After just nine months in the role Francis Maude has announced he will be stepping down as trade Minister. It means David Cameron will have gone through four trade ministers in six years.
The nine months that Maude has been in the role have not been happy ones – for him, or the British public.
Our trade deficit in goods has grown to a record £125bn and our overall trade deficit has risen to £34.7bn. Meanwhile, under the Tories the current account deficit increased to its largest level since 1830 – when the Duke of Wellington was Prime Minister.
We’ve also seen a widening gap between the Chancellor and the Trade Minister in that time. While initially championing Osborne’s much vaunted “£1 trillion trade target by 2020” recent weeks have seen Maude pouring cold water over the target – referring to it as a “big stretch” and indicating it is unlikely to be met. The “stretch” he refers to is the whopping £350bn that the Office of Budget Responsibility says Osborne’s 2020 target will be missed by.
Despite saying yesterday that he would be stepping down having devised a plan to tackle Britain’s huge trade problems these new figures – incidentally released on the same day as Maude announced he’d be leaving – are evidence that if there is a plan, it’s done no good so far.
While Maude might be able to just walk away from Britain’s dire trade situation others aren’t so lucky. Domestic export industries such as steel and manufacturing, where output is still lower than 2008, have come under huge pressure in recent years from soaring energy costs and cut price competition from markets such as China.
Boosting exports is key to tackling the historic deficit, but the government shows no sign that it really understands this. While Osborne fails to provide crucial support to the steel sector, which has seen devastating job losses, he isn’t failing to take every opportunity to court the increasingly unstable Chinese market which leaves Britain even more exposed to global headwinds. It was just a few months ago the Bank of England warned that if Chinese GDP were to fall by three per cent relative to its trend then the output in the UK would be around 0.3 per cent lower as a result, yet Osborne is undeterred.
It is workers in Britain that will be paying the price for these failing policies. Those losing their jobs at Tata steel, small manufacturing businesses suffering in the industry’s stagnation and many other ordinary workers are not lucky enough to walk away from the situation like Maude.
Their situation is compounded by the Government attacking ordinary people on middle and low wages in other ways.
Although Osborne pledged in November to stop all tax credit cuts, he is still going ahead with a proposed cut to the income disregard costing 800,000 people an estimated £300 a year. This is on top of the IFS’s analysis from just a few days ago that shows the Government’s planned cuts to Universal Credit will see 2.1 million working people lose out by an average of £1,600 a year.
And coming down the line Osborne’s ‘tenant tax’ which will force all but the very poorest council tenants to ‘pay to stay’ – charging them huge market rents to stay in their home – which many will be unable to afford.
Under the new measures a couple earning £15,000 each per year – scarcely over minimum wage each – would be asked to pay market rent for their home, or reduce their working hours in order to take them out of the income bracket.
Osborne claims to want the Tories to be ‘the Party of the workers’ but this policy shows how much of a farce that is. People who work hard on low pay will be forced from their homes.
Maude is lucky enough to be able to walk away from this Government and their failing policies – if only the rest of us could do so.
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