Michael Meacher - Labour's Future

I'm launching a campaign to push for greater social mobility in this country. Do you feel that your opportunities are limited by the class into which you were born and the educational options that were open to you? Do you feel that certain sectors of British society are born with a leg up on others, leaving no room for bright, capable individuals to ascend to the upper classes?

I've set up a website to deal specifically with these issues, and hope that together we can come up with a solution. Go to WWW.SOCIALMOBILITYNOW.ORG and let me know what you think by emailing SOCIALMOBILITYNOW@GMAIL.COM.

Together we can push for greater mobility. Let's start now.

Posted by Michael Meacher at 10:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

There has been a great deal of hand-wringing about the Government’s failure to meet its child poverty reduction target, i.e. to cut child poverty by half by 2010. It is likely to do little better than get halfway there. But that misses the real point.

If you let markets rip, if you give priority to Big Business and the City for whatever tax cuts they want, if you keep the trade unions on a short leash and insist on hire and fire flexible labour markets which stunt trade union power, if redistribution is a No-go area, then of course you’ll get a situation where one-fifth of the population have to subsist on less than £220 a week, while at the same time the top 1% get income of £220,000 a year plus £35,000 in investment income, which means they take home £4,900 a week.

And when Mandelson says “we’re utterly relaxed about people getting filthy rich” and when John Hutton says that we should “celebrate” people being enormously rich at the top, then of course you’ll get the new super-class that New Labour has so enthusiastically cultivated where the top 0.1% (just 30,000 persons) each get an average annual income of £760,000 plus another £150,000 from investments, making it £17,300 a week. And within that group you’ll find the chief executives of the FTSE top 100 companies taking home £71,000 a week, right up to the top of the pile, Bob Diamond of the private equity outfit Barclays Capital trousering £520,000 a week.

But it’s not just unfettered markets which have wreaked this extravaganza of inequality, it’s also New Labour’s supine genuflecting to the corporate interests that control those markets that has equally done the damage – aping the Tories over their huge inheritance tax concessions which benefit only the top 1.4 million, rejecting any proper taxation of the non-dom billionaires, backing down over capital gains tax on private equity extortion, and blocking any EU withholding tax on assets squirreled away into tax havens.

So don’t be surprised. Nothing much is going to happen on the child poverty front until these economic fundamentals are altered. And on that score, not all is lost.

The sub-prime market fiasco, colossal securitisation of assets for short-term greed, and the international credit crunch are transforming the financial and economic markets (as the Japanese Emperor Hirohito said at the end of the war) not necessarily to their advantage. In addition, at home the traction of the New Labour neo-liberal agenda has collapsed, as the polls, the local government and London mayoral elections, and the Crewe by-election clearly attest. Even at Westminster the old factions that held up the Blairite project have frayed and are breaking up. For the first time for 15 years the way is now open to a new politics. In place of the Tory-New Labour one-party-state stranglehold of the past 3 decades, a progressive modern Left now has a historic role to re-enfranchise the half or more of the population who have for so long been disenfranchised.

That new agenda should address poverty with real solutions, not merely offering the crumbs that fall from the rich man’s table. On fuel poverty, why when the oil and gas companies are reaping a colossal uncovenanted gain from growing oil and gas scarcity relative to demand, do we not impose a permanent annual levy on these companies to tap their windfall gain, and use all the proceeds to help the fuel poor and to fast-track the spread of renewables technology?

Why not re-introduce the 10p tax rate band when Alistair Darling’s one-year-only compensation runs out in April 2009, and fund the £6.6bn cost by excluding higher-rate taxpayers from the benefit, taxing undeclared share-dealings on the Stock Exchange, charging capital gains tax on foreign owners (now exempt) when they sell their UK commercial property, and charging income tax on short-term (less than one year) share-trading rather than capital gains tax which is lower?

On the housing collapse, why when private house-builders will build next year only a third of the Government’s target, don’t we allow local authorities to borrow against the collateral of their own housing stock and build houses themselves, since the Council waiting lists now exceed 2 million (12,000 in my constituency alone)?

And to stop the obscenity of gigantic bonuses and rich-to-rich back-scratching, why don’t we set up a Fair Pay Commission to lay down guidelines on what is fair and reasonable remuneration, with the powers where necessary to enforce them?

Then we might see real progress on dealing with poverty.

Posted by Michael Meacher at 10:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Along with everyone else, I strongly welcome the Bill.

The latest figures show that greenhouse gas emissions have fallen by about 18 per cent. since 1990, although carbon dioxide emissions have marginally increased in several years during the last decade. There are two important caveats: first, that—as many people have said, and as the Prime Minister acknowledged in a speech on 19 November last year—the reduction required by 2050 must be at least 80 per cent. rather than 60 per cent. if there is to be headroom for developing countries to expand their economies while keeping within the overall global 2° C increase limit, which scientists say should not be exceeded without risk to the planet.

