Michael Meacher MP

If there is one thing which should unite all political parties regardless of ideology, it is surely stamping out sex trafficking.   Slavery was officially abolished in the West in 1836, but in the form of trafficking in the twenty-first century, given the sheer scale of this enforced domination of victims for commercial gain, it still lives on.   At its peak in the 1780s the slave trade involved the transportation of 80,000 slaves from Africa to the Americas, but now ten times that number of women are trafficked across international borders.   Yet, inexplicably, the UK coalition government has now refused to endorse an EU directive aimed to cordinate European efforts to stop the sex slave trade. (more…)

So Blair, possibly the most unpopular man in British politics, and Mandelson, the second most detested man, think Ed Miliband would be a ‘disaster’.   It takes some gall for the architects of Labour’s ruin to think they have any right to give us lessons on Labour’s prospects when their own record was – well, disastrous.   Labour won in 1997, not because of Blair or New Labour mantra, but because the electorate was heartily sick of the Tories and wanted them out at any price.   John Smith would have won by a huge margin too.   But having won in 1997 on the back of virulent hostility to the Tories, Blair in two further elections then achieved the biggest loss of voters of any party in modern times.  The Labour vote collapsed by almost 4 million from 13.5 million in 1997 to just 9.6 million in 2005.   For someone who was such a monumental failure to claim any credibility in predicting political success takes one’s breath away – like someone who’s engineered a train crash telling people how to cut the accident rate. (more…)

The proposal of Grant Shapps, the right-wing Tory housing minister, that local authorities should write their own rules for housing waiting lists opens a Pandora’s Box in the most sensitive area of welfare policy.   New Labour had already flirted with the idea of removing people from Council tenancies if they persistently failed (according to Ministerial criteria) to seek and find work, and also of giving priority to people who had worked hard and amassed a significant NIC record.   The Shapps idea however goes the whole way – discretion to exclude immigrants (except from the EU), those with a criminal record or mental health history, difficult ASBO families, those perceived as lazy or feckless, and any other problem-causing ‘undesirables’.   But there is an alternative to Tory/New Labour authoritarianism. (more…)

So David Miliband would pose the greatest threat to the Tories?   How convenient for DM that this alleged private remark of David Cameron’s has hit the headlines, via an unidentified ‘well-placed source’,  just 4 days before voting starts for the Labour leadership.   It is of course the oldest trick in the political book, ever since the children’s story of Brer Rabbit and the Fox and the briar bush, to pretend when one is under threat that the one thing the political enemy fears most is X (in this case a vote for DM) in order to get gullible supporters to do precisely that, only then to find that it was just a ruse for DM to escape the threat of losing. (more…)

David Miliband is likeable, intelligent, articulate, but the wrong person to lead Britain.    New Labour to the core, he is the heir to the Blairite inheritance which is now so profoundly unpopular with the Labour Movement that it lost the party 5 million votes by the time of its demise this year.   Labour clearly needs to change to win back public support, but a vote for David is a step back into a  failed and repudiated project that no longer has traction.   We should learn from that failure, not seek to repeat it.   His brother Ed shows clear signs that he can do that, and as the only other candidate who can win, that is overwhelmingly the reason to support him. (more…)

The media got the story wrong.   They reported today that BP had been forced to withdraw from new oil drilling in the Arctic.   They miss the point.   The real news is that drilling is being permitted in the Arctic region at all.   It shouldn’t be.   The lesson of the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster ought to have been an accelerated global shift away from fossil fuels, particularly oil, on the grounds that remaining global supplies of oil are limited, they are increasingly found in inaccessible areas that are difficult and expensive to penetrate, and the untrammelled oil binge is incompatible with stopping climate disaster.   Sheikh Yamani, the former Saudi oil Minister, memorably said that the Stone Age didn’t end for lack of stones; it ended because human beings found a better way.   We should do so again – energy saving, energy efficiency and renewable sources of energy – not glut on oil which threatens global war as scarcity grows as well as ecological and climate destruction.   Fat chance. (more…)

The IFS report today confirms what we already knew – that Osborne’s Budget was the most regressive and unfairest in modern times – but it is important that the UK’s most authoritative and independent tax analysis so comprehensively junks the spin and smarm put out by the Coalition at the time.   The cuts in housing benefits will evict hundreds of thousands of the poorest families from their home and force them to look for cheaper accommodation which in many localities (especially London) doesn’t exist.   The cuts in disabled living allowances will discriminate against the physically handicapped.   Altogether the poorest tenth of families will lose over 5% of their income (and a 5% loss is a lot harder for the poor to bear than a 5% loss is for the rich), but the richest tenth who are working and without children will lose less than 1%.   But that’s only the start of the injustice. (more…)

