Michael Meacher MP

So, according to the Government, we are to have GM crops commercially grown in Britain from 2009, and if you don’t like your food being GM contaminated, too bad. That’s the clear message of Defra’s latest consultation paper proposing absurdly small separation distances between GM and other crops, a voluntary system of compensation for ruined non-GM farmers, and permission for GM crops to be grown at secret locations (rejecting a public register of sites as sanctioned by EU law).

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One aspect of the Government’s drive to ‘reform’ public services has gone little noticed. It isn’t only in health and education that the private sector is being given a preferential role. The same pressures are now being exerted against Council tenants to force them out of local authority housing.

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In their Energy White Paper of February 2003the Government concluded that the looming energy gap – as the old nuclear power plants are closed down, reducing nuclear-generated electricity from 19% now to 7% by 2020 – should be met by a combination of a major expansion of renewables (windpower, biomass, wave and tidal power, solar power) plus much enhanced energy conservation. Tony Blair has now clearly resiled on this. But he is wrong.

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