Michael Meacher MP

Today’s Treasury Select Committee report is a breath of fresh air when all around is muddle, compromise and insouciance. The Committee is right to conclude that the Government is rushing to endorse the current regulatory system (which of course was set in place by Gordon Brown in 1997), with insignificant adjustments, rather than taking as its main goal exploring the fundamental reforms necessary to prevent any return to reckless dealmaking and uncontrolled use of toxic derivatives. But the Committee is wrong to presume that the Government ever intended any such radical reforms. The evidence to the contrary stares it in the face. The Government (alias Gordon Brown) sought every conceivable device for six months to avoid having to nationalise Northern Rock. It pushed Lloydes and HBOS into an ill-fated merger precisely again to avoid having to take HBOS into public ownership, even to the extent of nearly wrecking prospects for Lloyds. When Northern Rock, Bradford and Bingley, Lloyds Group, and RBS all finally ended up, despite all the Government’s efforts, in the hands of the State, the Government made it crystal clear that, so far from using the opportunity to reform the banks, its sole objective was to return them to the private sector ASAP. It is not a story of missed opportunities. It is a story of rescuing the banks on their terms, at humongous cost, unconditionally. Not only has the State not taken over the banks in any meaningful sense, the banks have in reality taken over the State.

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The latest child poverty figures make sober reading. They show that the proportion of children living in poverty has doubled in the past generation, and the UK now has proportionately more poor children than most other rich countries. This is not what was promised or expected. In 1969, Thatcher having tripled child poverty in the 1980s, Tony Blair committed Labour to halving it by 2010 and eliminating it altogether by 2020. By 2005 there were still 3.4 million children living in poverty (i.e. living in households whose income was less than 60% of full-time median earnings), the number having been reduced by 600,000 since the pledge was made. However, this was well short of the cut rrquired since the reduction was just 17% whereas the target was 25%. What is more disturbing is that the total, having been cut inadequately, is now starting to rise again significantly. This is freversible, but not on current policies.

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Last week a glossy and expensive magazine dropped into my postbag entitled A Third Runway at Heathrow. Presumably it had been sent to all MPs, or at least to all who oppose this calamitous proposal. Its purpose, which was emblazoned all over it, was to inform us that a third runway would bring benefits to the UK economy amounting to £30bn over a 60 year period. I checked and found that the Government’s own official figure for this benefit was just £5bn spread over 70 years. The magazine, which was published and distributed by the British Chambers of Commerce BCC), was thus claiming that the benefit was £500,000 a year compared with the (very pro-third runway) Government figure of only £70,000 a year. Intrigued, I wondered how an organisation, even given their obvious and strong vested interest, could send round a claim to Parliament, and of course the media too, which was so vastly at variance from official estimates. It quickly became clear why.

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The tectonic plates are beginning to move under Trident. A new report from the IPPR, with authors including Labour’s former Defence Secretary George Robertson and former Liberal Democrat leader Paddy Ashdown, argues that Britain cannot afford much of the defence equipment needed and should revisit plans to renew Trident. Ashdown says “we can no longer afford to maintain museum Cold War armaments”, while Robertson contends that “in the post-9/11, post-financial crisis world, we must be smarter and more ruthless in targeting national resources at the real security risks”. They suggest instead reviewing possible alternatives to Trident or extending the life of the current system. Nor is this such a dramatic development. Over 2 years ago 4 key members of the US defence Establishment – Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, Sam Nunn and William Perry – used the pages of the Wall Street Journal on 4 January 2007 to advocate moving towards a world free of nuclear weapons and calling for progress towards disarmament. In addition the financial meltdown and deep economic recession are also now pushing in the same direction.

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Norwich North was lost, not only because of the expenses scandal or the pain of recession or unpalatable policies, but also for another very important reason. Too many potential Labour voters feel the Government isn’t listening to them and that there’s nothing they can now do to influence it (other than of course to go on a voters’ strike and lose a byelection). This is bad for any political party, but it’s particularly bad for Labour because it has always been seen as a party in which (unlike the Tory party) the activists, members, participants and voters had a real say over its aims, procedures and programmes. By joining the party at the local level, there was a strong and rewarding feeling that one was contributing, even if only to a very modest degree, to influencing events which cumulatively across the country could bring about real change. Not any more. The party has been hollowed out to a shadow of its former self, the activists have deserted, and the remaining core of loyal supporters have become house-trained to their own impotence. Not a way to run a railroad, let alone a political party governing the country. So is it now too late to restore the party democracy which is an essential ingredient of electoral success?

