Michael Meacher MP

Bahrain, Yemen, Libya, Syria, rumblings in Morocco and Algeria (and eventually Saudi?) even spreading south into sub-Saharan Africa such as Uganda, but the centre of this upturning of the old despotic order is Palestine.   The tectonic shift in the latter has been little noticed, but is more momentous than any of the others.   Palestine for half a century has been in thrall to US-Israeli domination, but without riots in the streets or even a new intafada that is now changing dramatically.   Even hardened cynics were shocked at how far the Palestinian negotiators accommodated the ever-increasing and ever more humiuliating Israeli demands.   But a new page is now opening, the most hopeful for decades. (more…)

Even if 2 billion watched worldwide, an ICM poll found that only 1 in 5 Britons were strongly interested in today’s events.   Apart from the committed royalists, three-quarters were pleased to have an extra day off, perhaps to join in a street party (mainly in the south-east), but at least to take their mind off all the bad news of late.   But does it?   Only the day before we learned that the economy has been flatlining at precisely zero growth for the last 6 months, as near as one can get to a recession without actually being technically in one.   But what is really disturbing is to compare this O% growth with the 1.8% growth in the previous two quarters in 2010 produced by the (modest) stimulation of the economy from Alistair Darling’s last budget in March 2010.   This contains a central message for the Osborne strategy. (more…)

It certainly is a fair assumption that the current Cameron/Lansley ‘listening exercise’ is not about listening, anything but.   It is a transparent device, under spurious democratic cover, to change course.   It is playing for time so as to get past the local elections as well as a damage limitation exercise to enable No.10 to gauge how the opposition to Lansley’s extremism can be handled with least risk.  Those risks come chiefly from two sources: the Royal Colleges and the medical establishment on the one hand and the LibDem threat to pull the plug on the bill in its current form after their spring conference turned it down flat.   In the last analysis arguments about the relative merits of the bill are not what counts: it’s a power issue.   Having said that, today’s PAC report has produced some dramatic new evidence which could influence the power struggle. (more…)

The nuclear blow-out at Chernobyl on 26 April 1986 can be put down to eccentric Russian reactor design, limited safety features, and to the fact that it was quite unlike any Western reactors.   But none of that applies in Japan with its highly efficient industrial structure and reasonably well-developed safety culture.   So if the sophistication of nuclear technology could unravel so easily in such an advanced country, can we confidently write off the possibility that such catastrophic potential could ever occur in Europe or the UK?   And if not, can the planned round of new nuclear rebuild proceed, ever? (more…)

It is almost incredible that a nation like ours – which prides itself on being rational, committed to public debate, willing to learn from past mistakes – can be drifting towards the next financial crash with eyes wide shut.    Several events in the last few weeks cannot be explained in any other way.   The Vickers Commission on Banking passed up the once-in-a-generation opportunity to split the retail arm of the banks from the investment arm, with no implicit taxpayer guarantee for the latter, so that no bank would be too big to fail and there would be no bailout for reckless speculation.   The Vickers cop-out means we have learnt nothing: it will still next time be a huge bail-out or systemic collapse.   There have been no checks imposed on bankers’ pay or bonuses, no deterrent to their recklessness, no increase in bank lending to businesses, no constraints on taxic derivatives, no regulation of the credit-rating agencies to remove conflict of interest, no action taken against offshoring or tax havens.   But that’s not all. (more…)

David Cameron is quite right that privacy law should be made by Parliament, not the judges – though it’s difficult to blame the judges when Governments have passed up every opportunity to enact such a law over the last 20-30 years.   Labour did finally pass the Human Rights Act in 1999, and in the absence still of a specific privacy law the judges, and in particular Mr. Justice Eady as head of the Queen’s Bench jury and non-jury lists, were obliged to interpret the concept of human rights insofar as they affected privacy.   Tabloid rage at Eady’s judgements is not because he misrepresented the right to privacy, but because they are desperate at any cost to report the sexual misdemeanours of the rich and famous which they know inflates their papers’ sales.   The real question is: how far should a privacy law extend? (more…)

Let us start with one point of agreement with Maurice Glasman’s Blue Labour.   He is right to focus on regaining Labour’s lost working class vote  rather than, as with the Blairites, preposterously concentrating on the tipping points of the swing marginals.   Labour lost 5 million votes since 1997, 4 million of them in the 8 Blair years to 2005.   The great majority were working class votes, about 3 times more than the middle class votes lost.   The need to target the potential working class vote is even more important when in successive general elections 4 out of 10 people on the election register (and perhaps 3.5 million not on it) do not vote, and overwhelmingly they are likely to be working class and potential Labour voters.   The question then is: why did they desert Labour and what is necessary to win them back.   Glasman’s approach on that seems unimpressive. (more…)

