Michael Meacher MP

Withdrawing from Afghanistan has for a long time been the obviously right policy, but given that the tide of battle has clearly now turned decisively in favour of the Taliban, this will now be widely perceived at best as making a virtue of necessity and at worst as an early exit to stave off a defeat. There are several uncertainties in the situation. It is assumed that the combination of a military surge by nearly 40,000 reinforcements with the parallel enticement of jobs and community development projects will wean away most of the Taliban forces. A recent US Senate foreign relations committe report estimated the Taliban fighting strength at 15,000 and that only some 5% were committed ideologues, while 70% fought for money the so-called $10 a day Taliban.
Doubling this to win them over would cost just $300,000 a day, compared with the actual $165 million a day that the US is currently spending fighting the war. Whether however such a convenient money solution would appeal to a Taliban leadership that now sees victory in its sights and regards these concessions as a clear sign of Western weakness is another matter. It is highly unlikely that the gradual, progressive handover of power to local Afghan control will take place in the smooth, orderly fashion envisaged. Much more likely is accelerated NATO withdrawal from the countryside into the main towns and cities as ever more confident Taliban commanders pick off their targets with redoubled ferocity. But at least the die has been cast.

Chilcot was as ineffective with Blair as expected. The central issue is not whether he can mesmerise with words (as when he sought to obfuscate what he clearly said and meant in an earlier TV interview that he would still have backed regime change even if there were no WMD in Iraq), nor is it whether he can distract from the real charge by diversionary musings about a future attack on Iran. The key issue is whether he had made up his mind on regime change irrevocably without any concerns for MI5, FCO or Cabinet contrary opinion (his Manichaean tendency of self-righteousness) for underlying motives he kept well hidden (above all sticking close to the Americans whose real motive was control of Iraqi oil, and WMD, the wickedness of Saddam, and democratisation of the Middle East were just pretexts), and then used every device to fix the facts to support the policy (as the Downing Street memo of July 2002 showed the Americans were already doing, and Blair then followed suit) even though he knew at the time that the evidence was trumped-up and false. That is the real charge, and Chilcot fluffed it.

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For a year, from when the date was set, I had been looking forward to Friday 29 January, until it was rather soured a fortnight ago by being named as the time when Blair would defend his infamous record over Iraq at the Chilcot Inquiry. On, I hope, a rather more uplifting note, my book ‘Destination of the Species: the Riddle of Human Existence’ is being published today by o-books, which seeks to answer some very fundamental about the universe and the meaning of human existence.
It is a systematic review of all the scientific evidence which shows that the Dawkins and neo-Darwinian view that the universe is driven by pitiless, directionless chance is seriously wrong and misleading. The evidence shows: astronomically precise fine-tuning in the construction of the universe; early life driven for billions of years by symbiotic and cooperative networking, not blindly by mutations; and the spontaneous transposition of matter and energy into new higher organisational states at certain thresholds of complexity both in biological and cosmological systems.

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Chilcot has unearthed a lot of new evidence and put a new slant on several of the main actors involved, but where is it leading? As Blair prepares to defend the indefensible tomorrow, what will be the consequences if, as expected, the Inquiry concludes that the war was illegal, that there was gross deception in the use of evidence to justify it, and that Bush and Blair were anyway determined to go to war irrespective of the evidence in order to secure regime change? What then happens? This is a defining moment for UN institutions and the rule of law.
This is not the first time this issue has been faced. On 2 March 2004 BBC news online carried the story that “Blair ‘war crimes’ case launched”, and the same day the Guardian reported that “Lawyers submit war crimes petition”. It is worth noting what the result was. On 9 February 2006 the Office of the Prosecutor at the ICC (international Criminal Court) put the following statement on its website:

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It is truly staggering (or is it just expected?) that after nearly 13 years of New Labour the 10% richest in Britain – not a tiny group, but 6 million people – now have wealth no less than 100 times greater than the 10% poorest. It is equally staggering that a hairdresser has an income of £12,400 whilst the chief executive of a major bank or FTSE 100 company has an income (like Stephen Hester at RBS) of £1.2 million , again 100 times more, and that’s without counting the stock options, bonuses, target-based incentives, and assorted fringe benfits which escalate top executives’ salaries to £5-10 million a year. In the 1930s the richest 1% took 12.6% of total UK income, but the war and post-war Labour Governments shrunk this to 4.2% by 1976, since when the Thatcher and Blair governments have bounced their share up again to 10.0% of all income. These findings from a study published today by the National Equality Panel should be a call to arms. They are of course the inevitable and predictable outcome of the unfettered market-rules-all de-regulated neoliberal agenda pursued equally by the Tories and New Labour.

