Michael Meacher - Labour's Future

The debate last week on Iraq and the wider Middle East was covered fairly extensively in the media but a crucial issue went mostly unremarked: it was an adjournment debate put forward by MPs, not a full debate of the House. It’s not surprising that it happened in that way, given the immense reluctance of the government to have the decision to go to war in Iraq and that the consequences of that decision formally examined in a Parliamentary debate.

At a time when public trust in politicians is at a low ebb, refusing to take part in the debate and hiding from it (as well as Tony Blair’s absence from the chamber, the government did not appoint tellers, so there could be no vote and presumably, to their way of thinking, no awkward headlines) is a poor tactic to pursue.

All this underlines the thinking behind my decision to propose a Waging War (Parliament's Role and Responsibility) Bill when I found that – for the first time in 30 years – I had actually got a place in the Private Member’s Bill ballot. I don’t expect my Bill to become law – I came 18th in the ballot and the chances of such a bill getting through the required stages would be slim even if a government were supportive. But if we are to restore some belief in the political system, this wouldn’t be a bad place to start.

Image: © Parliamentary copyright.

Posted by Michael Meacher at 08:59 PM | Permalink

A debate in Forest of Dean, where I, Bruce Kent from CND and the local MP Mark Harper – who is also the Tory spokesman on Defence – were the speakers, came down decisively against Trident renewal. A vote at the end of the debate showed 125 people against renewal with only 15 in favour.

The debate was chaired by Ian Mean, the editor of the local newspaper, the Gloucester Citizen and they had done a good job of running articles in the days leading up to the debate so that people were aware it was taking place. CND had also sent down copies of their Alternative White Paper for distribution. None the less, despite its proximity to Gloucester, Forest of Dean is generally a rural constituency.

Such meetings can often be sparsely attended, to add to which, the trains had not recovered from the blockages caused by Thursday’s storms. I have to admit that I was concerned whether the meeting would be a success.

So when I arrived and found the hall packed with at least 150 people, it was the strongest possible indication that people want a debate to take place - and a thorough refutation of the idea that the UK population are somehow bored of politics. They may be bored of spin, and mistrustful of some politicians, but when they have an opportunity to take part in a debate, voice their opinion, they are eager to do so.

Having such an emphatic margin of victory was simply the icing on the cake of a very positive evening.

Posted by Michael Meacher at 05:58 PM | Permalink

So Tony Blair, to judge by his latest speech, is worried that the leadership/deputy leadership elections are prompting a drift back to a left wing agenda. Even before any real debate has actually begun, he’s terrified that, given half a chance, we might just jettison the New Labour mantra foisted on us since 1997. He obviously can’t bring himself to acknowledge that the overwhelming majority of the Labour Movement never wanted New Labour – as it has developed – and now want to drop New Labour if we’re to have the best chance of winning the next election.

Nobody is remotely suggesting going back to the 1980s. But New Labour is just one variant of modern Labour politics, and a distinctly unprogressive one at that. What we should be doing is promoting a real progressive Labour model that genuinely champions Labour values in today’s current setting, not using the Labour name to cover over what are often virtually identikit Tory policies. Labour, real Labour, does not stand for privatisation, deregulation, growing inequality, lack of democratic accountability, poodle-dom to Washington, undermining of civil rights and liberties, abandonment of the Labour trade union link or extension of means testing. We stand for the opposite.

Tony Blair is bewildered. “I’ve yet to work out how,” he said, “if the public wants more traditional left wing policies, they vote right.” Tony, they didn’t vote right. In 1997, they voted left, to get rid of the Tories at any cost, not for any ideological understanding of, or commitment to, New Labour. In 2001, they voted left again because they were determined not to let the Tories back in again, not for any enthusiasm for New Labour. In 2005, yes, we did win – but only at the cost of losing four million voters since 1997, plus losing over half of our party membership – hardly a clarion call to man the barricades for Blairism.

This party of ours has never needed a debate about our fundamental values and the direction of travel as we need now. I say, let the debate proceed, let our people speak.

Posted by Michael Meacher at 04:05 PM | Permalink

(From Comment is Free)

The report last Sunday about a likely Israeli/US bombing raid on nuclear installations in Iran, plus the news that the Pentagon is proposing to send a second aircraft carrier to increase the huge US naval build-up in the Gulf and the Eastern Mediterranean, increasingly suggests that Bush's last throw in the Middle East is not the extra 21,500 US troops to try to stabilise Iraq, but a settling of scores with the real enemy, Iran. Indeed recent events are eerily reminiscent of the path to war in Iraq four years ago. The news this morning of a US military raid on an Iranian consulate in the Iraqi town of Irbil will only stoke tensions more.

