Michael Meacher MP

What is so striking about the reaction to Ed Miliband’s speech on the Tory/New Labour Right is their sheer disbelief that any alternative to globalised markets and the corporate ascendancy is feasible, such is their belief in the inevitability of unfettered market capitalism.   The arrogance of this view takes some beating.   The current neoliberal system has produced the biggest financial crash for nearly a century, quite likely the longest economic stagnation since the 1930s (and this time without a war to escape from it), a class inequality unrivalled since the Edwardian age, and an unsustainable industrial decline (last year’s trade deficit was £100bn).   The system producing such consequences is financially, industrially, socially bankrupt.   The real reason they like to believe in its inevitability is that it’s the source of their own power – and that power is now breaking up. (more…)

It is difficult to over-estimate the significance of the revolution that Ed Miliband launched this week.   It is as profound and dramatic a transformation as Thatcher generated in the 1980s.   It is breaking with the corporate consensus of three decades of untrammelled market capitalism and promulgating, for the first time in British politics since the 1970s, a radical, inspiring, and desperately needed alternative to the business model that has led to the financial crash of 2008-9, the Eurozone sovereign debt crisis, and paralysis across the Western capitalisms now being driven into prolonged stagnation.   It was an attack on an over-mighty financial and industrial elite that abused its power to amass vast wealth at the expense of the vast majority of the population.   At the same time it it was rolling out unmistakeably a new, moral, genuine social democratic model balancing justice with responsibility, demanding contribution alongside reward.   But can it be delivered? (more…)

For the first time in more than 15 years the true values and principles of the Labour Party were proclaimed by a Labour Leader in his Conference speech.   Gone was the attempt to present modernisation as accommodating the banks, big business and of course the Murdoch press.   Gone was the effort to align Labour with business irrespective of what business did, whether engaging in foreign speculation and exploitation of tax havens, sacking hundreds of workers, beating down the terms and conditions of workers by marginalising the unions, or demanding deregulation of environmental and labour safeguards.   Yes, Labour is indeed pro-business, but of the producers not the predators, of real engineering and not financial engineering, of the responsible job creators and not the asset strippers.   But that was not the heart of the speech. (more…)

Were Ed Balls prescriptions desirable?   Yes.   Were they sufficient?    No.   He wants to repeat the bank bonus tax, bring forward long-term investment plans, reverse January’s damaging VAT rise for a temporary period, cut VAT to 5% on home improvements, and give a 1-year national insurance tax break for every small firm that takes on extra workers.   Fine as far as it goes, but it doesn’t do the one thing which is really required – getting the economy going again on a sufficient scale to secure a genuine recovery.   It’s tinkering, but not the real thing.   To achieve that requires an understanding of what the fundamental problem of the British economy really is. (more…)

At the TULO reception in Liverpool today Ed Miliband at last let go and let his instincts power through.   In a tub-thumping speech he came across as confident, full of inner self-assurance despite all the sotto voce carping, punching out his themes forcefully like a man in command of a clear mission.   He knows very well that all the talk at the conference and in the press has been that there’ no clarity what Labour really stands for.    He told us in no uncertain terms that by the time Ed Balls had delivered his speech on the economy tomorrow and he had delivered his own Leader’s speech on Tuesday, nobody would have any doubt at all what the party stands for.   We shall see.   But a man doesn’t make predictions with such insistence which if untrue will be exposed within 48 hourfs unless  he’s cast iron certain they will turn out true.    But there’s another novel aspect of EM’s approach which is quite telling. (more…)

Putting the squeeze on privatised companies who’ve profiteered at the public’s expense is a sound policy, and will strike a big chord with families trapped in austerity with fast-rising bills they can’t evade.   Making the train companies (ATOC) adhere to fair and reasonable regulated standards, including not rigging fares which are now soaring by as much as 8%, makes undeniable sense when the public subsidy to ATOC has more than doubled since privatisation in 1996 from £2bn to £5bn a year, so that at present passengers subsidise rail twice -through taxes and excessive fares.   Equally, forcing the Big Six energy companies to pool the energy supplies they buy wholesale before they are then purchased retail would dramatically cut fuel prices which have been producing exorbitant profits for the energy oligarchs at the expense, among others, of 5 million households now in fuel poverty.   This is a policy that can be taken a lot further. (more…)

The perfect storm that is gathering could be even worse than the 2008-9 crash.   Worldwide competitive deflation is now a very real threat.   Europe is spooked by the fear of a Greek default and the very real risk of insolvency of the French banks, which have high exposure to Greek bonds and have lost half their value over the last 6 months.    Resistance to further bailouts is growing ominously in Germany, while resistance to the consequential austerity package is growing equally ominously in Greece.   The state of the US housing and labour markets reamains dire, and the Fed’s attempt to ease mortgage interest rates by buying $400bn of long-dated stock by selling the same amount of shorter-dated debt was dismissed with disdain by the markets.   Now the huge falls in the world’s stock-markets in this last week reveal fears both that growth is fading and that central banks and governments can/will do little about it. (more…)

Two key changes were needed to make good Ed Miliband’s promise of a change of direction at his election to the leadership.   One was obviously a shift away from New Labour’s Faustian deal with neo-liberal capitalism and Blair-Brown’s accommodation with the banks, big business and Murdoch press in support of deregulated finance and privatised free markets.   The second was the restoration of internal party democracy which had been squeezed almost lifeless by New Labour as both Blair and Brown sought to centralise their own power at the expense of the party.   Party conference was made into a showpiece for the leader’s speech and decision-making on policy was first downgraded by Blair (either ignored or dismissed as the party’s policy, which was not the government’s policy, as though the government was an entity totally unrelated to the party) and then abandoned by Brown altogether (there would be no votes taken at all).   In the run-up to Conference there is still far too little evidence of the former.   But what is really worrying is the stitch-up that is now being attempted on the latter. (more…)

