Michael Meacher MP

A lot has been talked, not least by me, about a jobs and growth strategy as the alternative to the cuts.   But, some people ask, is this for real?   It is, and this is how it might work.   Given the threat from climate change which scientists believe will reach crisis levels within the next 20-30 years (some say earlier than that), what is really needed, on the precedent of the National Health Service, is a National Climate Service.   Direct government employment means secure, flexible, permanent jobs.   If the Government took on 80,000 workers a month, in both direct and indirect jobs, that would create a million jobs in a year for the enormous range of building, designing, manufacturing, insulating, maintaining, and servicing functions that need to be done to create a whole new green technology.   Is that practicable? (more…)

How about this?   The Government thinks the country’s in an unprecedented bind, there have to be unprecedented cuts, even chopping back winter fuel allowances for the over-80s, yet the Government is about to build another plutonium Mox (i.e. mixed oxide) plant at a cost of £2-3bn when the first Mox was a monumental failure, cost over £2bn, and only ever produced 1.6% of its target output.   There has been no official inquiry into this colossal waste of taxpayers’ money, and the National Audit Office has said there are no plans to do so.   Indeed the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority has added that any investigations into what went wrong are commercially confidential.   I bet they are: I suspect that nobody who knew the truth would ever buy from Sellafield again.   So why then was it built in the first place? (more…)

The Vickers report is a cop-out.   Perhaps we should never have expected anything else, for two reasons.   When bankers, as rearch has shown, now provide half of Tory party funding, it is highly unlikely that a Tory Government will set up a Commission on Banking that significantly penalises banking interests when that might seriously jeopardise their own election prospects.   Secondly, it has always to be remembered that when appointing a Commission of Inquiry, governments always very carefully and methodically select a membership which they judge will deliver the main conclusions they want.   Both Vickers himself, a former head of OFT, and all his 4 commissioners are Establishment insiders who could be relied on to reach ‘sound’ conclusions.   Even so, this is the feeblest, wettest, most anodyne report that we could have imagined.   It will achieve almost nothing except the immediate £1bn rise in the stock market value of the 3 main banks at issue. (more…)

There’s still a great deal more murkiness to the phone hacking scandal than has yet come out.   The latest revelation is that Sir Gus O’Donnell, the Cabinet Secretary, took it upon himself to tell Gordon Brown in autumn 2009 that it would be ‘inappropriate’ to hold a judicial inquiry not long before an election into evidence that Brown’s phone and that of other Cabinet Ministers had been hacked into by News of the World reporters.   The word ‘inappropriate’ is the term always used by the civil service when there is something they want to block, but they can’t think of any publicly plausible argument to justify blocking it.   But even more importantly, what the hell’s it got to do with the civil service as to what may or may not be appropriate before an election? (more…)

It is scarcely possible to overstate the gravity of the charges against Murdoch’s organisation over the criminal offence of phone hacking.   There is undoubtedly a great deal more to be exposed, but we already know that phone hacking was rife at News International (N.I.) on an almost epidemic scale, that top N.I. executives repeatedly lied about it for 4 years in trying to cover it up, that hundreds and perhaps thousands of public figures had their phones hacked into including perhaps Gordon Brown when he was Chancellor (which wouold raise issues of national security), that Scotland Yard was leaned on to minimise any investigation, and that the integrity and honesty of several leading N.I. executives has been irretrievably breached.   Fobbing off a few famous faces with a hundred grand, plus a hypocritical and wholly unconvincing apology, is not going to end this scandal.   Rather it opens the way for a root-and-branch public inquiry into all the many questions that remain unanswered and the menacing role that this episode shows Murdoch has long wielded over the power structure of Britain. (more…)

For the third time in a row – Greece, Ireland and now Portugal – the continuing Eurozone crisis is being handled badly.   A Portuguese bail-out will shortly be arranged among the EU countries, but in practice dominated by the conditions laid down by the most powerful country, Germany.   This may seem reasonable given that Germany will make the largest contribution.   But more disturbingly, Germany will also decide the form of the rescue, and do that in a way that satisfies Merkel’s domestic political interests, not the long-term interests of the Eurozone as a sensible economic and monetary union.   Forcing the weakermembers into even greater debt at high interest rates will widen the unsustainable divide between core and periphery members and is simply a recipe for the next crisis. (more…)