It is said that US military planners believe that after five nights of bombing, the nuclear targets could be destroyed. However, because of the gaps in US intelligence on Iran, there can be no certainty about how much of the Iranian nuclear programme might survive. Furthermore, to limit likely retaliation, the target range would have to be substantially expanded. Iran's medium-range ballistic missiles that have recently been moved closer to Iraq would have be hit, as well as 14 airfields with sheltered aircraft. And in order to protect Gulf shipping, Iranian cruise missile sites, diesel submarines, and other naval assets would need to be targeted. In addition, Iran's two chemical weapons production plants would no doubt be added to the hit list.

Whether sustained air bombardment along these lines would destabilise, let alone overthrow, the regime is however quite a different question. If this is the real US goal, as Colonel Sam Gardiner, USAF (retired) former Pentagon war games planner, has recently been declaring, the far more likely result is that such strikes will strengthen rather than weaken the clerical leadership and harden resistance even of a recalcitrant nation behind them. Air blitzes never succeeded with their objectives in the Second World War, nor in Korea or Vietnam, nor most recently in Lebanon. There is no reason to expect any different result in Iran. Even if all the military targets could be put out of action, which is highly unlikely, Iran also has millions of fellow Shia supporters in Iraq and Afghanistan, who would very likely rise in revolt, and it must be very doubtful if American forces in the region could contain such a heightened and widespread insurgency. As an Iranian general recently commented to the US, "you can start a war, but it won't be you who finishes it".

The US would also have even less justification under international law for such an attack on Iran than it had over Iraq. The UN security council would never authorise it because Iran has not breached the terms of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Nor can the US or Israel claim they had the right to a pre-emptive strike. By long-established law, a pre-emptive strike is justified only to defend against an "imminent and certain" attack. To claim the right of self-defence against a threat that may or may not emerge in 5 years' time is to claim the right to wage aggressive war whenever one chooses. It is worth recalling that that was one of the two grounds on which Nazi leaders were convicted and executed at Nuremburg.

The truth is, Iran has done nothing illegal. It has demonstrated no territorial ambitions and has not occupied any foreign country - unlike the US, Britain and Israel. It has complied with its obligations under the NPT to allow inspectors "to go anywhere and see anything" - unlike the US and Israel which refuse this. Indeed, by comparison, Israel has refused to recognise the NPT, and holds between 200-500 thermonuclear weapons targeted at Iran and other Middle East countries.

Nor do any of the West's arguments for war against Iran hold water. It is said repeatedly that Iran is about to produce a nuclear bomb, and cannot be allowed to do so. In fact, Iran is not about to produce a bomb or anywhere near it. Iran is believed to have enriched uranium to the 3.5% level, enough for use as nuclear fuel, but it would require 90% enrichment, with 50-100 kg of it, to make a single bomb. As to the argument that Iran should not be allowed to have nuclear weapons, who decides that? What right does the US have to decide who should or should not have nuclear weapons? Iran is surrounded by countries to the west, north and east that have nuclear weapons - the US (in Iraq and Afghanistan and in the Indian Ocean), Israel, Russia, China, India and Pakistan, and now North Korea - so it is hardly surprising they might want similar protection. And what moral authority do we have to say Iran does not need nuclear weapons for self-protection when the UK government is about to replace Trident with another round of nuclear weapons for exactly that reason?

But, it is also argued, should we not strive to prevent nuclear proliferation? Yes, though it is hypocritical to use this argument against Iran when Bush, on his recent visit to India waved through his approval for India's developing its fast-breeder reactor programme, which is ideally suited to manufacturing plutonium for nuclear weapons. It is also hypocritical when a condition of the NPT is that the nuclear states should steadily reduce their own stockpiles to zero, which they show no sign of doing. Anyway, the biggest danger of nuclear proliferation is not that rogue states will learn how to enrich uranium enough to build nuclear weapons, but that already enriched uranium stocks will leak out to terrorist groups. The answer is not to bomb Iran, but to reduce stockpiles in the US and Russia to a minimum and keep them under iron control.

So why, against all this background, is the US so bent on attacking Iran? Two considerations are probably decisive. One is that President Bush clearly sees his role in the Middle East in messianic terms and will not let does-not-make-sense arguments stand in the way of what he regards as his manifest destiny. The other is oil. Iran holds the world's largest supplies of oil after Saudi Arabia and Iraq, and holds more oil and gas combined than any other country on the planet. As Peak Oil rapidly approaches, the US demand to control the lion's share of what is left - pitifully short-sighted though such a policy is - is now the dominant driving geopolitical force in world politics today.

