Michael Meacher - Labour's Future

The three concurrent inquiries at present - into the Iraq war, the corruption alleged to be behind the £43bn al-Yamamah arms deal, and democratic reform of the House of Commons - don't seeem to have much connection. In fact they are all probing one single fundamental issue: how can the wielding of unbridled power be held to account by checks and balances which preserve the democratic rights of the majority over fundamental decision-making? Blair could only take Britain into an illegal war of aggression because he had crushed or manipulated the countervailing forces in the Cabinet, Parliament and in society at large. BAE was only able to carry through what is now widely seen as one of the biggest and most corrupt arms deals in history because it colluded with the Government, and Downing Street in particular, in evading all the normal mechanisms of transparency and accountability. The Wright select committee which recently reported on reforming parliamentary procedures was primarily concerned with limiting the overweening power of the Executive to get its way on everything irrespective of Parliament and the electorate.

Continue reading "Chilcot, BAE, Wright - one thing in common" »

Posted by Michael Meacher at 11:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The stench of corruption in the long-running BAE saga over the al-Yamamah and other massive arms deals is almost suffocating, and now to cap it all BAE (for the moment at least) has escaped criminal prosecution. Just about everything in this episode stinks:
* Kickbacks for securing these gigantic deals (£43bn revenue to BAE for the Saudi deal) were channelled through offshore shell entities to disguise where these payments came from and who to, as MOD defence sales must have been aware,
* The SFO corruption inquiry launched in 2004 revealed huge sums paid into Swiss bank accounts associated with middlemen like the Syrian billionaire Wafic Said, a close friend of the Thatcher family, but as the Swiss prepared to disclose bank records to the SFO which might implicate the Saudi royal family, Blair ordered Lord Goldsmith, the attorney general, in a secret and personal letter to stop the investigation,
* The inquiry was then only resurrected when the US Justice Department discovered that BAE had been paying Prince Bandar, son of the Saudi Defence Minister, over £1bn through the previous decade in £30m quarterly payments, apparently through an MOD account, yet the British government refused to hand over documents about these Bandar payments, no doubt because Ministers had been insisting for 20 years that there had been no secret commission payments,
* Other BAE deals now being uncovered include the sale of hugely expensive radar to poverty-stricken Tanzania, with a third of the £28m contract price now revealed to have been diverted into secret offshore bank accounts, yet the deal was forced through by Blair who, in the words of Clare Short, "absolutely, adamantly, favoured all proposals for arms deals".

Continue reading "Plea bargaining has let BAE off the hook" »

Posted by Michael Meacher at 11:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Having for months advocated a strong State stake in energy supply, I was pleased - if admittedly rather surprised - to see that Ofgem is now recommending exactly that. It's almost as though it was recommending rolling up the unfettered free market system of liberalised energy and replacing it with the Central Electricity Generating Board. And about time too. Privatisation of gas in 1986 and electricity in 1989 certainly lowered prices, but at the expense of strategic long-term planning. Three consequences have followed from the wild marketising frenzy of the 1980s which are now seen even by the Energy Establishment to be lethal drawbacks. First, gas storage capacity when left to the market scarcely materialised , which left the UK with dangerously low reserves in cold snaps like the recent one and increasingly dependent on imported gas. Second, the disinterest in ownership of strategic national assets put the UK at the maercy of foreign power behemoths which again mattered at times of shortages and rationing when they would prioritise their own domestic consumers. And third, having sucked the short-term profits out of the industry, privatised companies are much less interested in investing to meet national energy supply targets.

Continue reading "Ofgem gets it at last" »

Posted by Michael Meacher at 11:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

If in the hackneyed phrase information is power, and it is, the rules governing this power need to be far more tightly drawn than at present, as several current issues illustrate. It is dreadful that the FOI requests made to the scientists at the UEA climactic research unit were so disgracefully blocked (albeit that some of the climate change sceptics demanding the information may have been obsessive and partisan themselves). Some of the data, for example concerning the location of 42 rural Chinese weather stations or the width of annual growth rings of trees in frozen Siberian bogs, might be arcane and of minute relevance to fundamental climate change questions, but it should still have been made readily available. The evidence about the 'hockey stick' is much more serious and should certainly have been provided in full. Scientific data should be a free resource to all who seek it. But that of course applies much more widely than just to contentions about climate change.

