Gordon Brown & the Rochdale widow.

 

Mrs Duffy & Gordon Brown

I favoured remaining in the E.U. because I grew up with it but I was never really impressed with either Strasbourg or Brussels. There's a lot of corruption. We had a referendum in June 1975, and two-thirds of Brits voted to remain in the Common Market. I also liked the idea of the free movement of people within the E.U. and so do many young people living in Britain. When I asked people what they understood Brexit to mean, they gave me different reasons. The Conservative Prime Minister, Theresa May, wasn't much clearer. All she could say was that Brexit means Brexit, whatever that meant.

Tony Blair and New Labour probably laid the foundations for Brexit. In May 2004, the E.U. welcomed ten new member states from Central and Eastern Europe. The UK under a Labour government opened up its labour market immediately to these new E.U. citizens. Other E.U. countries placed restrictions on the number of people entering their countries from Central and Eastern Europe. According to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), 80% of new jobs created under thirteen years of Tony Blair's New Labour government, went to migrant workers coming from Europe. Nevertheless, the British economy benefitted from the skills and labour of these migrant workers even though many working-class traditional Labour voters, felt betrayed by Blair and felt he ignored their concerns about immigration. They either stopped voting Labour, stopped voting altogether, or turned to Nigel Farage and UKIP.

The American economist, Milton Friedman, has talked about the "fallacy of the fixed pie", i.e. the tendency to believe that an economy is a fixed pie and that one party can only gain at the expense of another. It's a commonly held belief. Many people do believe this, but income and wealth are not fixed pies, and neither is the size of the economy or the size of labour market. The Victorians believed in the 'wage fund theory' that maintained that there was only so much money in the pot. This was advocated by the economists Adam Smith and David Ricardo.

I remember that incident which involved a Rochdale widow, Mrs Gillian Duffy, and Gordon Brown. A lifelong Labour supporter and former council worker, Mrs Duffy bumped into Brown while she was out buying some bread. Mrs Duffy said to him, "All these eastern Europeans what are coming in, where are they flocking from?" With his Sky News microphone still on, Brown was heard calling Mrs Duffy a 'bigoted woman" and he had to apologise to her when it went public.

I think the incident showed how out of touch politicians like Gordon Brown were when it came to understanding the concerns of the British people. The confrontation with Mrs Duffy was disastrous for Brown and for the Labour government.