Michael Meacher MP

We know there’s more joy in heaven about one sinner who repents than about 99 just persons, but William Hague lauding the government’s green record and calling on colleagues (in a leaked letter) to “avoid losing global leadership on the environment” takes the biscuit.   This is a government that seduced voters before the last election with the slogan ‘vote blue and go green’ and then claimed later with breathtaking hubris that it was ‘the grrenest government later’.   As it’s turned out, vote blue and it’s gone brown.   The Tory Right, nearly a third of the parliamentary party, has been persistently up in arms against everything environmental, and to their shame Cameron-Osborne have caved in at almost every point.   Here’s the 10-point record. (more…)

With the smart money on an early Greek exit, the two main questions to arise are: what will happen to Greece, and what future then for the Eurozone?   Ig Greece leaves, the exchange rate will drop sharply from 340 drachmae to €1 at entry to the euro to perhaps 1,000 drachmae, a loss of value to the national currency of around 75% as happened to Argentina in a similar situation in 2002.   But though in the latter case savings were decimated and import prices trebled, Argentina, released from an untenable dollar-peso parity, recovered strongly.   So probably will Greece, given the introduction of capital controls and administrative controls to ensure vital supplies reach key enterprises.   Removing the pressure of unbearable debt, boosting competitiveness from the intial collapse of the currency, lifting austerity, and paving the way for a much needed industrial restructuring should, after a painful transition, see Greece through.   But what of the other 26? (more…)

It is almost incredible that after failure upon failure the monetarists have still not yet been run out of town.   Even after the decisive anti-austerity presidential election in France a week ago, the ejection of all austerity-accommodating parties in Greece, and now the drubbing of the German Conservatives in North-Rhine Westphalia, it seems the best we can hope for from the Hollande-Merkel clash is a growth pact to run alongside an un-renegotiated  fiscal austerity pact  – a classic EU fudge since the former is not possible without a substantial easing of the latter.   It almost defies belief that after every monetarist project has run into the ground - Fisher’s quantity theory of money, Friedman’s ‘natural’ rate of unemployment, Thatcher’s financial deregulation, Blair’s privatisation of services, Brown’s PFI, and now Osborne’s oxymoronic expansionary fiscal contraction – instead of being shamed by their successive humiliations, they still return to the charge with yet another canard.   This time it’s supply-side reforms, code for yet further cuts in labour rights. (more…)

After the abundant evidence yesterday portraying Cameron as in the pocket of the Murdoch clan, the latest revelations show Osborne playing up a similar role.   The first person Cameron welcomed to No.10 after he was elected in May 2010 was Rupert Murdoch.   In June 2010 the news broke that Murdoch intended to take full control of BSkyB.   We now know that Cameron met James Murdoch 12 times between January 2006 and January 2010, and then between May 2010 and July 2011 there were no less than 60 meetings between Ministers and Rupert Murdoch, James Murdoch, Rebekah Brooks, and James Harding, editor of the Times.   That averages one a week, and there were more but they were not logged in this way by Downing Street.   Now we know also that Osborne had 4 meetings with Brooks during 2010, including 3 after the May general election.   Brooks also revealed that after discussing the BSkyB bid with Cameron at a dinner in December 2010, she had a more substantial conversation with Osborne at a restaurant that month.  

This array of evidence (and there may well be a lot more) is conclusive evidence of leaders of government consorting closely and at every stage with those who had launched the BSkyB bid when the public interest - the requirement that they handle this hugely significant bid with a semi-judicial integrity and detachment – dictated the opposite.   To say that this was unethical is grossly to under-state the case.   It stinks of corruption.   The issue for Leveson, and the country as a whole who have been let down and systemcatically deceived with assurances (above all from Hunt, but from the others too), is not only which heads should roll, but how to prevent such corruption ever happening again.

Who will call to account the person, the Prime Minister, who is meant to be the guardian of the nation’s welfare and to be himself the means to call to account serious wrongdoing at the heart of government?   A Prime Minister in hock to an aggressive law-breaking media organisation in ordder to keep the press on side and to curry votes for successive elections, clearly cannot do this.   Parliament needs a new mechanism for extreme circumstances such as these.   But maybe too there is a need for a constitutional innovation as the only effective means to check wrongdoing at the top of politics, and that is an elected, but non-party, President with the mandate to intervene, and where necessary publicise his/her interventions, where serious misdemeanours are becoming apparent.

