 Most of all, thanks to our guests, James and me, who have come to join us, as you have seen from the file, James has done a lot of things in his career. His date, he is yet almost at the New York University Foundation. He spent almost two years as the Chancellor of the Economic Advisor of Australia this year. His PhD is from SOAS, the... Excuse me. He's a great book, which, if you're very shorty, will be published some time later this year. Good, so James is going to give us an overview of how he thinks later party policies are evolving and what it might mean for government. I'm going to go to the floor, which shows a lot of issues around exchange rates and prices, et cetera, et cetera, that people will have an interest in. But really about the Q&A, which would be awful, I would, if it was a discussion now, it is in all of that. So, James, welcome to the room. Thank you. Thank you very much for the invite to say a few words. I just wanted to sort of lay out and outline the latest economic program. I think one of the things we've suffered from since... I mean, it starts working with China October 2015, so the police seems to have... It's a degree of... I'm going to say fake news, but misinformation about what Labour is up to and what we plan to do and that sort of thing. And it's been quite dire, you know, you've got to be clean with the city. We've got hold of some bit of an analysis through one of the city firms, which is basically a sort of close copy of an editorial in the Daily Telegraph. You know, that kind of thing. It's not necessarily very helpful. It's not where we want to get to. John has always stressed that the only way this works is we agree it will be transparency. There is no point. I was trying to say, yes, we want to be a radical and transformative government. Yes, we want to do these things, but they're having some secret plans to it. They can be really open, completely clear about what we're doing. And that's the only way any of this will work. So, in that spirit, I wanted to try and lay out where we've got to on economic policy. I should say, obviously it says of a former economic advisor, which means it's kind of off-leash. I can say where it pops into my head, but just to be clear, this is me speaking, is one that doesn't appear to you rather than reasonably necessarily as a way to help these corporates sort of view of the world. I think that's a question that doesn't have to give a kind of personal opinion or overview of that. But again, it doesn't necessarily take this as like speaking with the authority of the party itself or whatever. You might think through that. So, with that provider, there's a couple of things. Like I said, the economic program does plan to be radically transported. The phrase that John used was to criticize its radically fairer, more democratic, more sustainable than more before. The issue that we face, the big sets of issues that we face in the British climate, I think, but fairly clear, even leaving aside Brexit that would have been clear over the last years, that we have now, I think, criminal stereotypes in 2010. The social consequences of this. I don't believe it's London or really anything in the city. You can see the social consequences. There's a shocking rise in homelessness over the last few years. That's not a visible aspect of that. The usual estimate, or the estimate of recent respectable Germans, is responsible for 130,000 excess deaths over the last few years. So the social consequences of serity are pronounced. There are multiple economic consequences, more directly economic consequences, I think, that have faded through quite clearly in the last few years. It's been a contributor, certainly over time, to the stagnation in real wages. It's quite extraordinary. You have to look back a very long period of time. You have to look at the Polish laws to find a period in which real wages have either fallen or at least long risen for as long as they have to have over the last few years or so. So real wages, average real wages are lower today than they were in 2010. It's an incredible period of decline and stagnation in most people's living standards. Related to that is the decline and stagnation in productivity, especially in terms of output per hour, that we have converted quite notably over the last 48 years or so, into an economy that is dependent on basically a low rate of investment, producing low productivity jobs and which would pay low wages and which would have few protections. So this is a labor market that's become skewed in a very specific way over time. If we factor into that a couple of big emerging issues, one of which is really, as I'll talk about briefly, but we can take questions, have a discussion on that, I think mostly in the Q&A section. The two big issues, striking I think the effects of climate change, which now are becoming apparent, haven't been apparent really for a long period of time as a scientific opinion, I think they've only become apparent to popular opinion. If you look at just the opinion form of this and you ask people what are your top three concerns about the state of the country today, shift the environment from being that number 20 to being that number three over the last few months has been very, very striking and I'd expect that situation to continue. The climate change and the environment will be the proverbial, or one of the proverbial, doorstep issues whenever the next election occurs. Speaking personally, I strongly suspect that the next election will not be happening before 2022. Given the fixed-term parliament act removes most of the ways in which the government can be easily forced from office if it doesn't want to be forced from office, given the few incentives for the government to want to leave office at this point in time, 2022 remains the most likely date for the next election, I would say. And that doesn't mean you won't end up with one earlier, that whoever takes over as a conservative leader, the press leader is probably going to be Boris Johnson, by and good toward, whoever takes over may decide to do a sort of Theresa May and force a vote through Parliament and therefore reliant, because we would vote for an early general election, of course it has to be set upon us, vote for an early general election, potentially go on in October, I think before or around, we'll