Speech delivered at Sands Films Studio event for THE MAN WITH THE PLAN on 12th and 13th April 2025.
A Campaign film produced by Sands Films studio in London.
The Man With The Plan is a new film about William Beveridge, written and directed by Christine Edzard and starring Simon Callow. Contact: ostockman@sandsfilms.co.uk
A Campaign film produced by Sands Films studio in London.
The Man With The Plan is a new film about William Beveridge, written and directed by Christine Edzard and starring Simon Callow. Contact: ostockman@sandsfilms.co.uk
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LearningTranscript
00:00I'm going to welcome my near namesake, would you please welcome from the 99% organisation, Mark E. Thomas.
00:08Please welcome him up here.
00:16Thank you very much, Mark. Good afternoon, everybody.
00:20I must say it's very nice to be introduced by somebody with such a sensible name.
00:24The beverage plan, as we've heard, was a marvellous thing.
00:33It was visionary. It was comprehensive.
00:36He tackled five giants. He didn't pick off little pieces.
00:39He called them want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness.
00:46And he tackled them all.
00:47He tackled them in a joined-up way, and he created a plan which would resolve them all in an extraordinary way.
00:57So I think Kate used the word visionary.
01:00It was visionary. It was courageous.
01:02It was remarkable.
01:03But for me, the most remarkable thing about it was that any of it was implemented.
01:14Because if you think about the end of the Second World War, we'd come out of six years of war.
01:24About 50% of GDP had been diverted to the war effort.
01:28Suddenly, that means half of everything that's being done is useless.
01:32Nobody wants uniforms anymore.
01:34Nobody wants lots of spitfires anymore.
01:36Half of the economy is basically useless.
01:40That's devastating.
01:42A million people had lost their lives.
01:45Huge numbers of people were going to have to be demobilised.
01:48There was an enormous risk of unemployment.
01:52And I don't know if you remember what debt to GDP was then.
01:56I'm a little bit older than Mark.
01:57But it was over 250% at the end of the war.
02:03Now, we keep being told that we should be extremely worried because it's at 100%,
02:07which, although, as a mathematician, I can see no reason why 100% has any significance,
02:13I have heard some economists, including Liz Truss's favourite economist, say that if it goes above 100%,
02:25all sorts of bad things happen.
02:28Now, I was surprised by that because the Bank of England helpfully produces long-term data series,
02:34including one on debt to GDP.
02:36So, you can look for the last 300 years.
02:40Would anybody like to guess what the average level of debt has been for the last 300 years?
02:46100% yes.
02:49So, we should be absolutely terrified because our debt has suddenly reached the average level.
02:57I don't get it either.
02:59But given that background, given that 250%, given all those other things,
03:08it would have been, at least by today's standards, very understandable if Actley had said,
03:15oh, I just love this report.
03:17It's a brilliant report.
03:19And nobody would like more than I to implement this report.
03:23But somebody has to be the adult in the room.
03:26Somebody has to be prepared to take difficult decisions.
03:30And so, I'm going to put it on the shelf.
03:33And once we've rebuilt the nation's finances, which I am determined to do,
03:39then we will come back to it.
03:40You have my word on that.
03:42Well, actually, as we know, that's not exactly what happened.
03:47He found the money.
03:49He implemented it.
03:51And what was the economic cost of all of that?
03:56Well, actually, the economic cost was that we had the most successful 35 years in our economic history.
04:04In this country, it was called the golden age of capitalism.
04:08It was a truly extraordinary thing.
04:10There was no economic cost.
04:12Kate mentioned the multiplier effect.
04:14When you do good things, more good things happen.
04:17There was no economic cost.
04:19There was an enormous economic benefit.
04:21So, we can see in that instance that a determined leader could do something.
04:31But actually, there's a lot more evidence.
04:34Determined leaders have always been able to act when they needed to act.
04:40If we look at the UK, actually, even before we got to the end of the war, we had to pay for the war.
04:47Now, probably Mark's too young to remember, but at the beginning of the war, we hadn't finished paying for the First World War.
04:56So, our debt to GDP was about 150%.
05:01So, of course, it was unaffordable that we could push it up even further by paying for mobilisation and fighting a war.
05:10But, of course, we did.
05:11We pushed it up another 100%.
