Michael Meacher MP

The sheer nastiness of the Osborne budget takes some getting used to, but it repays closer analysis.   To feed the Government’s ideological obsession that not a penny more must be borrowed, the supposed growth projects (which appear very hazy and may take 10 years to come to fruition, if ever) are being funded by public sector pay cuts and benefit cuts.   These £1.2bn cuts via child tax and working credit and working tax credit savings will disproportionately hit the poor: the poorest fifth will have to stump up 32% of the savings and the richest fifth just 6%.   But what is so cruel, and insane, about this manoeuvre is that it is also pointless.   The deficit will be reduced by the cuts, but then grow again when the shrinking of income in the hands of the poorest families reduces demand and thence lowers government revenues. (more…)

It was classic Osborniana today.   He’s world-class at mockery, and the more he lacks positive substance in support of his position, the more he deploys the Aunt Sally defence – attack your opponents, caricature their case, knock down arguments they never made, and pretend you’ve won.   His performance today was vintage, inviting the old adage “If you stop telling lies about me, I’ll stop telling the truth about you”.   He spent a third of his Autumn Statement (i.e. 4th budget in 18 months) explaining in defiance of all the evidence that continued austerity was the only way to save Britain, a third attacking an imaginary presentation of Labour policy, and a third head-down racing through a mound of complex and unintelligible detail about  hundreds of innovative projects to convey the impression that recovery is well under way.   Analysis of the text however tells a very different story. (more…)

Danny Alexander’s main argument is that lower and middle earners will be better off in retirement as a result of the Government’s improved proposals announced on 2nd November.   But this is a sleight of hand.   What he has done is calculate that if such an earner worked longer and retired later, he or she would get more under the Government’s revised scheme at age 68 than under the current local goverment pension scheme (LGPS) at age 65 – but not more, in fact considerably less, than under the current GLPS taken at 68.   Take a 45 year old school dinner lady with 5 years’ service working part-time earning £8,000 (£154 a week).   Under the current LGPS taken at age 65 she would get £64 a week, while under the Government’s proposal taken at 65 she would get £56 a week.   Under the Government’s proposal taken at 68, she would get £74.50 a week, which is certainly £10 more than the £64 under the LGPS at 65.   But the key point, which Danny Alexander dishonestly ignores, is that (comparing like with like) she would get under the current LPGS taken at 68 no less than £87.50 a week. (more…)

Plan A has certainly been junked.   But of course in the classical political tradition that the Government never faces up to an error, we shall not be offered on Tuesday an admission of crass folly that has dragged Britain down from a recovery of growth in mid 2010 to a double-dip slump now which will push unemployment towards 3 million, freeze incomes for a decade, and postpone any economic revival till at least 2017.   The Autumn Statement this week will announce a series of new intiatives which clearly break with the ideological rigidity that a massive public expenditure squeeze will generate a private investment boom, fire up exports, and offset public sector job losses with private sector job increases (i.e. Plan A has failed).    But the tragedy for Britain is that Osborne cannot, or won’t, accept the logic of his position and grasp the only alternative that will really work.  (more…)

The latest ONS (Office of National Statistics) figures on incomes tell a frightening story.   Average earnings fell last year in real terms by 4.6%, a huge drop.   Since UK median earnings are now £410 a week and inflation is now running at 5% a week, that represents a fall in disposable income of nearly £19 a week.   This of course hits the poorest hardest, for two reasons.   Their gross pay increase of the bottom tenth in this last year was only one-third of the gross pay increase of the top tenth.   Worse, the bottom tenth, i.e. those paid less than £286 a week (only slightly above the national minimum wage of £228 a week), have a much lower wage to start with before being faced with a big inflationary cut in their real incomes to cope with soaring food and energy bills.   In terms of social harshness that’s bad enough.   But the economic consequences are even more serious. (more…)

The Equality and Human Rights Commission report ‘Close to Home’, published today, makes sober reading.   Recent reports have all shown unacceptably poor and sinking standards for vulnerable people in care – in hospitals (Mid Staffs), in residential care (Southern Cross, Winterbourne), and now in domicilary care in their own homes (this EHRC report based on interviews with 1,200 older people).   Every time they are greeted with assurances that lessons have been learnt and mistakes will be corrected in future, or Ministerial puffs like Burstow yesterday: “I am determined to root out ageism and bad practice to drive up quality and dignity in care”.   Really?   So why do these reports of poor care or bad care (financial or physical abuse) keep on coming with monotonous regularity?   Are we really concerned about the care of helpless old people or is it just a facade?   What should really be done? (more…)

The High Pay Commission set up by Compass, due to report today, offers a valuable service in providing detailed evidence of runaway pay packages at the top, headed by Barclays’ Bob Diamond with his £6 million a year over 3 years (£115,384 per week), the new ugly face of capitalism.   But as so often with Compass, it does not adequately structure the problem and hence its solutions fall well short of what is needed.   Compass proposes: greater transparency in publishing the top ten executive pay packages outside the boardroom (how effective will that be?),  putting employees on remuneration committees (how many and with what powers?), making companies reveal the pay ratio between top pay and the company median (embarrassment is a feeble instrument), and making firms reveal total boardroom pay (again a fairly innocuous requirement).   Will all this work in drastically reducing unmerited top pay?   No.   But other measures could. (more…)

Is it all over then?   The climate change summit in Durban, due to start within a week, appears resigned to the collapse of the Kyoto process for international action to arrest and reverse the damaging and dangerous impacts of global warming.   Allegedly the UK along with the EU,US, Japan and other rich nations have all accepted that the end of the Kyoto Protocol, signed in 1997 to apply till 2012, will not be followed by any new climate treaty till 2020 at least.   Does that matter?   The key point is that, according to the UK Met Office, without drastic action now, a worst case scenario of a 4 degrees Celsius rise in the average global temperature above the eighteenth century pre-industrial level will actually be reached as early as 2060.   It means the spread of deserts, the dieback of the Amazon, the massive release of methane and CO2 gases from melted permafrost, the breakdown of the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets, and the release of 20bn tons of methane hydrates from the ocean floor will produce a climate catastrope unprecedented in palaeohistory.   This matters for two key reasons. (more…)