just have to raise it, we'll basically do it, raise it in some form. That's a possibility. But given what happened in 2017, I think that there will be some sort of alliance on the conservative side to not go through that again. I strongly suspect that if I was any contended to the leadership where the race emerges, I'd be surprised to see that I'm definitely not going to go with the early general election, if you want to think too, people are just going to be able to see it, so 2022 is probably a time frame, and we're looking at on that level. Which means that the century of time in which we're established, if you like, based on the 2017 manifesto, the baseline in particular, the kind of economic policy we want to see and we want to develop over the next few years, it's a question of moving on from that and dealing with some of the challenges that come with this manifesto. I don't envision the next manifesto will vary that much from the 2017 war that got to 2017. I think that's proof to be, and people might remember the story that, say, being leaked in draft form some time before it was due to be published, which had the unexpected, certainly the people leaking it, which wasn't us, but would have been a nice Machiavellian thing to do. Have you expected the impact of proving to be a very, very popular document that a sort of solid, recognizably European socio-democratic offer was something that proved to be very, very popular with a great deal of electric labour, got the biggest increase in its share of the votes since 1945 and 2017, that it completely upended the prior polling that had taken place prior to that, and that was to a very significant extent on the basis of all four manifestos that were obviously made. So I'll guess, obviously, the process of the process of development is ongoing, and there are discussions in the party about where we're going to go to from there, and I'll touch on some of that in a minute, but I'll guess we're not going to deviate too far from that. So what's the outline of the economic program? The first one, and I think I want to sort of underline this, because there's been some not necessarily answering very helpful debate, certainly on the lexical roots about what labour is doing or not doing, which sometimes gets translated into about what we may or may not want to do with the economy. You know, if you look at our macroeconomic policy, in other words, if you look at the big headlight stuck around, what are we going to do with fiscal policy? What are we going to do with monetary policy? This is quite deliberately, quite intentionally about as boring as we can make it, right? That is absolutely rocks on the commitment on our part to do extremely conventional macroeconomics. There is nothing in here that starts to touch on some of our more unconventional ideas that are not going around in a minute. If certainly there's nothing to do with monetary theorem, we aren't going anywhere in the year that we talk about people's question of easing, these things are not going to happen. If you take monetary policy in particular, John has said this himself and has said into it that banking independence is sacrosanct. There is absolutely no intention at all of changing banking independence. It simply doesn't have to happen. There is a discussion, and I think this is a discussion that's now happening all over the place about the Bank of England's mandate, that has been in place for over 20 years. If you take the last 10, the mandate in place, he says you have interest rates. This is your primary instrument for effecting the economy and all that's happened is you jammed pretty much near zero for 10 years. Clearly there needs to be a discussion about what goes in the mandate. I think that's an interesting discussion about how we think about what a central bank would do in conditions up to 2000x with unconventional monetary policy, this sort of thing. That is not a very discussion. There are suggestions knocking around. Again, it's not set about including monitoring of house prices. There's a bold idea to give the Bank of England a productivity target, which certainly starts with quite a bit of debate and discussion one way or the other. That is an ongoing part of the discussion. But the core of it is the idea that with any Bank of England independence I think it's a complete monster after it's not going to happen. That's the monetary side. As they said, the fiscal side, we signed up very, very early on to what we call the fiscal credibility role. Drawn up on the back of somewhere with Simon Reimers and Jonathan Portes to be an English microeconomist on the basis of the 2014 paper where they tried to lay out what would be the ideal kind, what would be the optimum fiscal rule for a government. The idea being here, I should describe it is that we said in terms of what this involved that Labour will seek to eliminate deficit and current spending over a 5-year rolling period. In other words, every year the Chancellor will set a target for eliminating deficit and current spending, debt-deficit spending at the end of the 5-year period. We think this is a good way to both show that you are not simply running a current deficit for the forevermore but also gives you a degree of flexibility because it's a rolling target to deal with sort of debt-deficit shocks and that sort of thing. We've also included a debt-to-trains-GDP ratio. It's amazing that at the end of the 5-year period the debt-to-trains-GDP will be lower at the start of the 5-year period. That's actually a tie to that on what government can do with the deficit target. There's still a degree of flexibility in here because obviously we've not obviously written down to spending it all. The unit that's imparted this is directly from the work of Labour's supporters is inclusion of a zero load of animal in which if the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England decides that there's no freedom of office or standing. In other words, if you get to a situation hopefully done by 2008 you will have the capacity to use fiscal policies to include. You don't just have to rely on Monetary Policy for a day to day or rather for a sort of emergency action on the economy. Again, this is all really quite deliberately conserved. This is quite intentionally setting out something very clear. This is what we have to stick