Brian Hughes (letters 14/04/04) dismisses Green Party concerns about jobs, like C&G and others, going overseas. He says my research is wrong, as call centre jobs are on the rise in the UK. I never said they weren't but this trend is unlikely to continue. Some 200,000 office-based jobs are at risk in the UK. Mitial International, analysts of the call centre industry, predict 90,000 job losses by 2005. This trend is not new; textiles were outsourced from the 1970s, manufacturing jobs in the 1980s and now IT over the last ten years. However the pace and size of change is growing massively with manufacturing still being lost. Economic globalisation(1) is creating a "race to the bottom", in which corporations move to the lowest wages, lowest environmental protection and weakest health and safety laws. Labour's zeal for furthering economic globalisation means they are reorganising Britain for corporations, at the cost of the old social justice values. Unemployment may be less, but people now travel further to work for longer hours with less favourable contracts in less secure jobs. The rich are getting richer and the poor have got poorer. A third of British children are in poverty. Two-thirds of our pensioners are living below the poverty line. Brian Hughes and Labour are wrong; our economy is not working. The Green Party has a different economic strategy (2) which studies show means more jobs. We want a fairer distribution of wealth, public ownership of public utilities and a restoration of our manufacturing base. For example a "site here to sell here" policy, would mean companies like Dyson keeping their UK factory open for the British market. This would form the basis of a regeneration for domestic industries everywhere that is so necessary for the funding of adequate social provision.

Dilly Eeles, Gloucestershire Green Party

Notes: (1) See the globalisation section of the Green Party's website, www.greenparty.org.uk/campaigns , especially reports by Brian Fewster and by Dr Caroline Lucas MEP. (2) See Caroline Lucas MEP's report Time To Replace Globalisation.