The squeezed middle isn’t a Radio 4 joke any more.   Something is happening in Middle England which could well consume British politics right through to the election.   It isn’t just the poorest who’re being hammered by the cuts, as the bishops will be proclaiming in tomorrow’s Lords debate on the Welfare Bill, it’s the middle class too – far more numerous and far more vocal.   It used to be said in favour of capitalism, however nasty the system, that when the tide rose, all the boats rose with it.   That’s not happening any more.   In the boom period 2002-8 median wages were stagnant despite 16% growth in the economy.   The bottom half of workers – those below the median wage of £380 gross a week – only now get 12% of national income; in 1980 they got 16%.   So who have they lost out to? (more…)

According to the Government’s ‘housing strategy’ paper to be announced on Monday, the Tories are about to build some houses.   So far, so good, though quite a surprise since in this last year housing completions shrank to their lowest level since 1923.   But let’s not look a gift horse in the mouth.   According to Cameron, it will be ’as many as’ 450,000 by 2015 and ‘mainly’ affordable homes.   That would work out at around 100,000 a year, about the level of this last disastrous year, so not much change there.   But haven’t we heard this before?   Gordon Brown promised in 2008 that he would build 240,000 new homes a year, a total of 3 million by 2020.   The number declined sharply each year from 2008 to 2011.   Will this latest, much more modest promise (only 40% of what Brown predicted) fare any better?   Very likely not, for good reasons. (more…)

The Tory obsession with privatising irrespective of the circumstances or of common sense could bot be better illustrated than by their privatisation of Northern Rock at a loss to the taxpayer of at least £400m and perhaps £650m.   It’s not as though the Rock was originally in the private sector; in fact it started life as a mutual and developed as a mutual for 147 years before investment bankers (who else would have made such a crass decision?) urged the fateful recommendation to switch to the private sector in 1997.   Within 10 years of that woefully inappropriate advice Northern Rock had adopted a typically risky business model of lending with only a quarter of its financing coming from its deposits and the rest dependent on the uncertain state of the wholesale money markets which went kaput in the 2007 credit crunch, dragging down Northern Rock in the seizing up of the markets.   It’s the crassness of that experience that the Tories are so anxious to return to at the earliest possible moment. (more…)

The economic news is so unremittingly bleak that any sane Chancellor would now be changing course before the country tumbles into the ditch (i.e. a double-dip recession).   Not Osborne.   But the real clincher isn’t just the appalling rise in joblessness for 18-24 year olds to more than a million or the total rise in unemployment to the highest level for 17 years, or even the slashing of the growth forecast for this year from 2.5% to just 1%.   It’s the de-industrialisation which last year produced a UK deficit in the trading of goods of £98.8bn, by far the UK’s worst performance ever.   The last time Britain ran a surplus in traded goods was in 1982, almost exactly the 30-year span of the neoliberal era.   No country can survive a mounting gap between exports and imports on this scale.   The UK’s current economic course is simply unsustainable.   So what should be done? (more…)

Now that the deeply reactionary Corporation of the City of London have decided to uproot Occupy London, bang on cue with Mayor Bloomberg’s similar action in Zuccotti Park in New York and under the same specious pretext of health and safety, the question arises as to where Occupy goes from here.   It has been dismissed as a movement without any discernible objectives, but its website (http://occupylsx.org) clearly expresses the agenda: the bankers’ crisis, cuts won’t end social and economic inequality, industry should be regulated independently, priority must be given to job creation and health and education over arms production, and the world’s resources should go to caring for the poor not the corporate profits of the rich.   We have become so cynical and self-centred that such simply expressed and powerful ideas come as a bit  of a shock.   Surely we’re much too sophisticated for such simplicities.   The Sermon on the Mount may well have been received with similar condescension.   But it’s lasted rather longer than its detractors.   So will Occupy. (more…)

Latest figures show Big 5 banks are now lending only half to SMEs that they pledged under Operation Merlin to an enormous fanfare of self-congratulation a year ago.   There have been no checks imposed on proprietary trading or on transactions in financial derivatives, both of which were main contributors to the financial crash of 2008-9.   The assets of RBS and Lloyds are only half the value they were in May 2010 so that taxpayers continue to make a thumping loss on their bailouts despite ploughing £200bn of quantitative easing into bank coffers.   And to cap it all, the Vickers Commission’s proposals will not have to be implemented till 2019!   Their proposals of Chinese Walls between retail and investment banking are much weaker than the Glass-Steagall full separation passed by the US Congress in 1934, yet in the latter case the banks had just one year to comply.   How do the banks get away with it? (more…)

The real Border Agency scandal is not whether Theresa May or Brodie Clark authorised the relaxation of checks on millions of visitors over the summer, but rather that job cuts and expenditure squeezes are cutting swathes through the immigration rules.   In the last fortnight it has been disclosed (and one wonders how much else has still not yet been uncovered) that the Agency lost track of 124,000 asylum seekers and migrants – an eighth of a million – and that the number of these ‘lost’ cases has tripled in just 6 months.   Once again, like 5 years ago, the Home Office is not fit for purpose.   Nevertheless the Government is still going ahead with 5,000 job cuts at the Agency even though it is plain that it simply can’t cope with the scale of illegal immigration.   But this is only one of a growing number of examples where the standards of public service are remorselessly declining under the wright of the cuts. (more…)