Gordon Brown is to address the TUC in Liverpool.David Bartlett reports
GORDON BROWN will today pledge that his government will never follow the Conservative approach to recession of “slashing jobs and abandoning national pay bargaining”.
But the Prime Minister will risk a clash with trade unionists at the TUC Congress in Liverpool when he warns them that the recession has made some spending cuts inevitable.
He will urge delegates to accept that the only way to protect frontline services is to bow to the need for “tough choices” in other spending areas.
The message will be delivered, at Liverpool’s BT Convention Centre, just a day after delegates backed industrial action against any public-sector job cuts.
Yesterday, Southport-born TUC general secretary Brendan Barber poured scorn on government claims that the country is coming out of recession – saying the test should be when unemployment stops rising.
He told delegates that the UK’s economy has “fallen off a cliff” and will only start recovering when unemployment starts coming down and decent jobs are created.
“Green shoots mean little when thousands of people a day are joining the dole queue,” he told the opening session.
Today Mr Brown will warn that the alternative – a Conservative government – would be much worse, and adding: “Don’t risk your members’ jobs, or the nation’s future, with the Tories.”
He is also expected to add: “We have to make tough choices in public spending and we will need the support of the labour movement in protecting the front line first.”
The speech comes as Mr Brown shifts from his original message of “Labour investment vs Tory cuts” towards an acceptance that spending must slow whoever wins the next election.
Yesterday, his key ally Lord Mandelson, the Business Secretary, warned that flagship government projects could be put on the back-burner to help balance Britain's books.
And, at Westminster, the Prime Minister’s spokesman denied he was reluctant to use the word “cuts”, adding: “Some departments are cutting expenditure already, so there's no problem with that at all.”
Yesterday, Mr Barber welcomed delegates to Liverpool saying: “A great industrial city, a maritime city, a city rightly celebrating the release a few days ago of the wrongly imprisoned Michael Shields, and above all a union city.
“I don’t know whether this is trade unionism coming home, but this is certainly quite a lot of the General Council coming home,” added the Southport-born general secretary.
“Here in this city which was so scarred by the riots of the 1980s, let us remember the crippling economic and social costs of the Tory recessions, and let us resolve: never, ever, again.” Mr Barber said banks were still not lending as much as they should, businesses were not investing and consumers were slow to spend.
The union leader said people talking of a recovery wanted to pretend that the financial crisis was no more than a “little local difficulty”, so it could be back to business as usual, and “bonuses as usual”.