John Beddington, the Government's chief scientist, called on scientists today to share data freely "so that people can do the challenging in an unhindered way". He should apply his strictures to the Government's own use of data about GM crops and food (which he supports) where the GM companies only publish trials data favourable to their cause and prevent researchers getting access to any data that undermines their commercial interests. Indeed where scientific claims are being made, FOI transparency should be made applicable equally throughout the private sector, especially in the field of pharmaceuticals. Recent cases about the use of injunctions to prevent disclosure, and in addition super-injunctions as in the Trafigura case, also reveal the need for strengthening the law to open up access where there is a clear public interest to do so.

Continue reading "FOI: the case for tighter regulation" »

Posted by Michael Meacher at 10:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Ed Miliband has been tasked by Gordon Brown to take responsibility for preparing Labour's manifesto for the coming election and has invited contributions and advice from within the party for this purpose. Some 45 Labour MPs, supported by dozens of Constituency parties and trade unionists, as well as Compass and the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy, are now launching a Coalition for a Labour Victory based on a radical redistributive programme which we believe will resonate with Labour voters whose loyalties have been strained. We are therefore pressing Ed Miliband to focus Labour's campaigning for the election around the following 5 key principles:

1 The recession should be tackled, not with cuts in essential public spending, but by a massive public investment programme in job creation in house-building, infrastructure improvement, public services, and the new green digital economy, in order steadily to reduce the deficit by getting people off dependence on benefit and into work paying tax, national insurance contributions and VAT.

2 Banks should be split up with their casino investment arms hived off. Publicly-owned retail banks should be required to meet new social and community objectives and support manufacturing, with lending to businesses and homeowners restored to 2007 levels. Pay and bonuses should be tightly regulated.

In addition there are 3 other key policy priorities:

Continue reading "Coalition for a Labour Victory" »

Posted by Michael Meacher at 11:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Tory full-scale retreat from their blood-curdling threat to cut and cut again, straightaway and savagely, because Britain's revival depended on it, is degenerating into farce. This is not just a tweaking of the tempo or scale of their proposed cuts, it is a wholesale withdrawal from what they themselves previously insisted was the essential core of their policy to save Britain from a spiralling deficit that would prompt a bond strike in the financial markets and precipitate a downgrading of the country's triple A credit status. So what has changed? The recovery in the real economy is still very fragile, but then it was before too.

What has changed is the politics reflecting greater caution about the basis of the recovery, plus a gradual but steady narrowing of the Tory poll lead. So Cameron is covering his tracks with some neat re-positioning, but only at a substantial price. It does not inspire confidence to build economic policy on the shifting sands of political sentiment. It risks an explosion from the Tory Right. And it leaves the wreckage of Tory economic policy floating aimlessly rather close to Labour's position, suggesting that if the key dividing line between the parties is thus kicked away, there's little incentive or rationale to change governments.

Continue reading "Do the Tories know what their economic policy is?" »

Posted by Michael Meacher at 11:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The Democrats' shock defeat in Massachusetts plus the deepening impact of the recession on US jobs and incomes are having a devastating impact on US foreign policy. Having started with a welcome post-Bush drive to conciliate long-standing opponents in an effort to ease tensions where aggressive threatening had previously merely hardened enmities, Obama's original welcome intentions, which required far beyond a single year to realise, are now being swamped by declining polls in US domestic politics. He is certainly right to make his first priority winning back domestic support by focusing on reversing the ravages of the deep recession, but that does not require a foreign policy beginning to veer wildly in contrary directions. He has sent almost 40,000 extra troops into Afghanistan, but then almost immediately signs up to a phased withdrawal. He extended an unclenched fist to Iran, which probably helped to stimulate the 'green' proto-revolution there after the stolen presidential election, but now is quite suddenly ratcheting up the arms race without apparent provocation in the highly combustible cauldron of the Middle East.

Continue reading "Obama should beware about Iran" »

Posted by Michael Meacher at 11:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Withdrawing from Afghanistan has for a long time been the obviously right policy, but given that the tide of battle has clearly now turned decisively in favour of the Taliban, this will now be widely perceived at best as making a virtue of necessity and at worst as an early exit to stave off a defeat. There are several uncertainties in the situation. It is assumed that the combination of a military surge by nearly 40,000 reinforcements with the parallel enticement of jobs and community development projects will wean away most of the Taliban forces. A recent US Senate foreign relations committe report estimated the Taliban fighting strength at 15,000 and that only some 5% were committed ideologues, while 70% fought for money the so-called $10 a day Taliban.

