Michael Meacher - Labour's Future

The Stern Report is arguably the most important wake-up call for the planet since World War II. It completely destroys Bush's argument that tackling climate change cannot be afforded (anyway an absurd claim for the US ever to make). This, the most comprehensive and authoritative report on the subject ever produced, demonstrates that the costs of not taking action are up to 20 times greater than the costs of taking preventative action now.

But the grand Blair-Brown rhetoric over Stern needs to be matched by action on the ground. At present it isn't.

Stopping global warming means switching out of fossil fuels to renewable sources of energy. On that we have almost the worst record in Europe - 4% generation of electricity from renewables in the UK, compared with an averages of 25% in the EU.

Stern says we should spend 1% of GNP on countering climate change. For the UK that would be £12bn a year. Yet the UK's actual expenditure on its low carbon buildings programme is just £80m a year - less than 1% of the 1% we should be spending.

We should be requiring all large and medium sized companies to report annually on their environmental impacts. This was going to be part of government legislation this year, but Gordon Brown ditched it.

We should be allocating a carbon ration for each family in the country so that all individuals can make their contribution to lowering emissions.

We should be sending a message that gas-guzzling cars are out. Gordon Brown increased the car tax on SUVs this year by less than £1 a week, on a car costing tens of thousands of pounds. This is laughable - how about an increase of £20 a week or more?

The government should set a clear specific target to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the UK by 3% a year, as the only way to reach the agreed reduction of at least 60% by 2050.

Posted by Michael Meacher at 04:14 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The Government's statement that nuclear was can all be safely stored so we needn't worry about it is deeply flawed for several reasons -

1 The statement said the Government is offering " open and transparent partnerships with potential host communities, with appropriate involvement and benefit packages." This is Whitehallspeak for We intend to bribe local authorities to take on a nuclear dump near them - we're far from sure they'll agree otherwise.

2. Nobody, including the government, knows where to put the waste and until locations where it can be properly stored are identified and agreed, it is pie in the sky to say the problem is solved. It isn't.

3. There is already nearly half a million cubic metres of radioactive waste - enough to fill London's Royal Albert Hall 5 times over - so it will require lots of dumps. Where?

This piece of kidology is designed to show the authorities have the waste problem in hand, so they can then build a new generation of nuclear reactors. CORWM itself says that building 10 more nuclear power stations, which is what the nuclear industry wants, would triple the already enormous amount of waste we've got. We need this like we need a hole in the head. This is madness and we must stop it.

Posted by Michael Meacher at 04:47 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Happily, my constituency paper, The Oldham Chronicle has picked up the blog: this brief piece ran yesterday.

Posted by Michael Meacher at 05:54 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Funny how some of the most important issues only come out by sheer chance. It's just happened again - we only found out that 2 alleged terrorism suspects, so dangerous that they had to be subject to control orders, had escaped and have been at large for 2 months and 2 weeks respectively, because someone leaked the security breaches to the media.

Just before that came to light, there were the cases of another 2 terror suspects being heard by the Special Immigration Appeals Commission (SIAC). The SIAC meets behind closed doors. Evidence in both cases had been submitted by the intelligence serivces. It was found that the evidence submitted in one case contradicted that submitted in the other - not by any formal rules of disclosure, but only because the same barrister happened to be representing both suspects.

It's all reminiscent of that earlier flagrant example when we were told, just before the Iraq War, that a deadly ricin plot had been uncovered, to frighten us about the imminent threat of terrorism, only to discover two years later, at the trial of the Algerian involved that there was no ricin and no plot and that the story, in the words of the defence counsel was "a tapestry of lies and manipulation."

Now, to cap it all , the Government is cracking down. Not on deceit, but on the Freedom of Information Act which it itself introduced (and very welcome at that) by imposing a very tight cost cap which, by aggregating requests across a period or organisation is likely to ensure that requests for more contentious information are rejected as too expensive.

Posted by Michael Meacher at 11:42 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

In the last 4 days I have spoken at Labour County Party, Trades Council and Co-Op Party meetings in Truro and Bedford. I'm going to Castle Point in Essex next week. Labour MPs are invited to address CLPs all the time and it is a good way of attracting members. But these meetings illustrated just how let down Party members feel over so many issues - particularly poverty, low wages and a lack of affordable housing in Cornwall. I was told that many local employers were actually reducing already low wages on the grounds that the government said they only needed to pay £5.35 an hour. A very good reason to raise the NMW within a very short period to at least £7 an hour.

In Bedford they were disillusioned that a lot more had not been done to tackle climate change and make sustainability the focus for all Government policies.

These meetings and their feedback are nothing short of inavaluable. I'd be very glad to know what are the specific issues in your area which you think are not getting the attention they deserve, and what ought to be done about them. Please click here to let me know what you are most concerned about.

