The Congress Political Speaker this year, was Sir Kier Starmer. The text of his speech is available from the Labour Press Office; like Corbyn he is not a great orator but that skill is exceptionally rare in today’s parliament. I feel the speech was tuned for a GMB audience, but no harm in that, provided the commitments offered are genuine, and not part of “I’ll say what it takes to win” strategy, although you’d have look very hard to find any new promises.

The video of his speech starts here, on YouTube. After the speech, GMB Congress asked each region to pose a question to Sir Kier. This year questions were posed on, the new deal for workers, the minimum wage specifically in social care industry, plans for energy industry infrastructure manufacture, plans for in-sourcing, public procurement and anti union firms, the blocking of new offshore mining licences, and finally, the regulation off hire & fire especially by firms in dispute with their union, but interestingly, despite a CEC special report on pubic sector pay, nothing on public sector pay nor on the public sector disputes,

The issue of the politics of energy supply and the GMB was fore-shadowed in an article in the Guardian, where Gary Smith, the GS, strongly criticised Labour’s plans to ban new North Sea drilling licences, in what might be called a “shot across the bows”.

Smith is quoted in the article as saying,

“We are critical friends of the Labour party and I think this is just a lack of intellectual rigour and thinking about where they have got to on oil and gas,” he said on Sophie Ridge On Sunday on Sky News. “They are focusing on what they think is popular rather than doing the proper thinking to understand what is right for the country.”

Below/overleaf I have posted the video of the Q&A session, and written a précis of the session. … …

Brexit and Labour’s 2017 Manifesto II

In my article “Brexit and Labour’s 2017 manifesto“, and on my wiki article, “Stability & Growth Pact”, I talk about the reasons supporters of Labour’s 2017 manifesto might believe that they need to leave the EU to run fiscal deficits, nationalise critical businesses and offer state aid. I had come to the conclusion that our current terms of membership allowed the UK to pursue whatever macro-economic policies it chose and to be able to pursue its nationalisations. There would seem to be some questions on state aid and some people have raised the issue of the Railway Directive and its possible impact on the single market and nationalisation. A campaigning comrade of mine, from Southampton Itchen CLP has researched these issues and produced the following report, overleaf,  which he also published on Facebook wall.

He concludes, the notion that all EU activity is driven solely by Neo-Liberal ideology is in my opinion a mistaken assumption. In many instances there are additional rationales underpinning the EU rules that go beyond mere market obsession. The EU has pressed for more open networks in telecoms and energy but open access across national energy networks is critical for renewable energy production being made viable on a grand scale. Whereas in the water sector, where it is not feasible to create overlaying pan-European services, the EU has never shown any interest in legislating for open networks.

I would not go so far as to suggest the EU does not have an over optimistic view of the market system or tend to assumptions about private sector performance vs public sector that are not sustained by the economic models relied upon and it is possible to have a good discussion about Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage.

On the other hand, free market supremacy is a pretty widespread assumption in the modern western world. The victory of the Neo-Liberal ideology has been to shift public perceptions to accept the ‘private good, pubic bad’ mantra as a gospel truth. That human beings in the EU broadly accept the same mantra is not really a surprise. The challenge to us as socialists is not just to reshape the UK economy to provide for greater equality and justice but to begin to reshape the underlying assumptions about human and market behaviour that underpin much of the capitalist economic system. …

A European Software Strategy

The NESSI steering committee released it’s Position Paper on European Software Strategy. I share an authoring credit, with 14 others, it is the work of a committee. This document reviews the competitiveness of the European Software Industry and makes recommendations for R&D efficiency, SME growth, Open Source use, increased standardisation, investment in regional excellence and strengthening European academia’s software engineering capability. …