Doubling this to win them over would cost just $300,000 a day, compared with the actual $165 million a day that the US is currently spending fighting the war. Whether however such a convenient money solution would appeal to a Taliban leadership that now sees victory in its sights and regards these concessions as a clear sign of Western weakness is another matter. It is highly unlikely that the gradual, progressive handover of power to local Afghan control will take place in the smooth, orderly fashion envisaged. Much more likely is accelerated NATO withdrawal from the countryside into the main towns and cities as ever more confident Taliban commanders pick off their targets with redoubled ferocity. But at least the die has been cast.

Posted by Michael Meacher at 11:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Chilcot was as ineffective with Blair as expected. The central issue is not whether he can mesmerise with words (as when he sought to obfuscate what he clearly said and meant in an earlier TV interview that he would still have backed regime change even if there were no WMD in Iraq), nor is it whether he can distract from the real charge by diversionary musings about a future attack on Iran. The key issue is whether he had made up his mind on regime change irrevocably without any concerns for MI5, FCO or Cabinet contrary opinion (his Manichaean tendency of self-righteousness) for underlying motives he kept well hidden (above all sticking close to the Americans whose real motive was control of Iraqi oil, and WMD, the wickedness of Saddam, and democratisation of the Middle East were just pretexts), and then used every device to fix the facts to support the policy (as the Downing Street memo of July 2002 showed the Americans were already doing, and Blair then followed suit) even though he knew at the time that the evidence was trumped-up and false. That is the real charge, and Chilcot fluffed it.

Continue reading "Blair is not in the dock - yet" »

Posted by Michael Meacher at 10:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

For a year, from when the date was set, I had been looking forward to Friday 29 January, until it was rather soured a fortnight ago by being named as the time when Blair would defend his infamous record over Iraq at the Chilcot Inquiry. On, I hope, a rather more uplifting note, my book 'Destination of the Species: the Riddle of Human Existence' is being published today by o-books, which seeks to answer some very fundamental about the universe and the meaning of human existence.

It is a systematic review of all the scientific evidence which shows that the Dawkins and neo-Darwinian view that the universe is driven by pitiless, directionless chance is seriously wrong and misleading. The evidence shows: astronomically precise fine-tuning in the construction of the universe; early life driven for billions of years by symbiotic and cooperative networking, not blindly by mutations; and the spontaneous transposition of matter and energy into new higher organisational states at certain thresholds of complexity both in biological and cosmological systems.

Continue reading "Destination of the species: the riddle of human existence" »

Posted by Michael Meacher at 09:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Chilcot has unearthed a lot of new evidence and put a new slant on several of the main actors involved, but where is it leading? As Blair prepares to defend the indefensible tomorrow, what will be the consequences if, as expected, the Inquiry concludes that the war was illegal, that there was gross deception in the use of evidence to justify it, and that Bush and Blair were anyway determined to go to war irrespective of the evidence in order to secure regime change? What then happens? This is a defining moment for UN institutions and the rule of law.

This is not the first time this issue has been faced. On 2 March 2004 BBC news online carried the story that "Blair 'war crimes' case launched", and the same day the Guardian reported that "Lawyers submit war crimes petition". It is worth noting what the result was. On 9 February 2006 the Office of the Prosecutor at the ICC (international Criminal Court) put the following statement on its website:

Continue reading "What action will follow Chilcot?" »

Posted by Michael Meacher at 07:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It is truly staggering (or is it just expected?) that after nearly 13 years of New Labour the 10% richest in Britain - not a tiny group, but 6 million people - now have wealth no less than 100 times greater than the 10% poorest. It is equally staggering that a hairdresser has an income of £12,400 whilst the chief executive of a major bank or FTSE 100 company has an income (like Stephen Hester at RBS) of £1.2 million , again 100 times more, and that's without counting the stock options, bonuses, target-based incentives, and assorted fringe benfits which escalate top executives' salaries to £5-10 million a year. In the 1930s the richest 1% took 12.6% of total UK income, but the war and post-war Labour Governments shrunk this to 4.2% by 1976, since when the Thatcher and Blair governments have bounced their share up again to 10.0% of all income. These findings from a study published today by the National Equality Panel should be a call to arms. They are of course the inevitable and predictable outcome of the unfettered market-rules-all de-regulated neoliberal agenda pursued equally by the Tories and New Labour.