The latest IMF forecasts for the UK economy are devastating.   Since January, only 8 months ago, the IMF prediction for UK growth this year has almost halved, from 2% to just 1.1%.   That is profoundly worrying when it represents a cutback in expected UK output this year of some £14bn, but perhaps still not bad enough to fit the facts.   The so-called global recovery from the 2008-9 crash has now stalled, and the big 3 economies – US, Eurozone, UK – are now not heading up, not even levelling out, but slipping back.   UK growth in the last 3 quarters has already been a negligible 0.2%, and the latest collapse of demand as registered on the High Street may well produce a negative annual figure when the next quarter’s results are known next month.   The evidence for this lies in the IMF’s latest mark-down for the UK economy, a cutback of almost a third from 1.5% to 1.1% in the last 3 months alone.   What it all adds up to is that the UK is sliding into a second (double-dip) recession.   So what should be done? (more…)

Vince Cable rightly castigates top pay excesses – and to give him credit, no-one else in this government of millionaires is doing so – but the solutions he put forward yesterday to the LibDem conference are worth little more than a bucket of warm spit.   Simplifying complex executive remuneration schemes is not going to stop FTSE-100 chief executives sleeping soundly who now take home on average £4.2 million a year (or to bring it home what means, it’s £80,770 a week).   Nor are they going to sweat about ‘strengthening the link between bonuses and performance’ when bonuses have been turned into semi-guaranteed payments where managers seldom get less than 80% of the maximum.   Nor does performance-related pay mean a fig when chief executive pay over the last dozen years has quadrupled, yet the stock exchange index is no higher than it was at the start of this period. (more…)

Mahmoud Abbas is right to go ahead with his application for Palestinian statehood at the UN later this week.   If there were any doubts about it, the facrt that the US and its protege Israel are so frantically trying to block it suggests it must be the right move.   The fact that the US is so fanatically and unreasoningly committed to supporting each and every act of Israeli aggression against the Palestinians, and that Israel is so uncompromisingly opposed to the establishment of an independent Palestinian state within the 1967 borders, really give the Palestinians little choice.   Not that it will achieve much except the right to take Israel before the International Criminal Court to put Israel in the dock over the abuses of the occupation and to seek sanctions against both the country and its leaders. (more…)

What do these ideas add up to?   Devolve power from Whitehall, leave the big state behind, elect mayors with powers over policing, abolish the Department for Communities and Local Government, compete for new providers where schools are thought to be failing, provide education credits for parents to move their children to other schools, make all schools autonomous like academies, use ‘successful foundation trusts’ as the model to provide primary care, allocate social housing on the basis of rewarding good tenants and use ‘hasbo’ eviction orders against bad tenants.   What links all these proposals is not only that they’ve just been published in Labour’s so-called ‘Purple Book’ , but that they’re all Tory ideas.   Nothing illustrates more starkly that the Blairites are still undead and still trying to push the Labour Party into a free market, de-regulated, privatised, profoundly unequal Britain – just like the Tories. (more…)

If party conferences have any value at all, now that they are no longer decision-making occasions but rather showpieces for the leader, it is that they do provide an opportunity to take stock on the state of the nation and where it is heading. On that basis the conferences over the next 3 weeks are likely to be pretty bleak affairs. An EU survey has revealed that, of the 15 member states prior to the latest East European accessions, Britain now has the most pessimistic expectations apart from the 3 bankrupt or semi-bankrupt countries – Greece, Portugal and Ireland. Asked whether they thought life in general was getting worse for them, 1 in 6 (17%) Britons answered yes. Even Italy and Spain, highlighted as the next victims of the Eurozone debt crisis, were less – at 16% and 15% respectively. Since most people in Britain still don’t yet understand the full magnitude of the downturn about to hit them, life in Britain is clearly about to get very tough indeed. (more…)

The real lesson of the alleged Kweky Adoboli fraud at UBS isn’t that the Vickers reform requiring ring-fencing between the retail and investment arms of banks should be implemented far quicker than 2019 – though that should certainly be the case.   It’s rather that Vickers, after 18 months’ investigation, missed the point.   The central problem is not that taxpayers should be protected against any bail-out of wild, speculative and greedy investment traders – though obviously they should be – but rather that such activities within investment banking must be tightly regulated or prohibited outright.   Capital is scarce, and the wasteful and reckless dissipation of it in highly risky and speculative betting by investment bankers is something the nation simply cannot afford when capital is desperately needed for job creation and revival of the manufacturing economy. (more…)

The unemployment figures are terrible – up 80,000 in the last 3 months to over 2.5m – and for Cameron lamely to call them ‘disappointing’ is an insult when his own government’s cuts are mainly responsible.   And there is clearly a lot worse to come – with women’s joblessness fast approaching a quarter-century high, youth unemployment rising fast towards a million, and a final total figure of over 3 million now very likely before this deep recession is through  since unemployment is such a ‘lagging indicator’.   It should not be forgotten that in the early 1980s the recession ended by 1983 (and in the UK today that is the opposite of the case as we lurch towards a double-dip), but unemployment did not peak till February 1986 – at 3.2 million.   So what should be done when Osborne & Co. obstinately refuse to recognise that a private sector-driven recovery is just fantasy, as well as enforcing huge pension cuts without any meaningful negotiation and cutting public sector pay below inflation for years on end while City bonuses are still £14bn a year? (more…)