The future of the economy

Gordon Brown, Prime Minister and Leader of the Labour Party, today held a press conference at Labour HQ on the future of the economy.

Gordon Brown said:

"This is not a game show, or just a TV spectacle, it is a General Election to decide your future: your future security, your future jobs, your future prosperity.

"There is one party in this campaign that wants the focus to be on policy and on substance and that is the Labour Party. There is one policy area that matters above all others - the economy - which means our jobs, our living standards, our public services, how businesses grow and prosper in the months to come.

"For all the hype and excitement of yesterday, today is in fact a more important moment. It is a more important moment for the living standards of million s of people. But as today’s GDP figures show, our economic growth figures make clear the recovery is definitely underway and this campaign has already made clear that the Conservatives are a risk to that recovery.

"As for the Liberal Democrats, the more their policies come under scrutiny the greater the doubts about them and I say to both parties you cannot expect the public to put a cross against a question mark and the question marks about their policies grow every day.

"Now Britain is growing. German growth is flat, Italy has slipped back into recession, Spain is yet to emerge. So let's be clear, if Britain were to fall back into a double dip recession, jobs would go, growth would go, business would go, mortgages would go and the deficits would start to rise again. Keep our economy growing and jobs come, businesses start to flourish and the deficit comes down. We are not going to make the mistakes of the 1930s and nor are we going to make the mistakes of the 1980s and 1990s.

"Now let's just look more closely at the figures issued today. In the last quarter of 2009 it is now clear that it was government support, including our VAT reduction and then our car scrappage scheme and other measures for employment that kept the British economy moving forward. In the first quarter of 2010 we now know that the economy grew by 0.2% despite all of the difficulties of these first three winter months, showing the continued importance of government support for the economy.

"The Tories would take £6 billion out of the economy based on a flimsy four page paper which is a death sentence for thousands of jobs – teaching jobs, police jobs, care workers jobs. Then there is the impact on businesses and shops and retail throughout the economy. If they had been able to cut last autumn when they wanted to do so we would still be in rece ssion, not the recovery we achieved. If they had cut in the first three months of the year as they wanted to do so we would still be in recession and not in recovery and if they do it in the June emergency budget that they propose the risk of recession looms over the economy again and it will be difficult to restore confidence all round.

"Leadership, I have found, is being steady under fire, it is about getting the big calls right. The Conservatives got the big calls wrong when the financial crisis struck. The Conservatives are getting the big calls again wrong about how to engineer a recovery in our economy. Novices cannot today be trusted with the recovery, so it is dangerous to pull away support now.

"But I want to talk about the effect on ordinary families. 14,000 teachers would lose their jobs. Child Tax Credits would be cut perhaps by £10 a week for middle class families in this country. The Future Jobs Fund and the 200,000 jobs that young people and adults a re getting would be lost. The summer school leavers guarantee could go and that is about 50,000 young people not in education but left to do something else, probably unemployed.

"This is dangerous stuff. Recession described in statistics may not mean much to people but what happens to families as a result of these changes does mean a huge amount. So it is about families, it is about securing the recovery and it is about protecting our public services. It is about creating the jobs for the future. This is the New Labour future, a bold and ambitious agenda to move from recession to recovery to a new Britain where we have jobs and industry that can give prosperity to all and I am sorry that this set of remarks has gone on longer than you would have in a normal press conference but later I will be speaking about the economy, about our plans for the future of the economy, about the risk to recovery this year about what we will do next year to build up the jobs and industries of the future because these issues are too central, they are too important to Britain’s future to be left to superficial analysis and I will speak in more detail about our plans for the economy in a speech later this afternoon."