05:13Then we had, in 1948, we had Attlee, who, as we've heard, implemented it.
05:22But then, more recently, in 2007-2008, we had a global financial crisis, and that affected Britain.
05:31In fact, it affected Britain so much that the banking system was in quite serious danger of collapse.
05:37But, of course, suddenly, when there's an urgent need to act, the Bank of England swung into action.
05:46So, there's another magic money tree, actually, which is the Bank of England, swung into action and created, at that time, around £375 billion,
05:58which, you know, that's quite a bit of money, actually.
06:02The total...
06:04I'm not getting into the details, but the total they've created, total quantitative easing,
06:12because we had to do more at the time of COVID to fund the furlough scheme,
06:20that alone needed another £70 billion to be magicked up.
06:23The total stood at £895 billion.
06:27So, you know, we're getting on for a trillion that was just created
06:30because there were urgent things that needed to be done.
06:34Of course.
06:36And it's not just us.
06:39It's other countries.
06:40The post-war period, I mentioned that we had what we called the golden age of capitalism.
06:45Well, virtually every country's government did that.
06:49They had, in France, they called it
06:50Les Trente Glorieuses, the Thirty Glorious Years.
06:54In Germany, it was
06:55Der Wirtschaftswunder, the economic miracle.
06:58Most countries actually called it an economic miracle.
07:00And since I can't speak any other languages,
07:02we will just have to take that bit as read.
07:06But what happened in the global financial crisis with China?
07:12Well, after the global financial crisis, there was a worldwide recession.
07:17The Chinese government position on that interested me at the time
07:20because they said, no, we do understand that there's going to be a worldwide recession,
07:25but we've decided not to take part.
07:31And I thought, that sounds like quite a sensible plan.
07:36Portugal doesn't have its own central bank, so it can't do magic.
07:41And it was forced into very, very serious austerity after the global financial crisis.
07:46More serious than we had, and the results were worse.
07:49And in 2015, miraculously, the austerity hadn't rebuilt their government finances.
07:57And they said, well, we've had enough of it.
07:59We don't care what the EU says.
08:00We don't care what the IMF says.
08:02We don't care what the ECB says.
08:03We're going to stop the austerity.
08:06And if you look at the results of Portugal's economy
08:09and compare them with ours since 2015,
08:12but even if you compare it with others,
08:14because we've been particularly bad since 2015 for some reason that's escaping me,
08:18but even if you ignore us and just compare the others,
08:24Portugal has been stellar since then, since they rejected austerity.
08:29So, where does that leave us?
08:34We're in a position where we know, actually, we know from history,
08:38not from theory, from history,
08:40we know that when something is serious, governments can act.
08:44Well, things are serious now.
08:45Now, Kate mentioned we've got one in three children in poverty in this country.
08:51We are still a wealthy country, but we have one in three children in poverty.
08:56The median income household in this country probably by now
09:00is poorer than the median income household in Slovenia.
09:06Amazing.
09:06I always used to think, you know, we're kind of a bit like France or Germany or the Netherlands.
09:11Well, we're a bit like Slovenia.
09:14And that's a bit of a shock.
09:16Andrew talked passionately about the NHS
09:18and how it's struggling, how badly it's struggling.
09:22It's struggling so badly that, in my judgment,
09:25there is still a real danger of some kind of catastrophic failure in the NHS.
09:30That's how bad the struggle is there.
09:32Now, we have, I think, I saw something about faeces and fish.
09:40Yes.
09:42We have a climate crisis.
09:44We don't want our rivers full of faeces.
09:48I believe the suggestion is it should be fish.
09:51And I would agree with that.
09:54Oh, and here we have clean rivers and seas.
09:56Yes.
09:56Thank you very much.
09:57So we've got a climate crisis.
09:59We've got life expectancy falling.
10:01There are only a couple of countries, developed countries, where it's falling.
10:04It's generally been rising.
10:06But ours is falling.
10:08We are in a crisis now.
10:09And we need to act.
10:11So we need, collectively, to learn from people like Beveridge and Attlee.
10:16And we need an ambitious approach.
10:18An approach that says, this is what needs to be done.
10:22And we're going to do it.
10:23In 1942, same year that the Beveridge Report was published, Keynes said, pointed out something
10:30which had by then become obvious to people but has been completely forgotten now, which
10:36is that anything we can actually do, we can afford.
