Читать книгу Start Again: How We Can Fix Our Broken Politics - Philip Collins, Philip Collins - Страница 11

The first industrial nation has slowly transformed itself into a viable service economy. It does, however, lack many sectors of world-class calibre. One industry in which Britain competes at world class causes as many problems as it provides solutions. The banking crisis of 2008 showed the fragility of an economy which is too heavily reliant on financial services. A vast tranche of public money was, rightly, committed to rescuing the banking system. Had the bail-out not been forthcoming the consequences would have been even worse than they were. As it was, they were merely dreadful. The deficit in the public finances rose, at its height, to £103 billion, which is 6.9 per cent of GDP, the highest since the Second World War.

Tax revenue was revealed to be too concentrated in the City of London. Financial services accounted for 14 per cent of all tax collected in 2007 and today they still account for 11 per cent. The excessive reliance on financial services is also a way of describing an economy that is geographically unbalanced. The towns and cities of Britain outside London rose out of the ashes of manufacturing during the 1980s, but the recovery was deceptive. It was based too heavily on public spending and a reinvigorated public sector. A third of the jobs in Newcastle in 2017 were in the public sector. When the banks crashed they spread chaos into the system and the nasty medicine of austerity made the condition worse. The private sector in London and the public sector in Newcastle were shown to be umbilically linked.

Yet it would be self-harming to denigrate the financial services industry to the point that it flees. Britain is already taking that risk by leaving the EU and further hostility would be foolish. The rules of the British economy require a great deal of change, on which more anon, but the nation can only grow, can only answer all the questions that follow, if its economy is productive. To begin that process by dismantling a globally competitive industry would be an eccentric move. The tough question though remains: if Britain is not to be over-reliant on finance and if it is not going to use public spending as its method of economic recovery, where is the enterprise and what will the people of Britain do and make? Unless there is a clear route to prosperity the question of the distribution of wealth becomes redundant. But as long as there is no such route, then that is the second pressing economic question we face.