to. I think, broadly, the problems in the British economy are not ones that are easily solved by saying that it's a special moment. We are going to take our step. This isn't me. And we can do that inside our own fiscal rule because it allows us to say we can reverse the thoughts and we can undo some of the damages we've done over the last eight years or so or potentially 12 years by 2022. It allows us to do that. So we think the deeper issues and the problem of low investment isn't simply whether the government is doing cuts. The problem of low investment is the problem of our institutions which are too short-term which are too fixated on day-to-day profit and easy short-term considerations and aren't delivering the kind of economy we want to see. So we want to start to correct those institutions. One part of that is getting to the Treasury and starting to rewrite making better decisions. How we decide what projects get funded. How we find the green book. Green book is an extremely standard document for cost-benefit analysis. We have a few other tweaks, bells and whistles that have been slightly introduced over the years on perhaps you can clear the social impact. We don't think that goes far enough. We think if you want to correct the extraordinary bias in the British economy and this is one of the deep underlying problems we're up against is the extraordinary bias of economic activity towards London and the South East. The extraordinary bias of government spending particularly in investment spending and the figures in this are quite something to report. But we need to change how the institutions at SIG that's in the stock rate. So rewriting the Treasury's group, changing and introducing a wider concept of how you make a investment decision to do something more to see happen. Plus I've done all the former management director of the Treasury from ahead of the civil services. It's been interesting to report recently on the use of well-being measurements and wider conceptions of what the economy is and how an economy can work for people which I think is of interest. You can look at what the New Zealand Government has done to get its own Treasury to start to think more broadly about how the economy operates. Introducing well-being budgets. I think these are the areas that we'll start looking at. Getting away from pure cost-benefit analysis. We're moving by time coil and the co-author from the end of last year just goes into the details of how that bias happens. That in particular you have cost-benefit analysis you end up just looking at what's happening now and how you can adjust that. You can't do the big transformative investments you want to do. The big transformative investment you want to do will be rather grandly labelled the National Transformation Fund. Inside of this credibility we're all given space to borrow to invest 250 billion pounds. We're at ten year periods. The primary focus of that although it was less of an issue in the 2017 manifesto that was going to be right before this time around will be on decarbonising the economy and on providing a green new deal in some form or other green jobs. Green jobs across the whole country and economy that has significantly less environmental impact to the end at least of our first term. There is discussion in the later party going over to Conference at the minute the commitment to a net zero carbon target in 2050. The government as of what yesterday now has a commitment to a net zero carbon target in 2050. There's a discussion at the minute to pull that date significantly to the back. If that happens that becomes a more radical or interventionist programme. So we'll see where that discussion gets to. Labour to the Green New Deal is a pressure group inside the party calling for a 2030 as their date net zero carbon target. My guess is it will end up somewhere between 2050 and 2030 as policy at some point given the way the discussion is going to play out. But nonetheless that will be a change I think from the 2017 manifesto where we're moving somewhere beyond it. The other parts of this think are around the the Irish agenda or the language of the Irish agenda. The top of academic strogan and Marcel and Neil call it Labour's institutional term which has a nice sort of academic term phrase. And this is the idea exactly of getting out of thinking that we're just here to do a sort of standard socio-democratic tax and spend end of service and make public services work. We are going to do all that. That's the primary thing that we're going to be aiming for. But if you want an economy that works over the long term in particular you want an economy that works over the long term in conditions where you have to be carbonisable if there's a climate change and one that is fair in addition to all that you have to deal with some of these structural problems. So that's the institutional term. The document we put out before just before the 2017 election is called Paternity Bottle Soil and Ship. This is the kind of outline of some of the areas of what's going on. And what's happened since 2017 is we've started to flesh some of that out. The commitment is to bring back into public ownership the various parts of the economy that the French should then be privatising. So railways, perhaps the most obvious utilities and post office. All of these will come into public ownership. In your forms the recent document from Labour which is after which is after I talked about goes into what we might do to energy systems. I think the interesting thing there is not that we're here to simply take the entire existing electricity system bringing back into public ownership but instead there's a need to look at forms of local energy ownership community energy ownership that you want to rapidly decarbonise the economy. For example the obvious way to do this is more offshore wind. It's cheaper than gas by this point. The objection that you run into and you want to want your wind to be to the offshore wind for windy parts of the country and people not recently don't want their view spoiled to matter much about the crew people. This is how the thing starts to play out. They don't want their view spoiled whether it's a big private energy company doing it or whether it's a big public energy company doing it. It really doesn't make much difference but if you give people