I chaired a talk by Andrew Baker at the first meeting of the Centre for Progressive Economics at Queens University on Nov 27.
This is the most cogent argument I have heard against Osbornomics, which, by the end of this talk, sounds more like old fashioned Tory relish at punishing the poor.
Malachi O'Doherty 
NI, the RoI and the UK in general all face the same problem: we need to import much of our food and most of our energy. That is an unavoidable necessity. We are also importing a lot of goods that we used to manufacture ourselves: cars, electrical appliances, etc. To pay for all those imports we have to export something that those countries want from us. It used to be manufactured goods, but more recently we have come to rely on exporting our services, particularly financial services, and hi-tech products with high value-added content. That is how we generate the income needed to pay for the imports that we have come to rely on.
The phoney boom of the past two decades did not produce more export capacity. Instead, money was squandered on a property and construction bonanza which made multi-millionaires of bankers, builders and developers, but did nothing to address the problem of our shrinking export production. People in distant lands who want to sell us oil or cotton or bananas, for example, are not going to be interested in having a big house in the British or Irish countryside. They want products that we can export to them. There is more than a grain of truth in the slogan “Export or die” and it is time that our political leaders faced up to it. In fact, it is time that we all faced up to it.