Continue reading "The rich really are now filthy rich, thanks to Mandelson" »

Posted by Michael Meacher at 11:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

So No.10 is worried that despite technically coming out of recession in the last quarter of 2009, the recovery may yet stall and the economy shrink again in the first quarter of this year, just before the election. But even if that were to happen, there's still a measure that the Government could take in the March Budget which is eminently necessary and justifiable and would be highly popular with the electorate. People might think that as the banks now announce massive profits once again, at least they'll be paying tax again. But they won't. Tax law at present allows the banks to spread their colossal losses indefinitely forward offsetting them against tax, so that they won't be paying tax again for years if not decades. Merrill Lynch actually applied its £16bn sub-prime losses to the UK in order to pay no British corporation tax for 60 years!

Other countries limit the spreading of losses to only 3 years; why not the same in Britain? Even in the UK a major change of ownership (e.g. RBS, Lloyds, Northern Rock) leads to a company forfeiting its former tax losses. But it doesn't apply if the losses were in their subsidiaries; why then don't we close that loophole? That would bring in at least £10bn a year for the Exchequer - a nice little earner that could hansomely reward electors who have suffered as victims of the downturn.

Posted by Michael Meacher at 11:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Slowly, very slowly, and reluctantly dragging its feet at each stage, the UK Government is beginning to get it on the banks. Lord Myners' hosting a G7 summit today in London to consider some serious options for international banking regulation would have been laughed out of hand a year ago, but of course it remains to be seen whether this is simply a showcase to capitalise on detestation of the bankers in the run-up to the election or whether it is more than a talkshop and delivers some real reform. The auguries are not good. The UK Government has rejected separation of investment (casino) banking from commercial (retail) banking on the grounds that higher capital ratios plus 'living wills' (to wind themselves down in the event of collapse) will suffice. They will not. The UK Government has rejected Obama's proposal to clawback a large part (£56bn) of taxpayers' funding of the bank bail-outs on the grounds that the UK tax on bankers' bonuses (which will raise £3bn at most) will have an equivalent role. It will not. The UK Government made it a condition of the bail-outs that lending to businesses and homeowners would be maintained at 2007 levels, but then never enforced it. It has since collapsed to the lowest level for decades.

Continue reading "At last a glimmer of real action on the banks" »

Posted by Michael Meacher at 11:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

With gas storage supply in the recent cold snap down to dangerously low levels in the UK and far lower than in France or Germany, with coal carbon capture and storage (CCS) still at least a decade away, and with renewables still unlikely to meet even the modest 15% electricity generation target set for the UK by the EU for 2020, Government energy policy is becoming heavily dependent on its planned revival of nuclear. Yet it is already becoming clear that the conditions it has laid down for this nuclear renaissance are make believe. The UK Government has confirmed a few months ago that it is sticking to the cost estimates on which it based its forecast that nuclear was cost-effective with an average carbon price of 36 euros per tonne of carbon, and that plants could be built for only £1,250/kW (or about $2,000/kW). Neither of those conditions are realistic. As the UK Department of Energy (DECC) said in the Commons statement of 9 November last year: "We agree with the EU that there are significant risks in attempting to manage the carbon price. Introducing price caps or floors makes emissions trading a game of betting on the next government intervention in the market". Quite so. Nor is the other condition any more soundly based.

Continue reading "The Government's energy policy is in deep trouble" »

Posted by Michael Meacher at 09:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Today's revelation that the police in the UK, with the connivance of the Home Office, are planning to launch spy drones over Britain for covert surveillance from the sky is only the latest, but perhaps the most far-reaching, measure yet of the Government's obsessive drive for all-round comprehensive spying on its citizens. According to its authors, Kent police and BAE, civilian UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) would "greatly extend" the Government's surveillance and "revolutionise policing". That must be the under-statement of the year. This is pure Orwell. We are told that these spies in the sky could operate from 20,000ft (two-thirds as high as Mt. Everest) and would thus be invisible from the ground, and be in continuous operation for 15 hours at a time. This is so all-embracing, like a permanent unsleeping eye watching you ceaselessly, that it can only be described as totalitarian in the untrammelled range of its application.

