Global and national action to help North East businesses
Apr 7 2009 by The Journal
Prime Minister Gordon Brown writes for The Journal on the impact the G20 summit will have on the North East’s economy.
AFTER the flurry of activity around the G20 summit in London last week, people will want to know what this plan to fight the global recession will mean for people’s jobs here in the North East and across the United Kingdom as a whole.
I am clear that the agreements we reached can make a real difference for British families and businesses facing difficult times.
While others have tried to talk down our prospects and claim that the recession is a problem unique to Britain, the G20 summit demonstrated beyond doubt that the difficulties we face are global and require a global solution.
Just as a financial collapse that started elsewhere in the world has hit many businesses and families in and around Newcastle, so the British economy will only recover if we can get the global economy back on track.
We are an open economy and a trading nation. Many thousands of jobs here in this region depend on the goods and services we sell abroad.
So I was very pleased that, because of the global plan agreed at the G20 meeting, the global recession will be shorter and more jobs will be saved, than would otherwise have been the case.
And we can prevent future financial crises by delivering the tighter regulation we agreed at the London Summit.
Our global and national action to help North East businesses and families are two sides of the same coin: both are critical if we are to recover more quickly with fewer job losses.
So now that the world has signed up to a global plan for recovery, all of us in the Government will be setting to work making sure our action makes a difference here in Britain. In the next few weeks, I will be concentrating on our own national plan, which puts in place the building blocks for future recovery by investing in families, jobs, and in the key sectors of the economy. We will continue to stand by those who are worried that they could lose their homes or jobs.
And we will not walk by, but deliver our promise to provide real help now.