Posted by Michael Meacher at 04:31 PM | Permalink

From Sunday Telegraph, 24 December 2006

Britain is now one of the most unequal countries in the world. A recent report on boardroom pay reveals that the average salary of chief executives of the top FTSE 100 companies is now a staggering £46,154 a week. That is 115 times the average wage in Britain today, 249 times the national minimum wage, and 519 times the basic state pension.

The latest Government figures, entombed within their publication Households Below Average Incomes, shows that the rich have made quite a killing out of the last decade and that inequality rose sharply between 1997 and 2002. It has, however, fallen back somewhat since then, but it remains above the level of 1997. This reflects the fact that though child credits, working family tax credits, and pensioner benefits have given a modest and very welcome lift for the poor, the rich have done hugely better. Official statistics now show that 1.5 million people now earn more than £1,100 a week.

The super-rich, the top 1 per cent, have done better still. Their share of national income fell from 13 per cent in 1937 to just over 4 per cent in 1974, but then in the Thatcher-Major years rose rapidly back to nearly 11 per cent in 1997. The latest figures now suggest they are back at pre-Second World War levels. Their share of national wealth has ballooned even more. It shot up from 17 per cent in 1990 to 23 per cent in 2002. So fewer than half a million adults now control nearly a quarter of the nation's entire wealth, while half the population (more than 20 million adults) have seen their share fall to just 6 per cent in 2002: a case of "gushing up" rather than "trickling down".

The mega-rich, the top 0.1 per cent, have done best of all. Some 75,000 individuals now own almost half the liquid assets in Britain, and they are on average 66 per cent richer than they were five years ago. Those at the very top, the 1,000 richest people in Britain, have seen their wealth triple from £99 billion to £301 billion in the nine years since 1997. In the past year alone, the overall wealth of this tiny group has soared by 21 per cent or by more than £50 billion, and the number of billionaires has more than tripled from 14 to 54.

This matters for at least three key reasons. First, the corollary to this extreme maldistribution in income and wealth is the persistence of poverty and deprivation. If all the gains made by the top 1 per cent since 1997 were transferred to the poor, poverty would be abolished overnight.

Second, such excessive widening of inequality cannot conceivably be justified. It does not reflect a comparable improvement in business performance (indeed, rewarding failure has become routine), but rather greed on a mega scale. In 1980, the chief executive of a top company might have earned some 25 times more than the average worker; today it is around 120 times.

But there is a third, more profound reason why such drastically widening inequality matters. There is now abundant international data that shows the greater the degree of inequality between richest and poorest, the higher the level of ill-health, crime and social breakdown in society as a whole. The price of extraordinary material success is often social failure and higher dysfunction within society.

In his painstaking and methodical analysis of the evidence in his book The Impact of Inequality, Richard Wilkinson, Professor of Social Epidemiology at Nottingham, has demonstrated that in those countries where income differentials between rich and poor are smaller, there is less violence, including substantially lower homicide rates, and prison populations are smaller. Community life is stronger, and people are more likely to trust each other. Health is better, life expectancy is several years longer, and teenage birth rates are lower. There is also more social mobility, and educational attainment at schools tends to be higher.

It might be said that putting this all down to inequality is going too far. But all these relationships are statistically highly significant, and there are now 170 studies showing that health is better in more equal societies, and 40 showing that violence is worse in more unequal ones. The implication is that further rises in absolute living standards no longer reduce social tensions; indeed, in the absence of a drive to limit inequality, they may well aggravate them.

Thus, for example, the US, which has extreme wealth but also extreme inequality, is beset by the highest homicide rates, the highest teenage pregnancy rates, the highest rates of imprisonment, and comes 26th in the international league table for life expectancy: not a model that we should follow, though our rising inequality is pushing us in that direction. By contrast, Japan, Sweden and Norway, also very rich but not nearly so unequal, do well on all these measures.

Nor should this be surprising. What really matters to people about income is where it puts them relative to others in status and self-evaluation. Increased social hierarchy and inequality significantly raises anxieties about personal worth, and for those who lose out, the feelings of inferiority, resentment and inability to compete inevitably generate anti-social reactions to the structures that demean them. There are lessons here for the Government.

Peter Mandelson told us charmingly that "New Labour is relaxed about people getting filthy rich", and indeed the Government's ideological commitment to unfettered market forces, neo-liberalism and globalisation has certainly let inequality rip. At the same time, New Labour has commendably tried hard to limit social dysfunction by a relentless array of targets to deal with inefficiency, misdemeanours, crime, poor performance and inadequate effort.

What is not perceived is that these policies are incompatible: that the pursuit of inequality persistently undermines the very real efforts of New Labour to improve health and educational outcomes, cut crime rates, improve social mobility, and build sustainable communities — as well as obviously reduce poverty.

Posted by Michael Meacher at 02:37 PM | Permalink