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So No.10 is worried that despite technically coming out of recession in the last quarter of 2009, the recovery may yet stall and the economy shrink again in the first quarter of this year, just before the election. But even if that were to happen, there’s still a measure that the Government could take in the March Budget which is eminently necessary and justifiable and would be highly popular with the electorate. People might think that as the banks now announce massive profits once again, at least they’ll be paying tax again. But they won’t. Tax law at present allows the banks to spread their colossal losses indefinitely forward offsetting them against tax, so that they won’t be paying tax again for years if not decades. Merrill Lynch actually applied its £16bn sub-prime losses to the UK in order to pay no British corporation tax for 60 years!
Other countries limit the spreading of losses to only 3 years; why not the same in Britain? Even in the UK a major change of ownership (e.g. RBS, Lloyds, Northern Rock) leads to a company forfeiting its former tax losses. But it doesn’t apply if the losses were in their subsidiaries; why then don’t we close that loophole? That would bring in at least £10bn a year for the Exchequer – a nice little earner that could hansomely reward electors who have suffered as victims of the downturn.

Slowly, very slowly, and reluctantly dragging its feet at each stage, the UK Government is beginning to get it on the banks. Lord Myners’ hosting a G7 summit today in London to consider some serious options for international banking regulation would have been laughed out of hand a year ago, but of course it remains to be seen whether this is simply a showcase to capitalise on detestation of the bankers in the run-up to the election or whether it is more than a talkshop and delivers some real reform. The auguries are not good. The UK Government has rejected separation of investment (casino) banking from commercial (retail) banking on the grounds that higher capital ratios plus ‘living wills’ (to wind themselves down in the event of collapse) will suffice. They will not. The UK Government has rejected Obama’s proposal to clawback a large part (£56bn) of taxpayers’ funding of the bank bail-outs on the grounds that the UK tax on bankers’ bonuses (which will raise £3bn at most) will have an equivalent role. It will not. The UK Government made it a condition of the bail-outs that lending to businesses and homeowners would be maintained at 2007 levels, but then never enforced it. It has since collapsed to the lowest level for decades.

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With gas storage supply in the recent cold snap down to dangerously low levels in the UK and far lower than in France or Germany, with coal carbon capture and storage (CCS) still at least a decade away, and with renewables still unlikely to meet even the modest 15% electricity generation target set for the UK by the EU for 2020, Government energy policy is becoming heavily dependent on its planned revival of nuclear. Yet it is already becoming clear that the conditions it has laid down for this nuclear renaissance are make believe. The UK Government has confirmed a few months ago that it is sticking to the cost estimates on which it based its forecast that nuclear was cost-effective with an average carbon price of 36 euros per tonne of carbon, and that plants could be built for only £1,250/kW (or about $2,000/kW). Neither of those conditions are realistic. As the UK Department of Energy (DECC) said in the Commons statement of 9 November last year: “We agree with the EU that there are significant risks in attempting to manage the carbon price. Introducing price caps or floors makes emissions trading a game of betting on the next government intervention in the market”. Quite so. Nor is the other condition any more soundly based.

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Today’s revelation that the police in the UK, with the connivance of the Home Office, are planning to launch spy drones over Britain for covert surveillance from the sky is only the latest, but perhaps the most far-reaching, measure yet of the Government’s obsessive drive for all-round comprehensive spying on its citizens. According to its authors, Kent police and BAE, civilian UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) would “greatly extend” the Government’s surveillance and “revolutionise policing”. That must be the under-statement of the year. This is pure Orwell. We are told that these spies in the sky could operate from 20,000ft (two-thirds as high as Mt. Everest) and would thus be invisible from the ground, and be in continuous operation for 15 hours at a time. This is so all-embracing, like a permanent unsleeping eye watching you ceaselessly, that it can only be described as totalitarian in the untrammelled range of its application.

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It took the loss of the Massachusetts ‘safe’ Senate seat to get Obama to do the right thing. God moves in mysterious ways his wonders to perform! So what do we need to get a UK ‘Volcker’s rule’ (stopping banks taking deposits from running hedge funds or making private equity investments or using their own money to gamble on the markets in proprietary trading)? A lot more than the ultra-cautious Brown-Darling defensiveness towards the City of London. Darling’s ‘living wills’ requiring banks to have clear contingency plans to wind themselves down in the event of drastic failure is yet another gesture succumbing to City lobbyists. Yet the remedy that applies in the US applies in spades in the UK. The US is now well ahead of the UK (and of Europe) in dealing toughly with the banks to prevent a further and even more dangerous collapse. So why is the Brown government so timid in the UK?

