Michael Meacher MP

 Apart from 9/11, the banking crash is the most staggering saga of mishandling for the last several decades.   In both cases, both with momenoous consequences, the causes leading up to the disaster were ignored at the time and have been misrepresented since.   The response to the episode in each case was extreme and laid the foundation for further crises in future in new directions.   And again in both cases because the true causes of the debacles have not been recognised or at least not been faced up to, no remedies have been put in place or are even at present seriously envisaged that will prevent further flashpoints in future.   The reaction to the Independent Commission on Banking (the Vickers Report) due to published in a fortnight illustrates this exactly. (more…)

The Committee on Standards in Public Life at its meeting on Thursday is considering accepting the Tory proposal to cap political donations within a range between £50,000 and £10,000.   This is patently a device designed to hurt Labour disproportionately by putting a low limit on donations from the major unions.   Research shows that whilst under the present uncapped arrangements the Tories have had a 3:2 funding advantage over Labour, a £50,000  would stretch  this almost to a 4:1 advantage, greater even than the 3:1 advantage they would secure from a £10,000 cap.   That explains why the Tories carefully picked on £50,000, just as maximum differential advantage also explains why the Tories are now pushing through the reduction in the number of constituencies from 650 to 600, as opposed to a cut of either 25 or 100.   This is political expediency dressed up as somehow a fairer system.   But there’s a lot more to these proposals than meets the eye. (more…)

On Thursday for the first time police and prison officers will be subject to a charge of corporate homicide if a person dies in their custody.   This is significant since in the last decade 333 persons have died in police custody, yet not a single police officer or senior manager has ever been successfully prosecuted.   This is disturbing particularly on two counts.   One is that the number of deaths in police custody has been steadily rising over the decades: during 1970-79 it was 245, so that the number in the latest decade is a 36% increase.   Second is the fact that there were no convictions even after an inquest jury had returned a verdict in 10 cases since 1990 of unlawful killing.   This has understandably led to a cynical view that the police are beyond the law. (more…)

It’s remarkable that the hyper-rich in France (Bettencourt and others) and in the US (Warren Buffett and others) are now calling at a time of austerity that they should be taxed more.   Not a peep however out of the hyper-rich in Britain.   Yet they, more than any of such wealth anywhere else in the world (with the possible  exception of America), have good grounds to contribute increased taxation dues for three very strong reasons.   First, during a period when average UK real incomes have stagnated since 2003, the wealth of the wealthiest 1,000 Britons (just 1,000!) soared by £297bn between 1997-2010 according to the Sunday Times Rich List 2011; each one of them therefore increased their wealth on average by just under £300,000,000.   Second, if the increase in their wealth were taxed at a modest 20%, it would yield £60bn, enough to pay off nearly half Britain’s budget deficit – for which many of them were directly responsible.   Third, they are the prime offenders responsible for the criminal activity of tax evasion now running at £70bn a year in the UK. (more…)

As Bernanke at the US Fed today rejects another round of QE electronic money creation, US growth is much slower than the historic norm because of the depth of the sub-prime fiasco plus the EU sovereign debt crisis plus the damaging political wrangling over US debt levels plus the downgrade in the US long-term credit ratings – as if that’s not enough - new data indicates the West is being rapidly overtaken by the developing world.   This will increase export potential for Western economies, but (with the excedption of Germany) make it long-term much harder to get access to those expanding markets because of the intensity of domestic competition.   The alarming message, when the US and Eurozone and UK economies are flat on their backs, is that these developing countries aren’t just ‘emerging’, they’re fully-fledged rivals. (more…)

So once again the State is being called upon today, even by a former MPC hawk Martin Weale, to rally a depressed private sector in incipient slump and to protect it from a worsening sovereign debt crisis in the eurozone with a further large dose of QE (printing perhaps another £50bn of electronic money).   No doubt this will be seen in some quarters as further evidence of the resurgent role of the State in the face of the inability of ultra-free markets to solve the problems they themselves created.   It is nothing of the kind.   Along with the massive bank bail-outs, the return of Keynesian deficit spending, a withdrawal from light-touch regulation, and even the revival of some State intervention in industry - the ultimate taboo in the neoliberal canon – it is rather the exact opposite: the harnessing of State resources as a temporary convenience before the return of market triumphalism.   An ideological shift back to the security and power of the State?   That’s not what the evidence tells. (more…)

You have to give it to Osborne: he can dress up a pig’s bladder and make it look like a silk glove.   He’s just announced today that “stashing the profits of tax evasion in Switzerland is over”.    It’s nothing of the kind.   Switzerland is making a one-off deduction from all UK accounts held in Swiss tax havens like Zug or Zurich, but at a much lower rate (34%) than is chargeable in the UK, only from 2013 onwards, and without proper exchange of information which would end the secrecy as the fertile terrain in which tax cheating can flourish.   Osborne also deludedly boasts: “We will be as tough on the richest who evade tax as on those who cheat on benefits”.   Really?   The £5bn benefit fraud is certainly being cracked down hard on (quite rightly, by all governments), but the fgovernment’s efforts to stop £70bn a year in tax evasion are like trying to hold water in a colander. (more…)

Despite the initial euphoria about the downfall of a brutal and erratic autocracy in Libya, several uncomfortable matters emerge from the wreckage – and not just the obvious question of whether the National Transitional Council can bring about the reconciliation for a secure, viable and democratic future for the country.   One issue, which should not be lost sight of in the rebels’ victory, is the deliberate manipulation of UN Resolution 1973 to achieve ends manifestly beyond and not covered by its text.   The legal advice given to the Cabinet by the Government’s legal officers has never been published in full, only a summary where no-one can know what may be omitted.   Cameron however did say in the Commons on 21 March that “The action will be limited by what the UN Security Council resolution says……….We must act both within the letter and the spirit of that”.   Clearly it didn’t cover mission creep to justify regime change, the bombing of Tripoli, and attempted assassination of Gadaffi. (more…)