Rarely can a Budget have disintegrated so quickly.   Dixons have just announced sales falling by 11% over the last 11 weeks, and are now cutting capital expenditure by 25%.   Oddbins goes bankrupt.   The former Asda boss has predicted a “long-term trend of trading down”.   HMV has just issued its thrid profits warning in 3 months: annual profits are now expected to be less than half of what the City was expecting only 6 months ago.   M&S have announced its clothing and homeware sales have declined 6% in the fist 3 months of this year.   Thomas Cook, H Samuel, Ernest Jones, Argos, Comet, Mothercare all report sales and profits tumbling.   This collapse of consumer confidence is everywhere, as all the economic reports are echoing. (more…)

As has often been said, the banks have a policy: privatise their gains, socialise their losses.   However we should have a different policy: make the banks pay for what they have done and restructure them so that they can never do it again.   Fat chance of course that anything like this will ever happen under this Government when, as we now know, the Tory Party gets half its funding from bankers.   But the policy of ending this reverse Socialism which favours the banks more than any other sectional interest in the country must be right.   It’s just possible that the Vickers Commission which reports on the 29th of this month may recommend splitting banks’ investment arm from their retail arm.   But even if they do (which I doubt), there are several other steps we should take to bring the banks under control.   Here are just a few. (more…)

As the first pilot schemes for getting claimants off Incapacity Benefit and into work have judged that 70% were fit for work, the real attitudes of the Tories towards unemployment is becoming painfully clear.   Their Work First model of active labour market policy is defined by increasingly punitive approaches to conditionality and compulsion, the tightening of access to working-age benefits, and contracted-out services that prioritise fitting the workless into any job available.   All this in the context of rising unemploment and the lack of decent quality job opportunities throughout the depressed regions.   But the real scam is only now coming to light in the Government’s announcement of who it has awarded contracts to for forcing people back into work, any work, even while the Glovernment is itself contracting the economy and shrinking the jobs base. (more…)

The internal contradictions in Osborne’s economic policy multiply.   Before the election he complained quite rightly that the nation’s private debt was far too high – in the bubble years it reached £1.35 trillion, only slightly less than the nation’s entire GDP which was £1.45 trillion.   It is now £1.56 trillion, and according to the Office of Budget Responsibility (a proxy for the Treasury) it is expected to reach a staggering £2.13 trillion in 2015.   That is half as much again as total national income and nearly twice total household income.   That might seem a disastrous failure for Government economic policy (and of course in one sense it is), but what is so perverse is that it’s actually being welcomed by Government.   Here’s why. (more…)

Unnoticed in the austerity-driven travails following the financial crash lies another tectonic shift.   According to research by the US bank Morgan Stanley, since the start of the ‘recovery’ in 2009-10 total real wages have risen by £105bn, but profits have soared by £330bn.   This is the first time that profits have outperformed wages in absolute terms in 50 years.   In Germany employee pay has risen by £31bn while profits have accelerated to £99bn.   Things are even worse in Britain.    Here profits are up £14bn, but aggregate real wages are actually down £2bn.   This will get a lot worse still when low-middle income families are now officially expected to take an unprecedented 4-7% real terms cut in their living standards in this next year. (more…)

It’s worrying that Ed Miliband in launching Labour’s local election campaign seemed so defensive and uncertain about his economic case, when it is actually very powerful.   Economic growth by itself, on the Government’s own forecasts, will halve this year’s Budget deficit within 5 years without a single public expenditure cut being made.   Higher taxes exclusively concentrated laser-like on the highest-paid 1%, and particularly on the top 0.1% who have made gargantuan gains in the last 15 years (and who were the ones largely implicated in the financial crash), would raise most of the rest – certainly enough to keep spending cuts to a very small minimum.   That’s a very strong case that has still not yet been made by the Leadership.   But even that does not include the killer app. (more…)

One of the perils of politicians is that no sooner have they made a grand pronouncement on the sweep of history, as they perceive it, than events immediately conspire to prove that they had totally misread the runes and that the opposite is true.   That seems the fate of David Miliband who a month or two ago gave us his considered opinion that “Left parties are losing elections more comprehensively than ever before”.    The clear implication was that the only way forward for the Left was to move towards, or preferably outflank, the Right on the market, immigration, welfare reform, and a reduced role for the State.   No sooner had he said it than the Right began to crumble across all the main countries in Europe.   The solution is not to imitate the Right, but to have a distinctive alternative vision. (more…)