Continue reading "CCTV out of control" »

Posted by Michael Meacher at 11:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It took the loss of the Massachusetts 'safe' Senate seat to get Obama to do the right thing. God moves in mysterious ways his wonders to perform! So what do we need to get a UK 'Volcker's rule' (stopping banks taking deposits from running hedge funds or making private equity investments or using their own money to gamble on the markets in proprietary trading)? A lot more than the ultra-cautious Brown-Darling defensiveness towards the City of London. Darling's 'living wills' requiring banks to have clear contingency plans to wind themselves down in the event of drastic failure is yet another gesture succumbing to City lobbyists. Yet the remedy that applies in the US applies in spades in the UK. The US is now well ahead of the UK (and of Europe) in dealing toughly with the banks to prevent a further and even more dangerous collapse. So why is the Brown government so timid in the UK?

Continue reading "So Obama gets it; but not yet Brown" »

Posted by Michael Meacher at 10:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

So class now returns to the political agenda - 30 years after Thatcher sharply widened class divisions, fatened the rich and trebled child poverty, and a decade after New Labour promised to halve child poverty but actually widened inequality still further and only reduced child poverty by a fifth. The depressing truth is that both parties have pursued a neoliberal economy of unfettered market forces, privatisation and deregulation, all of which sharply drive up inequality and both parties reject redistribution beyond minimalist tinkering. The inevitable result is that child poverty in Britain is now the fourth highest in the EU, the rich are now richer compared with the rest of the population than they have ever been since Edwardian times, 17 million people (more than a quarter of all households) remain on benefit, while chief executives of the FTSE 100 companies are now paid on average about 155 times more than the average paid worker. So class matters, yes, it matters dreadfully, it always has. And Harriet Harman is right to say today: "class overarches discrimination from gender race or disability".

Continue reading "Class - the neglected issue" »

Posted by Michael Meacher at 11:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Mandelson's plaintive excuse for washing his hands of the Cadbury debacle on the grounds that the decision "was one for the shareholders of Cadbury" is really pathetic. What are Ministers for? Their role is, not tamely to roll over when confronted by the damage inflicted by market-driven neoliberal capitalism, but to change the rules governing the operation of the economy or of society where outcomes undermine the public interest. What clinched the takeover was the short-term purchase of a quarter of Cadbury shares by hedge funds which bought them up very late in the day in the hope of a quick bonanza. One answer therefore to this latest brand of predatory capitalism would be, as the union Unite is now recommending, to limit votes in a takeover situation only to long-term shareholders, thus eliminating any role for the hedge funds. But that is surely not adequate. What about the primary stakeholders, the employees, 6000 UK workers in the case of Cadbury who now stand to lose their job in large numbers to pay off the debt of this heavily leveraged bid?

Continue reading "Stopping more Cadburys in future" »

Posted by Michael Meacher at 08:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

There are nostalgic reasons for rejecting the Kraft takeover of Cadbury - another iconic British comapny lost overseas - but the real arguments are rather different and much more compelling. First, a nation's strategic control over its own industrial base can gradually be whittled away to the point where its economic survival and prosperity can be put at risk. Industry is a closely inter-connected network, and when increasingly key industrial decisions are taken overseas on the basis of foreign not domestic interests, the viability of that network can be seriously undermined. The hollowing out of US industry is one example, and (as in so many other ways) the UK shows signs of following. Second, as most other countries have concluded, there are strategic companies of such central significance to the economy that they cannot be let go. By contrast British governments, both Thatcherite and New Labour, in thrall to a deregulatory neoliberal philosophy, have refused to intervene in the loss of such key companies as BAA, PowerGen, National Power, British Steel, Rover Group, Jaguar, ICI, Boots, Cazenove, P&O, and Pilkington. This glorification of the market against the integrity of the nation may well come to be seen as damaging as unfettered financial markets are now seen to be.

Continue reading "Cadbury into Kraft won't go" »

Posted by Michael Meacher at 11:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)