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The evidence revealing the inappropriately close relationship between Cameron and News International in the run-up to the BSkyB bid gathered pace in the last two days with the appearance of Coulson and Brooks before Leveson.   Cameron’s insouciance about hiring Coulson to No.10 without thorough checks on what he may have known about phone-hacking at the News of the World where he had been editor, even when the Guardian later indicated in 2009 that phone hacking at the tabloid was rife, suggests that the Prime Minister was so determined to get as close as possible to the Murdoch outfit that he was quite ready to gloss over any embarrassing details that might incriminate Coulson and never raised the subject with him more than once even while the hacking saga was steadily unfolding.   The further revelation that Coulson was given only low-level security vetting, unlike his predecessors, yet on his own admission may have been given unsupervised access to top-secret documents confirms that he was exempted from proper security checks which might well have disqualified him because Cameron was determined to take him on no matter what, in order to consolidate his closeness to a media empire which he helived could keep the Tories in power for a long time. (more…)

The report in today’s newspapers that a Labour shadow cabinet reshuffle may be in the offing is to be welcomed if at last it enables the party to get a grip on one of the essential components for electoral success – the Policy Review.   For 18 months now this has been stranded in the doldrums with little or nothing to show for it and no report, not even a poor one, waiting to be unveiled.   Liam Byrne has shown his disinterest in the project he was supposed to be heading by, in effect, resigning to contest the mayoralty of Birmingham.   Another person, this time with commitment and vision and ideas and vigour, should now be appointed to take over the task, with a clear mandate to present a report resonant and vibrant enough to enthuse potential Labour voters countryside, and to have it ready for Conference 2013.  (more…)

Apart from assuring us that the government’s main objective was economic stability – the stability of the graveyard it seems in this government’s case – the only other significant things in the Queen’s Speech were what it didn’t contain, not anything it did contain.   Nothing about housebuilding, an infrastructure bank, reviving manufacturing, boosting capital investment, QE to bolster youth employment rather than the banks, or anything that really needs doing.   And nothing about 1% versus the 99%.   The inequality in wealth in Britain today is on a staggering scale, and it’s not even mentioned.   So let’s start with the facts, grace of the Sunday Times Rich List rather than Treasury data – even the evidence of the distribution of wealth has been privatised. (more…)

You couldn’t invent it.   There’s really only one issue in Britain today that ultimately matters: how to get growth.   All the political parties recognise that, indeed proclaim it, but none of them put forward the policies that will actually deliver it.   The Queen’s Speechis an irrelevance, with a whopping big black hole in the middle of it.   It contains nothing about generating growth except the liberalisation of the unfair dismissal laws, i.e. making it easy for employers to throw their workers on the scrap heap without any rights at all – gratuitously vicious without having any growth-promoting potential at all.   It takes wilful blindness of a high order not to see that supply-side measures in Britain’s current slump are now inconsequential and that what cries out to be done is a major boost to demand via public investment in jobs that will start the virtuous spiral of growth.   Cameron and Clegg priding themselves on their wares at the last tractor-making factory in Britain (I wonder why that’s the case?) obviously still can’t hear the little boy at the back saying ‘But they’re not wearing anything’. (more…)

News that Merkel may well be about to exercise one of her skidding U-turns on growth doesn’t seem to have filtered through our George.   Even if he’s the last one in Europe after everyone else, including dominatrix Merkel herself, has accepted that austerity isn’t working and slumps require spending on jobs and growth, he’s not going to shift from his fixation with debt deflation.   Nor is he the boy standing alone on the burning deck: he has plenty of other takers.   Their local election drubbing seems to have redoubled the Tories’ ardour for ideological zealotry, with the Tory Right (and where they go, Cameron will soon follow) now hawking around their demands for even bigger public service and welfare cuts (when we haven’t even yet had 90% of the first tranche) which will reduce tax receipts still further and ratchet up the recession another notch.   And they want too to ditch the human rights convention, bring back selective grammar schools, and heighten job insecurity.   Bring it on!

Even in policy areas where Osborne’s boasted about his reforms, it’s all turned to dust.   He claimed that through the Merlin negotiations he was increasing bank lending to industry; it is still falling.   He claimed he was taking action to avoid another banking crash; but the new rules on capital ratios won’t come into operation till 2019.   He claimed he found tax avoidance ‘morally repugnant’; but he hasn’t staunched the flow into tax havens – BIS data show bank accounts in tax havens still held £1,700bn in 2011, much the same as in 2007.

He has notoriously said (till recently) that ’We’re all in it together’.   But last year average real UK incomes fell 1.6%, yet in the same year the wealth of the richest 1,000 Britons, according to the Sunday Times Rich List, rose £18bn – an average increase per person amounting to £346,155 a week!

He has declared that executive pay increases have been excessive, but apart from wringing his hands has done nothing to stop it; it’s only shareholders and investors who’ve taken the action.   He thought the 50p top tax rate cut would go down a blinder in Tory circles; even Tory voters according to the Mail on Sunday are now demanding its return.

