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The Prosser Perspective.... a weekly column from Dover and Deal MP Gwyn Prosser.

24 September 2009

After months of poor polling results, next week’s Labour Party Conference in Brighton will be our best opportunity to shake off the defeatism being whispered by some of my parliamentary colleagues and commence our election fight back.

The economic and political challenges that the global financial crisis have presented to us have been immense but they are not ones that Labour has been cowed by.

We need to clearly explain how we are taking Britain out of recession, stimulating recovery and building the new economy of the future. That means continuing to provide real help for businesses and the unemployed. It means actively investing in economic growth for the future and it means a responsible plan for paying down debt without causing the recovery to stall.

Next, it is imperative that we continue to be the change-makers in British politics. As modern social democrats we must constantly rethink the role of the state in delivering our social objectives and we must do more to take the fight to our political opponents.

The past year has exposed the limits of David Cameron’s modernising rhetoric. The veil is being lifted. Their only answer to the global financial crisis has been one of retrenchment, regardless of the social consequences.

Although Gordon Brown has suffered a lot of bad press, no one can deny that he has driven the fight-back against the global downturn. Our efforts helped prevent a manageable recession turning into a 1930s Great Depression.

But, despite signs that the economy is picking up, our work is far from done. The task ahead is to build the new economy that will emerge from the global firestorm that has engulfed us and next week in Brighton, we will spell out our three point plan to create new jobs and rebuild prosperity.

First, while the freefall in the economy has ended, the effects of the recession are not yet behind us and this is why maintaining responsible government spending and investment is vital.

We know, for example, that to borrow the extra pound today in order to keep young people in work, training and study will save many pounds of extra public borrowing in future if society ends up having to cope with the social catastrophe of long term unemployment, as we did in the eighties.

Second, government must actively invest in the economic growth of the future. Growth is the biggest antidote to debt and it will determine how far and fast we are able to pay it down in the future.

We will not advocate centralised planning or attempt to pick winners but we will work in partnership with business, science and universities. The government should be backing the winning ideas and technology-based innovations on which our nation’s future depends.

And, third, we need a responsible approach to reducing the fiscal deficit without eating into the fabric of people’s lives. In order to fight the crisis all leading economies have had to borrow more. The costs of not doing so would have been catastrophic.