ownership of wind fast and the scale that you need to operate on here allows you to do that and it starts to disappear. This is what happens in Denmark, what happens in Germany. Again we're operating inside kind of Northern European and Social Democratic norm at this point but I think it's important that if we say we want to change ownership this isn't just about let's have public ownership of all things. I think that's important for certain areas that should then be private ownership after the 80s and into the 90s but it's also about why forms of ownership or dispersals of ownership which is starting to happen. Community ownership of some assets locally if you land reports produced by George Monty or a few other people that sweep those into certain forms of local supportive ownership land and also I think most dramatically a rapid expansion of employee ownership, worker ownership which we call an inclusive ownership fund and then slide John last year's conference which we're expecting large companies, there's over 250 employees to put 1% of their equity into a collectively owned trust every year which will then be held by the workers in that company and they'll be entitled to different voting rights across that collective ownership. So over time you can actually convert your large companies to a form of collective ownership when you give people a great state in that company you give people direct say and control over them and receive the difference so you have an obvious material state here and we think this is simply an important way which will start to dramatically shift how decision making happens in our large companies that we know worker ownership and when you have more participation in corporate governance from the workforce companies tend to act in a more longer term way they think about the future a bit more they're not just chasing what we have of them which is very, very short-term profit basis that large companies too often rely on so we're going to shift that over time again it's part of the ownership agenda again this is about more than just saying we should do that the 20 cent e-multiply so about 46 billion pounds or the tax rises to 46 billion pounds or the principle we'll probably end up around the same place for the next time around that is an important part of it it's important to be able to serve it but the programme here is structural changes these institutional changes that we're all trying to deliver through that it's one of those things where I think everybody secretly would prefer not to have to talk about it by this point in proceedings it's sort of wrapped them around for three years in its own way all sorts of fairly bearable bearable consequences that we would see in particular I would say that Theresa May insisting of trying to drive through a deal that Parliament wasn't going to accept to reduce the most extraordinary sort of political backwash across the whole country but her determination to try and get that initially through which by the way from a personal point of view it should be on its end or if it's progressive on the left I personally don't think personally I've said this publicly before I personally don't think we should talk about any movement in the way that we have done I absolutely don't want to see a deal with the EU which prioritises the MP3 movement and sort of trashes everything else that was roughly the deal on the table at the minute I also don't want to see a deal in the outline of their political declaration the continuation of that playfield of the European Union that stated the rules that this to me looks like a deal but no one on the left is on the progressive side of the central should go anywhere near and fortunately Parliament is consistently objective if you look at the very talk from the very conservative leaders they're insisting they can get this through somehow or other this doesn't look particularly likely and I don't see any reason why Labour would shift its position into a formal position to a deal that is demonstrably not the jobs first breaks it not the kind of deliverance or the breaks it that people would like to see more widely than that I think you're seeing the situation in which the discussion on breaks it has got to a point where clearly if it comes down to saying how do we prevent a no deal breaks it lays you very clearly in respect to the result of the referendum but it comes down to the situation of preventing a no deal breaks it and certainly something like the second public vote would be an option to consider if it's not possible to get to a reflection and this is the option then you end up having to look at that would be challenging itself to say the least but if we're determined to try and avoid something like a no deal breaks it which I think you don't have to think too far about just how damaging we've found this could end up being the civil service is happening telling people this that the second referendum is not shown on the table and we could end up in that situation by September of 2017 so that's the outcome of the situation there are some nuances around that which sometimes don't get discussed I think from from a point of view of the future Labour Government there are specific issues around financial services and the access of financial services to European markets broadly once you lose passporting you as a financial service provider in passporting access to European markets once you have financial services to provide outside of passporting you can be fairly different about no deal or of different kinds of deal equivalence regime is just never ever going to be as good as its passporting access it's quite a hit for financial services to do this worse than that I think is the possibility of weakening future governments negotiating positions we have to still negotiate deals they have the potential to remove the government's rights at the moment so 30 days a week they can pass the government forward pressure for the people to remove market access of financial services the commission has already done this so it's something to watch out for in a future situation in the European that is sort of an introductory remark to that I'm very happy to take comments and questions I'm really interested in what you're about to say and where you can come from on all bits of the particulars of course, thank you