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So class now returns to the political agenda – 30 years after Thatcher sharply widened class divisions, fatened the rich and trebled child poverty, and a decade after New Labour promised to halve child poverty but actually widened inequality still further and only reduced child poverty by a fifth. The depressing truth is that both parties have pursued a neoliberal economy of unfettered market forces, privatisation and deregulation, all of which sharply drive up inequality and both parties reject redistribution beyond minimalist tinkering. The inevitable result is that child poverty in Britain is now the fourth highest in the EU, the rich are now richer compared with the rest of the population than they have ever been since Edwardian times, 17 million people (more than a quarter of all households) remain on benefit, while chief executives of the FTSE 100 companies are now paid on average about 155 times more than the average paid worker. So class matters, yes, it matters dreadfully, it always has. And Harriet Harman is right to say today: “class overarches discrimination from gender race or disability”.

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Mandelson’s plaintive excuse for washing his hands of the Cadbury debacle on the grounds that the decision “was one for the shareholders of Cadbury” is really pathetic. What are Ministers for? Their role is, not tamely to roll over when confronted by the damage inflicted by market-driven neoliberal capitalism, but to change the rules governing the operation of the economy or of society where outcomes undermine the public interest. What clinched the takeover was the short-term purchase of a quarter of Cadbury shares by hedge funds which bought them up very late in the day in the hope of a quick bonanza. One answer therefore to this latest brand of predatory capitalism would be, as the union Unite is now recommending, to limit votes in a takeover situation only to long-term shareholders, thus eliminating any role for the hedge funds. But that is surely not adequate. What about the primary stakeholders, the employees, 6000 UK workers in the case of Cadbury who now stand to lose their job in large numbers to pay off the debt of this heavily leveraged bid?

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There are nostalgic reasons for rejecting the Kraft takeover of Cadbury – another iconic British comapny lost overseas – but the real arguments are rather different and much more compelling. First, a nation’s strategic control over its own industrial base can gradually be whittled away to the point where its economic survival and prosperity can be put at risk. Industry is a closely inter-connected network, and when increasingly key industrial decisions are taken overseas on the basis of foreign not domestic interests, the viability of that network can be seriously undermined. The hollowing out of US industry is one example, and (as in so many other ways) the UK shows signs of following. Second, as most other countries have concluded, there are strategic companies of such central significance to the economy that they cannot be let go. By contrast British governments, both Thatcherite and New Labour, in thrall to a deregulatory neoliberal philosophy, have refused to intervene in the loss of such key companies as BAA, PowerGen, National Power, British Steel, Rover Group, Jaguar, ICI, Boots, Cazenove, P&O, and Pilkington. This glorification of the market against the integrity of the nation may well come to be seen as damaging as unfettered financial markets are now seen to be.

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It is extraordinary that trans fats haven’t been banned. According to the overwhelming weight of medical research, they are very bad for the heart, contribute to the UK’s very high levels of heart disease and boost the UK’s excess coronary deaths every year. The President of the UK Faculty of Public Health, Prof. Alan Maryon-Davis, has today asserted that trans fats are much more damaging than saturated fats. Every year more than 140,000 Britons suffer a heart attack from which over half die. So why are trans fats still used? They are vegetable oils that have been chemically altered in order to bulk up foods – notably cakes, pies, pastries, chips and fast foods – and extend their shelf life. In other words these manufactured ingredients can and do kill people, but are still used by the food industry because it significantly increases their sales and profits – yet another glaring example of how governments side with the big corporations rather than the health of their citizens. To tobacco, asbestos, thalidomide must now be added trans fats.

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I see Alistair Darling is telling us he’s sure the recession is over. Presumably that’s why he’s been aggressively asserting the Treasury line this last week about the magnitude of the cuts he intends to impose on the economy, to rival the Tories. But the latest economic data is telling a very different story. David Blanchflower, previously a member of the Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee, argues that there are at least four reasons for believing the UK economy has taken another turn for the worse. Consumer confidence has suddenly dived, not only in the UK but also in the EU. The number of staff placed in permanent jobs has fallen compared to a month earlier. The latest quarterly CBI survey is decidedly downbeat, suggesting that the last quarter of 2009 did not see the economy strongly rebounding into growth. And unemployment almost everywhere is rising, particularly in the US, but also in nearly every EU country. That puts an entirely different picture on the landscape for the general election.

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