Now that US troops have left Iraq (or rather re-named continued occupation as training Iraqi security forces), the spotlight turns to Obama’s pledge, made in November 2009, that the US will begin the transfer of its forces out of Afghanistan in July 2011, less than a year away.   However US objectives in Afghanistan should be assessed with a healthy amount of realism.   It’s true that the US has practically no control over territory outside the coalition’s main military bases.   It’s true that the war against the Taliban is unwinnable whilst the Karzai ‘government’ remains corrupt, incompetent and riddled with warlords.   But does that matter to the real US aims in Asia?   No. (more…)

The Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR) was a good Tory innovation – so long as it’s genuinely independent and not merely a Treasury creature.   But ever day the news cries out for another good innovation – an Office of Corporate Responsibility (OCR).   Take today’s news.   BAE wined and dined the Air Chief Marshal of the RAF and the Permanent Secretary of MOD 52 times over 3 years in an effort to get on the inside track in landing more nulti-million pound deals than their rivals, and succeeded in doing so.   Shell is accused by Amnesty of spilling 9 million barrels of oil in the Niger Delta over the past 50 years, twice as much as the 5 million barrels spilled into the Gulf of Mexico by the Deepwater Horizon blowout, though Shell is almost exonerated in a new UN report – why? because Shell paid for in full for the $10m report!   And this is just the tip of recent news about corporate corruption. (more…)

Latest evidence indicates that the Government realises (but won’t tell us) that Britain faces, not just the most horrendous public spending cuts since the last World War 70 years ago, but also a painful and costly recovery if and when it finally materialises.   Secret talks with the oil industry and with geologists show the Government is seriously worried about ‘peak oil’, i.e. the point at which global oil production reaches its peak and then starts slowly to decline despite steadily increasing demand from China, India and other big developing countries still driven by pell-mell growth.   The price of oil today is $75 a barrel: once global recovery starts it will probably double within a year. (more…)

The sudden withdrawal of the Guernsey tax exile, David Rowland, from taking up his appointment as Tory Party treasurer shows there is just a glimmer of political concern in the Tory High Command about the iniquities of massive tax avoidance.    Not much, though.   The appointment of Sir Philip Green, that greasy barrowboy of jackpot capitalism, whose tax affairs are so hugely complex to evade the attentions of the taxman, to undertake a review of public spending suggests the natural instincts of the Tory Party in support of tax avoiders/evaders run very deep.   And in case there’s any doubt about it, the Tories have now just made clear they’re not going to do a thing about tax avoidance. (more…)

The US  retreat from Iraq silently under cover of night says it all.   But there are painful lessons, wholly contrary to the spin, which Western opinion (and particularly US opinion) needs to learn but will find hard to swallow.  For almost everything about this catastrophe was wrong from start to finish – from its cause to its management to its consequences. (more…)

We are now at real risk of losing one (or more) of the four defining characteristics of a civilised society.   Alongside good health, education and housing services access to justice is not just desirable, it is absolutely essential.   It’s now seriously threatened by a combination of upheavals which together could end the principle of the free availability of justice which has lasted since 1948. (more…)

It was unfortunate today for Nick Clegg, in his eulogy of the first glorious 100 days, that he chose to include the greening of the economy as one of the key achievements when almost the same day the Coalition ditched one of its central green objectives.   The ‘environmental performance standard’ (EPS) for power companies is aimed at restricting greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel plants and encouraging the switch to less polluting technology or preferably renewable energy.   Without a tighter EPS the way is open to resurrect the dirty coal plant project at Kingsnorth in Kent which was stopped after a bitter battle involving the Climate Camp a year ago.   What happens now that the Government have reneged on their EPS promise? (more…)

Politicians do of course constantly use spin and deception to promote their self-interested slant on reality, but even in this tawdry atmosphere of lies and manipulation it still takes one’s breath away to hear Cameron and Osborne (the latter again today on the Today programme) trying to make out that their cuts programme is all about a fairer and more progressive society.   It’s actually the biggest and most sustained onslaught on social and economic justice since the 1930s, certainly magnitudes worse than the Thatcher era.   Just look at what we’ve already been told, bearing in mind too that there’s a great deal more yet to come (and the sleepy month of August when people’s attention is distracted by holidays has already been used to put out some of the nastiest surprises).   The evidence covers every aspect of policy as this shows. (more…)