10:39If we can physically do it, if we've got the people, if we've got the bricks, if we've got the energy, if we can physically do it, we can afford it.
10:52But we've been conditioned to believe that we can't.
10:55And in particular, we have this nonsense of fiscal rules, ironclad fiscal rules, non-negotiable fiscal rules.
11:03Well, excuse me, we didn't always have fiscal rules.
11:09I'm quite old, so most of my life we didn't have fiscal rules.
11:13But they were introduced in order to give an appearance of prudence.
11:18And, of course, they were always unchangeable.
11:21We are now, according to the Institute for Government, on our tenth set of unchangeable fiscal rules.
11:27Now, but they are non-negotiable.
11:34Now, in fact, if you didn't want national renewal, there are really only three things that you need to believe.
11:43It's very important that you believe there's no magic money tree.
11:47Because if you believe there's a magic money tree, then, of course, you believe that what Keynes said is true and you can find a way to do things.
11:54So what does that mean in practice?
11:56It means you have to believe you can't borrow more because of this magic 100% number.
12:02You have to believe you can't tax more because the trickle-down effect would cease.
12:11And we wouldn't want that.
12:14And you cannot create money, even though we've seen 895 billion created.
12:20The reason you can't create money is because if you were to do that, we would become like Weimar Germany or Venezuela tomorrow, runaway in hyperinflation.
12:32So, unfortunately, none of the three magic money trees are you allowed to pluck the fruit from.
12:37And we just have to be responsible and accept we can't succeed.
12:41Now, I'm representing the 99% organisation.
12:4699% was...
12:48We are the 99% you may remember was the slogan of the Occupy movement in the States.
12:55You remember that?
12:56And it's a very simple idea.
12:59There are 99 of us for every one of them.
13:02Actually, it's more than that.
13:04When I published my book, Martin Wolf reviewed it and he commented to me, you know, it's not 1% of people who are doing all of this.
13:11It's a fraction of 1%.
13:13And I said, yes, it is.
13:15It's really exactly something like 0.01% of people are the people who are actually driving all of this.
13:23And I said, yes, you're quite right.
13:25And equally, you know, probably if you're in the top 10%, you're still not struggling.
13:30So 99% is a metaphor, not a precise number.
13:33And I couldn't call my book 99.99%.
13:36So he accepted that argument.
13:39So we have three big projects going on.
13:45We're an all-volunteer movement, by the way.
13:47We don't have a single employee, but we have about 4,000 members.
13:50We have three big projects.
13:52One of them, actually, Danny and I were in Oxford yesterday talking about the need for defensive constitutional reform.
13:59The risk that what we're seeing happening in the States as we speak could happen here.
14:06And we estimate that the risk of that is, if we do nothing, the risk of that is probably around 40%.
14:16So yesterday I used this phrase that we're playing Russian roulette by not acting.
14:22We're playing Russian roulette with the British social contract and British democracy.
14:26But we're playing Russian roulette with two loaded chambers.
14:29So that's one.
14:31It's not a good idea.
14:33Well, he's not acting.
14:35He's maybe waking up, but he's not woken up yet.
14:40Well, I don't think he's on the wrong side of that, frankly.
14:43But he's not acting.
14:45And we need to wake them up.
14:46So that's the first project.
14:48We want to wake them up to this because they need to act.
14:51They have to do that.
14:52But the second one is about the NHS.
14:55And we don't do things on our own.
15:00We work with a lot of other organisations, including Andrew, actually, on supporting the NHS.
15:06And the third one is on demolishing economic myths.
15:10I've talked about some of them.
15:12We have recently been given the opportunity to run two parliamentary working groups,
15:17one on the NHS, one on progressive economics.
15:20So we are doing our little bit to try to wake up MPs and politicians and get them to act.
15:27Now, I have never done this before, but I've been inspired by the others to do a chant.
15:32So I thought that we should all, assuming that we don't have any oligarchs in the room,
15:42we should all shout out, we are the 99%.
15:46We are the 99%.
15:49We are the 99%.
15:52We are the 99%.
15:55We are the 99%.
15:59Very good.
16:09Marky Thomas.
16:10More than alarınitch.
16:11Yes.
16:12More than a sche parte.
16:18It is.
16:20It is.
16:22It's the 99.
16:22Heh.