How about this for austerity Britain?     The first Mox plant (to manufacture mixed plutonium-uranium fuel for nuclear reactors) was built without a licence by the previous Conservative government in 1996 at the vast cost of £498m, even greater than the cost of the 2012 Olympic stadium.   The plant has since cost an additional £840m in commissioning and operating costs, making it an exceedingly costly white elephant for taxpayers amounting to £1.34bn.   It was predicted to produce 960 tonnes of Mox fuel over 8 years, but actually produced only 13.8 tonnes, just 1.4% of the stated target.  It has earned no money at all.   Now the Government is proposing to build a second Mox plant at a cost of £2-3bn when ordinary people faced with the cuts are being told there’s no money available and everythig must be cut back drastically.   But not nuclear, it seems. (more…)

The lengths to which the fossil fuel industry will go in its own self-interest to block what is patently best for the world’s  energy needs deserve an anti-Noble prize.   First it was biofuel that was the new wonder energy source and Bush spent billions subsidising it, until it became clear that it would be necessary to cover the entire world’s agricultural space many times over to satisfy world energy demand with biofuels.   Then it was tar sands, notably from Alberta but also in large measure from the US, which would power the world when conventional oil ran out, until it was realised that more energy was needed to extract it than the new energy it yielded and the climate change impact would be turbo-charged.   Then it was a nuclear renaissance across the world, but that has likely died the death after Fukushima.   And now limitless supplies of shale gas are the new wonder drug.   Anything, anything, except the obvious – wind and solar.   But shale gas is another phantom oasis along the way, for several reasons. (more…)

There is a great deal wrong with the press and a Commission of Inquiry into its abuses is long overdue.   Nor is it just a matter of the multiple phone hacking scandal, the News International lying about it, the police complicity with the Murdoch organisation in seeking to close down any investigation, and the supine failure of the Press Complaints Commission under its Tory chair Lady Buscombe to deal with News of the World payments to the police for stories.   That is sufficient in its own right for a proper judicial inquiry, and even the Tory chair of the Lords Communications Select Committee, Lord Fowler, has been calling for this.   But the inquiry needs to go wider. (more…)

As Polly Toynbee has so delightfully put it: Do you want choice in elections or do you want to kick Nick Clegg’s head in?   Whatever view you take, it’s pretty depressing that the first ever referendum on electoral reform should be marginalised by such tactial irrelevance.   Of course Clegg should be punished for netting shoals of votes with a promise of honesty in politics and then immediately breaking all his main pledges, but cutting off your nose to spite your face was never a brilliant way to make a point.   Besides, almost every allegation on AV foisted on the voters has been a lie – not a good way to conduct any public debate.   Here are just a few examples. (more…)

Today’s launch of the government’s ’red tape’ consultation is a classic.   There are three types of consultation.   One is where the government is obliged to hold such an exercise, knows the likely result, but has not the slightest intention of taking account of it (e.g. on GM or nuclear).   A second is where the results are mixed, the government adopts what it’s already committed to, and ignores the rest.   The third,  of which the ‘red tape’ consultation is a good example, is a sort of agent provocateur exercise where the government wants to do something extremely controversial, but needs to incite sections of the population (in this case farmers and businesses) to get the backing to override strong anticipated resistance.   Having said before the election that this would be the greenest government ever, Cameron after the election obviously wants to show to his supporters that it will actually be the brownest. (more…)

This has the makings of an epic battle.   Not just the NHS, or even AV, but immigration.   Cable’s open defiance, recommending legal challenges against measures to reduce immigration, when this is a top Tory priority, will cut to the Coalition quick.   But unlike the NHS, where the arguments against the Lansley reforms are overwhelming, and AV which is not about the real issue (which is PR or First Past the Post) at all, immigration is about a very key issue but where the arguments are nuanced.   Everyone (almost) agrees that immigration has enriched Britain economically, socially and culturally, but it is the scale of it and the capacity to achieve integration that is at issue.   It can and should be handled better. (more…)

The case against nuclear is overwhelming, yet it is a fair bet that after Fukushima and after carrying out all due ‘reviews and consultations’, the Government will still go ahead with a major new nuclear build programme.   Why?   It says a lot more about the political networking of the nuclear industry than it does about their engineering or technological proficiency.   For not one of the big put-offs about nuclear have been satisfactority answered – the catastrophic potential, the nuclear waste mountain, sharply rising costs, radiation and cancer risks, decommissioning costs, vulnerability to attack, flooding and climate change risks to reactor coastal locations, uninsurable accident liabilities, nuclear proliferation threats, the link to nuclear weapons, and many others.   So how does nuclear survive? (more…)

After a public disaster who should decide the persons to investigate it?   Presumably not the Government since a major public disaster is nearly always associated with government failure or incompetence.   That would be like allowing burglars on trial  to select the jury.   Yet that is exactly what Government does regularly.   The most recent example is Government’s Health and Safety Executive review of the lessons for the UK of the Fukushima disaster, which is confined to the usual suspects excluding any energy experts who are not pro-nuclear.   Sadly this is par for the course.   The Chilcot Inquiry into Iraq excluded any forensic barrister with expertise in international law.  The Vickers Commission on Banking was Establishment through and through, and after labouring for nine months produced a mouse.   As the computer sceptic once put it, “Garbage in, garbage out”.    Independence and accountability have vanished from our public life.   They should be restored.   Here’s how. (more…)