Dr. Tom McDonnell:

Of course. The second pillar then is about full, but also high-quality, employment. We do not want to go down the low-road model that the UK has pursued since the early 1980s. We want a high-road model based upon high-quality jobs and that takes you more in the direction of Scandinavia with active labour market policies, high wages, high-value-added activities, and big implications for the type of industrial policy. It is not just about developing any job. Sometimes developing some types of jobs actually boxes you off from going in a different direction so we need to be much more selective because that will ultimately decide the standard of living for people on the island and certain sectors can be traps. The tourism sector, for example, is generally regarded in the economics literature as a trap because it tends to be low-value-added jobs that are often seasonal in nature, and if industrial policy is pushed in that direction, it is almost a dead end. However, that is just one example.

The third pillar is about security so that is really about the welfare state. It is about poverty, the social wage, adequate income supports, child supports, and working age pension. It is about universal basic services and intergenerational equity and all of those policies coming together, which ultimately will be the same policies North and South, at least in the longer picture. It is very much not so in the shorter picture in all cases.

The fourth pillar is about stability. This is about price stability, environmental and biodiversity stability, and fiscal stability, which is obviously very much in the news at the moment. It is also about this notion that economic stability does not imply stagnation; in fact it requires dynamism. We cannot remain bent on maintaining the existing system as it is. We have to constantly evolve and engage in this process of creative destruction, but to do that, we have to have the security in place that protects people from those transitions.

That then takes us into this conversation about just transition, which people associate with climate change but actually applies to all economic changes that have happened over the past 200 years and will continue to happen over the next 200 years. We are very concerned about a lot of the technological disruptions that are going to happen over the next ten or 20 years as we move through the fourth industrial revolution. AI is the classic example. How does one respond to that? Is it a complement or is it a substitute for work? Also, regarding climate change, green jobs versus brown jobs, and the huge implications for agriculture and agrifood, how should we respond to those questions? It is about attempting to answer those, building that framework and putting it in place, which will hopefully then be helpful for policymakers.