Michael Meacher MP

The hidden cuts are always the nastiest.   Although Osborne announced that for benefit upratings he was abandoning the normal inflation measure that has been used since 1974, namely the retail price index (RPI),  and replacing it by a consumer prices index (CPI), the full implications of this have only now become clear from PQs.   Though the child benefit and housing benefit cuts have had much more publicity, the switch from RPI to CPI will be much more devastating. (more…)

The discovery today, following a Saudi tip-off, of an explosive device containing the undetectable semtex PETM hidden in a print cartridge at the East Midlands airport today, together with a similar device found at Dubai, are yet another warning – if any were needed – that terrorists will continue to target the West.   Inevitably security checks will be tightened further and cargo flights in particular will now be placed under intense surveillance.   In the short run nobody can dispute that this is necessary, despite the unfortunate (but misinterpreted) BA gaffe earlier this week.   However that leaves open two related questions.   Why do Islamic terrorists linked to al Qaeda hate the West so much that they want to bring down an airliner destroying hundreds of innocent lives?   And is this endless, or is there a way out of the impasse? (more…)

Next year an executive will be paid £100 million – a year.   It’s a fairly certain bet when this year someone called Bart Becht, the boss of the consumer goods company, Reckitt Benckiser, is being paid £92,596,160.   That works out at £1,780,695 – a week.   Assuming he works a 70 hour week, that comes to £34,244 – an hour.   That’s more than 3 times in an hour what a person on the minimum wage (£5.93 an hour) gets in a year.   Or put it another way, Becht is being paid 6,000 times more than his lowest paid employee.   Does it matter which way you put it?   Is this sane? (more…)

The Commons debate today on the Spending Review, arguably the most important debate of the whole current 5-year Parliament, was a classic example of everything’s that wrong with the parliamentary process.   Both the Government and Opposition front-bench speakers went on far too long (50 minutes in each case) as a result of which the 50 back-benchers who put down their names to speak were squeezed into 5 minutes each if they were lucky enough to be called, which a dozen were not.   The tone of the debate was tribalistic, rowdy, and a repetitive re-statement of entrenched positions (in many cases largely following Whips’ hand-outs), without any real cross-examination of economic strategy.  (more…)

If there is one innovation amid the cuts landscape which seems at first sight attractive, it is the IDS brainwave of a universal benefit, joined this week by the proposal of a high-value universal State pension.   Gone would be the almost impenetrable complexity of interlocking benefits, gone would be the hassle and indignity of means-testing, gone would be the disincentive of the poverty trap with its benefit cut-offs and tapering, and gone would be the high administrative costs and bureaucratic obstacles.   Those gains are not to be sneezed at.   But as with any single panacea, it’s not as simple as that. (more…)

This second leaked batch of secret US army field reports – this time nearly 400,000 reports on Iraq following the 90,000 on Afghanistan – is truly horrible in what it reveals.   But what will be the result?   The details of torture, sadistic abuse, summary executions, and every kind of war crime are utterly shocking in the gratuitous brutalities and killings exposed against not only alleged insurgents, but also non-combatant women and children, almost none of it held to account till now.   However, the hard question remains: how can the vileness of this be stopped? (more…)

Osborne’s announcement in the  Spending Review that he would cut the social housing budget by a stunning 60% is breathtaking.   Even more so is his claim, verging on the delusional, that the ensuing collapse in the building of affordable housing – already at a pitiful level – will be recouped by allowing the housebuilding industry to charge rents on future new-build housing at 80% of the private market rate.    That would more than double existing rent levels, and to assume that tenants in future – after £18bn wefare payment cuts, huge cuts especially in housing benefit, and the imposition of an overall benefit cap – will be able to pay such rents is pure fantasy. (more…)

At least they know how unfair it all is, judging by the prohibition on drinking champagne at receptions at the Tory party conference while the rest of the country burns.   Yet it’s breathtaking that the Coalition can let the phrase ‘social justice’ pass their lips when the facts undeniably demonstrate the reverse, though the Treasury papers have been spun to give a very different and misleading impression to bolster the politicians’ case.