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The excuse that the loss of Norwich North was just due to the popular local MP Ian Gibson standing down in protest at his being forced to give up his seat at the general election in the unprecedented circumstances of the expenses scandal simply won’t wash. It is true that it was widely felt, not least in his constituency, that he, among a few others, had been scapegoated when many others, including frontbenchers in both parties, were guilty of much more serious offences. By far the most blameworthy offences revealed by the Telegraph were the flipping of the designation of homes and the evasion of payment of taxes due, and several members both of the Cabinet and Shadow Cabinet were found liable on both these counts, yet no action has so far been taken against any of them. But having said that, there were clearly several other reasons for this further Labour calamity.

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Today’s report that the economy contracted by an unprecedented 5.6% over the last year is really ominous. It isn’t just that the economy continued to shrink twice as fast (by 0.8%) in this last quarter as City opinion had expected and that any talk of economic green shoots is simply not tenable, it’s the fact that the steepness of the decline exceeds even that of the 1980-1 slump where the retrenchment eventually reached a stunning 6.4%. But what is most depressing is that neither of the two main parties is adopting the policies necessary to overcome this unfolding disaster – Labour because it is focused on protecting the interests of the banks rather than the needs of the real economy, and the Tories because they are proposing to use the mounting debt as a pretext to make such swingeing cuts in publiuc expenditure as could stop any recovery in its tracks.

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The Government’s commitment announced earlier this month to build an extra 10,000 affordable homes in each of the next two years looks to be unravelling amid Whitehall in-fighting about its funding. The £1.5bn cost (at an average £75,000 per house) was to be found by making cuts elsewhere, but this is not surprisingly proving difficult to achieve. DCLG has been told to raise £600m, and proposes to do this by cutting both other existing LA housing programmes and refurbishment plans for 44,000 Council and 8,600 privately rented homes. A further £900m has to be found by other Departments. But rather than chopping other essential public services, what is really needed is a mini-public expenditure review across the board. That should certainly involve a drastic reduction in further taxpayer funding of the banks (which already amounts according to the IMF to a staggering £904bn – equal to over 60% of Britain’s entire GDP), chopping Trident and ID cards which are increasingly seen as having no relevant role, and raising taxes on the 2% richest over £100,000 a year who largely caused the financial crisis in the first place. A temporary surcharge of 5% on this latter group for 3 years in the current crisis would yield sufficient funding to build an additional 60,000 affordable homes, and the direct redistribution from rich to poor would galvanise public opinion which has been waiting for just such a message for so long.

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Jack Straw’s modest pot of constitutional scraps offered earlier this week is a depressing anti-climax after some of the most tumultuous upheavals in modern political history opened the gate to much more profound change. Constitutional reform, never a prospect to set the Thames on fire and ejected by the recession even from the mildly titillating platform laid out by Gordon Brown on the third day of his premiership, shot back into prominence as the means to redeem the expenses scandal. The party leaders vied with each other as to who was the most radical in transforming an anachronistic and moribund parliament. Now the opportunity for once-in-a-century root-and-branch change is in danger of dissipating. Nothing about bringing forward a written constitution which Britain, in company with only a few other countries like New Zealand and Israel, still lacks. Nothing about a Bill of Rights to begin to turn around the authoritarian erosion of civil liberties in the last three decades. Nothing even about an elected second chamber, electoral reform, or a fixed term for parliaments. Just a tidying up of a few odds and ends.

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Parturiunt montes, et nascitur mus, as the epigrammatist Martial put it succinctly two millennia ago: the mountains are in labour, and they bring forth – a mouse. A fitting epitaph on the Cameron/Osborne proposals for bank regulation. The 54-page document is studiously vague, and retreats from a number of positions already taken up. If the Tories are already winding down their commitments 11 months before the election, one wonders what if anything will survive under the pressure to win votes, given the substantial level of donations expected from the City. The document announces that “reform must be based on a clear understanding of what went wrong in the first place and a clear determination to put it right”. Exactly so. Which is why it’s disappointing, to say the least that since the financial meltdown was triggered primarily by the bankers’ surge into toxic credit derivatives, the recklessness hyped up by the massive bonus culture, the lack of control over the investment arm of several major banks, and the failure of regulation over mortgage selling, there is nothing in the Tory document about rectifying these fundamental flaws. It is rather a showpiece for condemning Gordon Brown for setting up the Financial Services Aiuthority (FSA) in 1997, though the problem was not the institution itself but rather the fact that it was told to use only the lightest regulation. Are we really to believe that the Tories, either then or now, would do anything much different to their funders in the City?