On that basis, I draw the sobering conclusion that an 80 per cent. reduction by 2050 requires an annual reduction in emissions of at least almost twice the rate of the past two decades.

The second caveat is that—as, again, many have said—the Bill ignores the UK’s share of international aviation emissions, which Department of Trade and Industry figures show already account for 12.5 per cent., or one eighth, of the total UK impact on global warming. Indeed, I regret to have to say that because the Government are proposing to triple airport capacity, the Environmental Audit Committee calculates that by 2050 UK aviation emissions—let alone UK shipping emissions—might amount to almost half of all UK emissions.

In introducing the Bill, my hon. Friend the Minister questioned the practicalities of including that data. I say to him that it would be entirely practical to include international aviation emissions in the Bill: the UK already reports on them regularly under the Kyoto protocol, and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has figures dating back to 1970 on how much fuel has been taken on board at UK airports.

However—and this is where I disagree with some Members’ contributions—even if aviation emissions are included in the Bill, another loophole still needs to be closed. At present, the Bill allows 100 per cent. of emission reduction targets to be met by buying carbon credits from abroad rather than by reducing emissions in the UK. I am in no way against using genuine carbon credits that have been earned abroad promoting clean development in other countries, but this is a question of balance, and there are two relevant arguments.

One is that, unfortunately, the purchase of carbon credits overseas is sometimes open to highly dubious manipulation over the vexed issues of additionality and baselines; they are complex and can easily be manipulated, and there is clear evidence of considerable abuse.

The second argument, which is the clincher, is that we will succeed in stopping climate change, or the worst affects of it, given the stage we have now reached, only if we in the west, who are primarily responsible for it as a result of our industrialisation over the past two centuries, can persuade developing countries—largely China and India, which alone have two fifths of the world’s population—that we are serious about tackling climate change.

Buying all our credits from abroad simply will not persuade those countries that we are serious if at the same time we are taking an unsustainable path in our own country. That will produce only cynicism and resistance.
The fact is that the rich countries, with approximately 18 per cent. of the world’s population, are responsible for 54 per cent. of global emissions—three times our due share.

Until that is dealt with, we will simply not get international co-operation, without which the entire climate change problem cannot be solved. We are 1 per cent. of the world population and account for 2 per cent. of global emissions. Even with Europe, we are a small part of the picture. This has to be global, and we have to persuade the rest of the world that we are deadly serious about tackling the problem.

We should in this Bill impose a reasonable limiting cap on the buying of carbon credits abroad to meet UK emission targets. Indeed, that was precisely one of the caveats that led a United Nations human development report issued in the last year to say:

“If the rest of the developed world followed the pathway envisaged in the United Kingdom’s Climate Change Bill, dangerous climate change would be inevitable.”

That is a very sobering reminder. This is a good Bill, but it is certainly not ambitious enough.

Posted by Michael Meacher at 10:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

So Iain Coucher, chief executive of Network Rail, is to trouser a £305,000 bonus, despite the enormous disruption to passengers over the Christmas break from the engineering works on the West Coast line in the Rugby area. That’s on top of his salary of his salary of £539,000 and company incentive scheme payment of £200,000, making a total for the year of more than £1 million.

This is the same country where the Government is now holding down 3 million public sector workers to a 2 ½% rise this year, well below inflation now running at 4.2%, on the grounds that the public sector should lead the way in showing restraint – and Network Rail is in the public sector.

What stinks so much about this award by the Network Rail Board remuneration committee (usually chosen by the Board chairman or chief executive himself on the basis that you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours when it comes to your turn in the merry-go-round of mutually generous boardroom pay fixes) is that this is only the last example in a long line of top people’s avarice. And as with Adam Applegarth who walked off with a £750,000 bonbon after bringing Northern Rock to its knees, such hand-outs as often as not are a reward for failure or incompetence. Just imagine the shindy if the trade unions demanded to be treated like that.

So how does one stop this greed incorporated, holding the country to ransom? One way might be to require the mandatory approval of the shareholders for any such mammoth pay-and-bonuses packages. But five years ago the Government refused to legislate for that. They should think again. Or, better still, require it to be put to the vote of all employees of the company since payment is made from a pot to which they contributed and if the boss scoops up a thousand times more than they get (which is what’s happening at Network Rail), there’s less for them.

And if that’s a bit too radical for a Government that believes in stuffing the mouths of the City with gold, why not set up a Fair Pay Commission since the bacchanalian jackpots now being raked off by the super-rich have gone completely amok? Such a Commission, with membership reflecting a cross-section of British society, should draw up guidelines demonstrating a fair system of rewards, not only for the top ranks but for all levels of employment. They would then be openly debated, the public would be consulted, and the final result would offer a template for the Commission to reach its decision if an egregious pay or bonuses package were referred to it for approval.

If Gordon Brown needs to persuade the voters he’s on the side of ordinary people, not the rich, this might just be part of the repositioning he so badly needs.

Posted by Michael Meacher at 04:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)