Posted by Michael Meacher at 12:33 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The Companies Bill is currently going thorugh its Commons stages. I was struck by a point that Larry Elliot made in his column in yesterday's Guardian. In particular, this part caught my eye:

“A firm can expect a visit from Revenue and Customs once every 330 years on average and to be found breaking the law once a millennium.”

330 years. And yet still the business sector complains about red tape – persuading Brown to scrap the Operating and Financial Review (OFR) last November and is still campaigning to reduce the “burden” of regulation in the Companies Bill.

Not everything is going their way: this morning the Government conceded on an amendment tabled by Jon Trickett covering the issue of bringing a company's supply chain within the remit of the Bill - so responsibility cannot be sloughed off onto subcontractors, subsidiaries or suppliers. Great news, but the government is still opposing the other two amendments - on the content of the Business Review which seeks to reinstate important elements of the scrapped OFR by making reporting a director's duty - so lodging responsibility at the highest level of a company and on mandatory reporting standards - to create a level playing field.

If your MP is not already backing the amendments, contact them and ask them to do so. This is not a heavy burden, just asking companies to recognise their responsibilities.

Posted by Michael Meacher at 04:20 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The pressure exerted on General Sir Richard Danett to pretend there was not “a piece of paper, however thin” between him and the Prime Minister will deceive nobody. Dannett saying the British military presence in southern Iraq “exacerbates the security problems” is not answered by Tony Blair responding that “we’ll withdraw completely from Iraq as the Iraqi forces are able to handle their own security.” In fact, Dannett is saying, irrespective of the state of Iraqi forces, the presence of British troops is making the security situation worse, not better, and we should therefore withdraw. When is the PM going to listen to the advice of his own Chief of General Staff?

Posted by Michael Meacher at 11:50 AM | Permalink

I welcome the Corporate Manslaughter Bill which has just had its 2nd reading in the Commons. About time, since it's been 10 years in the pipeline, but it is still seriously flawed.

The Bill only covers 'senior managers' who play a significant role in making decisions, so in larger organisations with complex management structures or where much of the work is subcontracted, it may be just as impossible as now to bring a successful charge. The penalties in the bill on involve an unlimited fine or a remedial order - exactly as now - when they ought to include a prison sentence for the most serious offences. In 1996, Labour was clear about the need for directors to be directly responsible for health and safety: http://www.corporateaccountability.org/dl/Corporatekilling/T&GRep.pdf . Briefings from UCATT and the TGWU stress the importance of director’s duties being included, either in the bill or by amending existing health and safety legislation, and that it must be done in conjunction with the main bill itself, not afterwards. We must make sure that this happens.

Unincorporated bodies, including partnerships, are excluded and this large loophole should be closed. And not only should directors have a statutory duty to comply with health and safety obligations, but there should also be a 'secondary liability' to include anyone in the organisation who conspires or colludes in an act which results in death.

Briefings & case studies:

http://www.tgwu.org.uk/Templates/Campaign.asp?Action=Display&NodeID=92872
http://www.tgwu.org.uk/Templates/Campaign.asp?NodeID=91394

Posted by Michael Meacher at 01:33 PM | Permalink

So where's the choice at the next general election? Cameron in effect offers more of the same, but more slickly delivered. Cameron says he will protect the NHS against cuts (though he doesn't say where the extra expenditure will come from). Cameron says he's committed to social responsibilty and devolving power from the state. What's the difference between Cameron and New Labour? Where's the choice?

Britain needs a real choice, not (as with Gordon Brown) another decade of New Labour but with a different face at the top, not (as with David Cameron) the heir to Blair, apeing the same policies but with the smooth touch he presumably learnt from his PR days.

Posted by Michael Meacher at 05:08 PM | Permalink

Clinton's speech at Labour Party conference made the point that New Labour, unlike Bush in the US, had cut inequality. That is the opposite of the truth. The Guardian's latest survey of boardroom pay - http://business.guardian.co.uk/story/0,,1886010,00.html - shows average earnings in the UK rose 3.4% last year, while the average pay of chief executives of the top FTSE 100 rose 28% - following 16% and 23% rises in previous years. What this means is that the average worker today gets about £400 a week, a worker on the National Minimum Wage gets £185 a week, while chief executives in top companies get on average £46,154 per week - 160 times more than their lowest paid workers. These colossal and growing inequalities are obscene.

We should raise the NMW from £5 to at least £7 an hour. We should tax bonuses, so called fringe benefits, share options and other tax avoiding remunerations of the super rich at the marginal rate. And we should require meetings, in all medium and large companies, where representatives of each main grade in the company, including from the boardroom, present their pay claims for the next year, and have to justify them to all other employees in the company.

Posted by Michael Meacher at 01:57 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)