There was an excellent article “Corbyn wins economist’s backing for radical plan” by Daniel Boffey in the Observer on 23rd August 2015.
In 2010 and 2015 Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband did not have the nous to stay and plan an orderly succession. If the management of the Labour Party thinks the current leadership election is satisfactory then they are suffering from terminal delusions of adequacy replete with a do not resuscitate notice.
Labour party luminaries have also been piling in to have their say and now it is the turn of 40 economists in support of Corbyn compounding the shambles. Regrettably they have not done the arithmetic.
With the UK balance of payments the trend is clear. The UK ran a current account deficit of 3.5% of national income in 2012. The next year it rose to 4.7% of gross domestic product. Last year, it hit 5.9% of GDP. A major reason for this deterioration is the sizeable deficit on visible trade – manufactured goods, raw materials, oil and food. This is a chronic problem; there has not been a surplus on manufacturing since the early 1990s. The first priority should be a programme of reindustrialisation including fostering, reinforcing and developing the industry that we have. Make it much harder for the City to treat companies as gambling chips, set up a seriously big industrial development bank that will lend for industrial investment rather than property speculation, be ready to invoke the manifest distress clauses in the EU intervention rules to save industries in danger of collapse and do what every other EU country does and require publicly financed services to buy domestic.
It appears that the economists and those Labour Party members supporting Jeremy Corbyn have conveniently forgotten that management of any thing is about priorities and trade-offs elsewhere such as public ownership of rail and utilities.