“Britain will be borne aloft by the march of the makers” – thus Osborne in June on rebalancing the economy away from the financial sector and towards a revival of manufacturing.    In fact the latter continues to go backwards, with production down again by 0.3% according to the latest figures.   And the Government’s own decisions fly in the face of Osborne’s boast.   After cancelling the loan to Forgemasters in Sheffield, it rejected the tender for the huge Thameslink train contract submitted by Derby’s Bombardier and gave it to Germany’s Siemens.   Not only does this lose 1,400 jobs in Derby, it puts at risk Bombardier’s whole survival as the only remaining train manufacturing plant in Britain.   Today Cameron has just rejected a last-minute appeal to reconsider the decision.   No other country in Europe would behave in this way in sacrificing one of its key industries. (more…)

Well, well, well.   Who said: “There are deep problems in our society that have been growing for a long time: a decline in responsibility, a rise in selfishness, a growing sense that individual rights come before anything else.”?   Cameron.   And where does he think the selfishness and fixation on individualism came from, if not from Thatcher who  claimed society never really existed and made selfishness and greed the cardinal aims of life?   Yet still he insists that the problem was “criminality, pure and simple” and obsesses about the “moral decline of Britain” as though society and economy were not the issue, only the misbehaviour of individuals.   Blair is equally muddle-headed when he puts the riots down to alienated, disaffected youth outside the social mainstream and argues there’s no social or moral decline, only a need for intense family intervention and dealing with anti-social behaviour and gangs, as though the social and economic structures he championed had nothing to do with creating the alienation and disaffection in the first place. (more…)

We have now come full circle on housing.   After the Second World War a massive building programme for social housing was launched by the Attlee Government and continued by Macmillan through the 1950s.   Thatcher began to unwind this process in the 1980s by drastically reducing local authority house-building from 200,000 a year to just 30,000 a year by 1990, and by inaugurating the sell-off of Council housing through the Right to Buy Act of 1985.   New Labour continued the process, cutting the number of Council houses built to a mere 200-300 a year in the last decade, despite the number of Households on the local authority waiting lists topping 1.8 million.   Now eviction from social housing is being used by some (Tory) Councils as a penalty if a member of the family has transgressed during the riots, and more insidiously if the hike in social housing rents as part of the cuts can’t be afforded by tens of thousands of families. (more…)

Just as the rioters are now at the receiving end of severely punitive treatment, so  the licentious members of the eurozone are having similar punishment meted out to them for their financial wickedness.   Under the EU-IMF bailouts Greece and Ireland have hace their domestic fiscal policy-making amputated.   This has been done without anaesthetic by Euro Commission surgeons supervised by the German finance ministry using hacksaws and chisels apparently loaned from Milton Friedman’s Chicago economics department.   This is for the EZ malefactors.   Less appreciated is that the EU as a whole, including Britain, has agreed a package of similar Brussels control over the making of national budgets for all member states from this year onwards. (more…)

Official UK Government data show the proportion of UK pupils achieving level 4 or above at Key Stage 2 rising sharply between 1997 and 2010, and the proportion of examinees achieving at least 2 A-level or equivalent passes, plus those with 3 or more such passes, also rising markedly over the same period.   It looks and feels good.   Sadly it isn’t, for 4 strong reasons.   These reasons are reflected in the international comparison of educational performance provided by tghe OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) covering 65 countries.   It shows that while Finland and Korea in 2009 had between 42-52% of pupils classified as top or strong performers in the key subjects of reading, maths and science and only 6-8% classified as lowest performers, the UK had only 28-34% rated as top/strong performers but as many as 15-20% categorised as lowest performers.   There is in fact a UK slippage which is very disturbing. (more…)

It must be rare in modern history for a Government’s economic policy to get such a comprehensive and universal thumbs down.   But Osborne’s managed it.   On every single aspect of policy the signals are now flashing red:

*  The latest unemployment, published yesterday, shows a big increase of 38,000 during April-June.   As there is no rise in aggregate demand and export growth is stymied, the 2.5m jobless figure (7.9%) will now rise remorselessly over the next year towards 3 million.

*  The youth unemployment level (16-24 year olds), already at 950,000, will pass 1 million when the new graduates hit the labour market.

*  Osborne’s boast that he has created half a million jobs in the ‘latest year’ (i.e. from March 2010) is a lie: more than 300,000 of those jobs were created before the present government came into office. (more…)

James Murdoch is now bang to rights.   The latest evidence just revealed, the letter dated March 2007 from Clive Goodman appealing against his sacking by News International after he admitted phone hacking in court, reinforces the already compelling evidence that there was widespread knowledge at the News of the World over 4 years ago that hacking was rife there.   JM has claimed before the DCMS Select Committee he didn’t know about the ‘for Neville’ email in 2008 when he signed off a £700,000 payment to Gordon Taylor to buy his silence over his hacking claim – but that is hardly credible.   Why on earth would he sign such a large cheque without knowing what it was for and why?   And top NI executives, Crone and Myler, have explicitly said he did know.   Now Goodman is revealed saying he was encouraged by NI executives (by offer of his job back) to withhold the real truth about NoW hacking from the police and the courts (i.e. to pervert the course of justice).   And why was Goodman still paid nearly £250,000 by NI after his release from jail if not to buy his continued silence, and can JM have been unaware of this? (more…)