This man has the touch of genius if the Tory aim is now, as it seems, to lose the next election. (more…)

There are several important implications in Hollande’s convincing victory over bling-bling Sarkozy.   It’s not just the first Socialist presidential win for 31 years, even more significantly it clearly marks a turning point in European politics, though a lot still depends on how forcefully and skilfully this wedge against the dominant Right is used.   But the signs of change are manifest.   Ten out of the 17 Eurozone Heads of State have now been unceremoniously ditched since the financial crisis began 4 years ago.   Merkel, the bulwark of the EU Right, is now more isolated than ever: her close ally, the fiscal disciplinarian Dutch PM Mark Rutte was ejected two weeks ago, now her most important ally Sarkozy, and in her German homeland her party has just been removed from office in the Schleswig-Holstein elections.   Coupled with that there is an outright rejection of ultra-austerity in Greece, Spain and Italy, and the Left has made big gains in Denmark and Slovakia and now of course in the UK.   It begins to look as though the fixed rigidity of Right-wing economics won’t hold.   But there are two other key implications too. (more…)

The economic news this last week has been all agog at this sudden surge of shareholders in revolt.   The insurer Aviva’s CEO, Andrew Moss, had his proposed remuneration package rejected by 54% of the shareholders, as had RBS, Shell & GlaxoSmithKline in recent years.   The Aviva shareholders certainly had enough to complain about.   Since Moss took over in 2007, revenues fell by 19% and profits by 16%, the dividend slumped 21% and the share price by no less than 62%.   Yet total executive pay over the same period ballooned by 90%.   Shareholders were therefore outraged at the proposal to award him another £46,000 plus a £2.2m ‘golden hello’ package for another board member joining from another company.  So what effect did this majority revolt against pay excess have?   Zilch, because when New Labour introduced the shareholder vote a decade ago, they made it voluntary, not binding. (more…)

What is so extraordinary about the fallout from these local elections is how far the wider Tory leadership is in denial.   The Tory Right immediately goes on the rampage demanding a harder line on crime, immigration and Europe, as though the loss of jobs, falling incomes and absence of growth were nothing to do with it.   The Daily Mail front page headline today “Now stick up for Tory values”, as though privatisation of all public services, liquidation of the Welfare State, and the social cleansing of inner cities via housing benefit cuts were not enough.   Grant Shapps claims on the radio that if the government hadn’t pursued its economic course, we would now be in the state that Greece is in.   Boris Johnson advises Cameron that the secret is ‘to remain bone dry on the economy accompanied by compassionate Conservatism’: it’s difficult to know which is worse, since the only people Johnson seems compassionate towards are his bankers in the City.   Cameron, we are told, is going to argue alongside Clegg on Tuesday that ‘the fight to rebalance the economy remains the glue that keeps the two parties together in government’; well theat’s certainly news since there’s no rebalancing of the economy and any glue left is set to come apart. (more…)

Nobody knows exactly what happened to cause Gareth Williams’ body to be found padlocked in a holdall.   But it does look increasingly suspicious that a third party was responsible and the involvement of MI6 officers, and in particular officers in the Met’s counter-terrorism branch SO15, cannot be ruled out.   Unaccountably, they failed to report him missing for 7 days which is extraordinary for someone engaged in sensitive work at GCHQ, and the explanation given by his line manager lacked all credibility according to the coroner.   SO15 failed to inform the senior investigating officer about 9 memory sticks and a black holdall found at his MI6 office until 2days before the end of the inquest.   No formal statements were taken by SO15 offivers who interviewed Williams’ colleagues.   And the family reported that he had complained of ‘friction’ at MI6 at the time of his death.   None of this points directly to SIS involvement in his death, but it does fit into a pattern that is beginning to emerge of MI6 acting as a law unto itself. (more…)

The condemnation of Rupert Murdoch as “not a fit person” to run a big international company by the Commons DCMS select committee is stunning, but not of course the end of the matter.   The determining decision has to be taken by Ofcom, and if as expected the regulator confirms the committee’s view, the government should see it through.   But if they decline, for example on the grounds that the select committee’s judgement was a partisan one, with MPs splitting on party lines, what then?    First, it wasn’t partisan when the reasons given by the Tory MPs were either circular (Davies) or procrastinatory (wait for Ofcom, Mensch) or in denial (Coffey).   Second, the one MP outside the two main parties, the fiercely independent LibDem Adrian Sanders, didn’t abstain, procrastinate or close his eyes in denial – he backed the judgement on Murdoch as ‘not a fit person’.   Third, there’s another way through this. (more…)

Too much attention has focused on Murdoch’s cussed personality, not enough on what kind of press we want to see in this country.   At present there is no nationality requirement for ownership.   There is no limit on the share of any media market controleed by any one proprietor.   There is no constraint on owners’ power to take over parts of other media domains.   There is no control to prevent market dominance.   There is no right of reply.   There is no provision to increase diversity and improve balance in the press.   Self-regulation has patently failed, but there are no measures to ensure that, consistent with freedom of the press, newspapers do not abuse their role in the manner highlighted by, but no confined to, the phone-hacking scandal.   All of these need to be corrected. (more…)