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If John Bercow discovered sex and New Labour at the same time, as some Tory wags wouold have it, New Labour is now discovering class and elections at the same time, though it’s almost certainly too late. But Alan Milburn’s thesis on reversing Britain’s declining social mobility, published today, is still interesting in highlighting one of this country’s major problems, namely the widening abyss in aspiration and performance between the classes. Pity is however that New Labour, with its emphasis on unbridled markets and ballooning inequality, has played a large part in creating the problem in the first place, and is not exactly best placed to resolve the problem now. Even so, Milburn’s strictures deserve attention: would they create a more open and fairer channel for talent from whatever provenance it comes?

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The killing of 186 British soldiers in Afghanistan is, rightly, producing huge repercussions in foreign and defence policy. So why has the killing of 229 people last year, when they were doing nothing other than working for their employer and for their country, passed without mention? That is shameful when the official Health and Safety Executive admits that over 70% of major injuries and deaths in the workplace are due to management failures and therefore could have, and should have, been prevented. All deaths are a tragedy for the family involved, but a death at work is almost always very traumatic, made even more so when the employers have behaved carelessly, negligently or criminally and yet seem to escape scot-free or at least not be subject to appropriate penalties. So why do we not take far more seriously this large annual swath of avoidable killing, especially when the true figures are far higher than the official statistics ever admit to?

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The controversial re-appointment of Trevor Phillips as Chair of the Equalities Commission raises important questions that go wider than the issue of equality of treatment in Britain. It is certainly significant that resignations from the Commission had already occurred prior to the re-appointment, which might have been expected to act as a clear warning sign of serious discontent within the organisation at the autocratic management style of the Chairman, and in addition junior ministerial concern had also been made public beforehand. Nevertheless, all this unease was brushed aside and Phillips was re-appointed last week. That led to the resignation on Friday of the forceful disabilities rights campaigner, Baroness Campbell, and now two further senior resignations, of another disabilities rights campaigned and a human rights academic. Thus a third of the board of 16 have now resigned rather than accept Phillips as Chair. So why, given this unprecedented public display of no confidence, was he still re-appointed?

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Ed Miliband’s White Paper on the de-carbonisation of Britain is very welcome, especially its proposals to ensure that renewables secure proper access to the grid. Regrettaly however in one important respect it remains imprisoned within the traditional energy ideology of the past, namely its obeisance to nuclear as a necessary part of the energy mix ‘to keep the lights on’. This is a false claim on at least half a dozen counts. It will not keep the lights on since no new nuclear power station will be built before 2021, and Britain’s energy gap is projected for 2015-2020. It will generate unconscionable quantities of long-term toxic and highly dangerous nuclear waste for which no country has yet found a safe and secure method of disposal, and which is estimated in Britain’s case to involve up to half a million tonnes by the end of this century. Civil nuclear power risks the spread of nuclear weapons proliferation, as the current dilemma over Iran shows all too poignantly. The areas round nuclear power stations have repeatedly been shown to exhibit much higher than normal rates of cancer and leukaemia. The decommissioning and waste management of the first round of nuclear stations has been estimated by the NDA to cost at least £73bn, 5% of Britain’s entire GDP. And the risk of a catastrophic nuclear accident can never be entirely eliminated. But there is one further aspect of the nuclear record which is regularly ignored, but which demonstrates that the experience of nuclear is far more disastrous than has been admitted.

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The recent Commons debate on Afghanistan did little to clarify the objectives of the war in Afghanistan. Both the Government and Opposition asserted that British troops were fighting there for the sake of UK national security, that by contesting the Taliban and denying them a return to the control of Afghanistan we were preventing them from using that country as a base from which to attack the UK. Gordon Brown has even gone so far as to repeat on several occasions the FCO/MOD line that three-quarters of the attacks or threats made against the UK in the recent period emanate from that region. If this can be taken seriously at all (as opposed to a rationale for pursuing a war that a majority of the British people do not believe in), it is simply untenable on at least three grounds. It equates the Taliban with Al Qaeda, which is wholly false. It claims that the Taliban aim is bombing British cities (for which there is not a shred of evidence – how many persons apprehended and charged with such offences have been Taliban?) rather than removing occupation forces from their own country. And it offers no motive – why should a group from one of the poorest and most primitive countries in the world want to launch attacks 3,000 miles away, even if they had the capability to do so, which almost certainly they don’t have? We need to look a lot more closely at what really lies behind this war.

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