Michael Meacher MP

Two current stories throw a searchlight on contemporary Britain. Farepak collapses, taking with it the £41m that 150,000 customers had saved towards their Christmas hampers. The customers have no rights because Farepak is technically not a deposit-taking bank. Three Natwest bankers are extradited to the US accused of conspiring with senior executives of the now-collapsed Enron to defraud their employers of £20m. There is a row about why they were sent to the US, but that misses the point. Why were no charges brought in this country when their alleged crimes were committed in Britain against a British firm?
It is now typical for the government to turn a blind eye to mega-scale crime or cheating of customers while relentlessly pursuing the pettiest of offenders with Asbos. Corporate crime in particular now almost always goes unpunished, indicating just how far corporate power, allied with a pro-big business government, insulates its holders against redress.

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The natural reaction to recent reports about Hayden Phillips’ interim review on party funding is to suggest that Tony Blair’s backing for the £50,000 donation cap will destroy the union link and thus the party with it.
Certainly, if it goes through – if the NEC does not stop it in its tracks at its emergency meeting tonight – it would be an unmitigated disaster for Labour. Let’s not beat about the bush: the suggestion of a £50,000 donation cap is a right wing ploy designed to damage us, made easier by New Labour’s ill conceived courting of rich businessmen exemplified by the Ecclestone/F1/tobacco advertising affair.

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After we handed in the CND Alternative White Paper in to No 10 yesterday, I asked Tony Blair, when he made his Trident announcement in the Commons: “At a cost of up to £75bn, including maintenance costs over a 30 year lifespan, how can his proposal conceivably be justified in an utterly different post Cold War environment, when it will severely restrict much more needed conventional defence expenditure, it will clearly undermine the nuclear non-proliferation treaty worldwide and it will drain off colossal sums of money from where it is most needed, dealing with the real threats that face us from terrorism, climate change and long term energy insecurity?”
The only answer, repeatedly, from Blair was that we had to have nuclear weapons because you never know what nuclear armed enemies might arise to threaten us in future. There are three counters to this argument which lethally undermine it.

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