They claim that the richest tenth will pay more in cash terms, and as a proportion of income, than the poorest tenth.   This sleight-of-hand is achieved by including in the graphs on p.98 of the Treasury’s Spending Review 2010 the tax and benefit changes made not only “in the Spending Review and the June Budget, but also pre-announced measures in Labour’s March 2010 Budget or earlier“.   In other words, the hits imposed on the poor came from the Tories and almost all the hits imposed on the rich came from Labour.   So much for fairness and honesty.   But the full picture is a lot more revealing, and worse, than that. (more…)

You could not have a better test for ‘fairness’, a clearer test for being ‘all in it together’, than to compare post-CSR what is being granted to the bankers and what is being handed out to the victims of poverty.   On the very same day we have just been told that the bankers are going to get £7bn in bonuses (yet again) this year while those picked out laser-like among the poorest are going to have their welfare payments cut by – you’ve guessed it – £7bn.   But it’s not just over bonuses where the banks have wriggled free from being held to account for their recklessness and greed.   Even over the bank levy just announced they’ve got a get-out-of-jail -free card. (more…)

Astonishingly the near-insurgency conditions prevailing today in France aren’t just because Sarkozy intends to raise the retirement age to 62, but mainly because his proposals to reform the social contract are being imposed without consultation – in practice, without negotiation with the unions.    The trade unions are seen in France as the bulwark and defender of citizens’ social rights as well as protector of the interests of their members within a capitalist system.   Who performs that role in the UK, especially since New Labour collaborated with the Conservative enemy in repressing the unions (never forget Blair’s boast that we have in the UK the most restrictive trade union legislation in the Western world)? (more…)

Yesterday I posted: read the small print very, very carefully.   I hope you did, because only then can you grasp how deeply toxic this Spending Review is.   The damage is largely contained in a section in the middle of Osborne’s speech (in columns 958-9 of Hansard 20 October) which he gabbled incomprehensibly to conceal the pain he knew he was causing, in a speech that was the most obfuscatory and politically rigged and misleading of any that I can ever remember in the House.   Equally disturbing, when you look at the Treasury hand-outs afterwards to discover the truth that Osborne was at such pains to conceal, the income distributional graphs (Spending Review 2010, Cm 7942, p.98) are profoundly deceptive as the very small print on the next page reveals. (more…)

Cutting public spending by £83bn within 4 years and eliminating the entire £109bn structural deficit within a single 5-year Parliamentary session is the most ambitious Tory attempt yet, Mrs. Thatcher not excluded, to turn the clock back to pre-Welfare State days and to embed private services more deeply into British society.   But the bare figures don’t reveal half of it. (more…)

Of all the viciousness of the cuts to be unveiled tomorrow, arguably the most vicious of all is the callous decision to virtually stop social/affordable house-building altogether.   These are public sector houses/flats priced above the cost of construction, but below local private market levels.   They are the only way that the lowest-income 15-20% of the population (9-12 million people) can hope to get access to a place to live.   The lack of availability of sufficient affordable homes is the biggest, most damaging, most scandalous focus of social misery in Britain today.   Deliberately to magnify that yawning gap now is an act of politically treasonable neglect and irresponsibility. (more…)

In 1981 in the midst of a recession Geoffrey Howe, Mrs. Thatcher’s Chancellor, brought in a deeply deflationary budget.   As a result unemployment finally peaked at 3.2 million in February 1986.   This time round, with all the signals flashing red for the coming hurricane both internationally and nationally, George Osborne appears set to do the same, with unemployment already at 2.5 million and with 25% spending cuts almost certain to reach 3.5-4.0 million before the cycle is through.   Only there are three major differences this time.  (more…)

By coincidence three issues have come to the fore over this weekend which throw a searchlight over the nature of  justice, or lack of it, in Britain today.   All three are reported in the media without any recognition of the underlying connection in how the rules play out.    All three concern highly sensitive matters – parliamentary expenses, welfare benefits, and the Government’s spending cuts.   But the link between them is missed. (more…)