Michael Meacher MP

Who’s ever heard of David Gauke, the junior Treasury minister, before he announced yesterday that paying tradesmen cash in hand was “morally wrong” because it denied the Treasury vital funds and everyone else would then have to pay more tax.   His only previous claim to fame is that he claimed £10,000 expenses when he bought his London flat, as though that didn’t mean that taxpayers had to pay out more to cover his expenses.   But what really adds hypocrisy to Gauke’s pronouncement is that it came only a week after a new report, undertaken by an ex-McKinsey economist, found that the level of offshoring wealth in tax havens by the super-rich elite is now estimated to have reached the staggering level of £13 trillions, nearly 9 times the UK’s total GDP.   The problem’s not paying plumbers in cash, it’s letting just 92,000 people stash away £6.3 trillions and doing little or nothing to stop it. (more…)

Sir Robert McAlpine, the giant construction firm paid £50m to help build the Olympic stadium and founded by the treasurer to Thatcher’s Tory party, is being sued by 86 blacklisted building workers for £17m in lost earnings.   As a result of files seized 3 years ago of the so-called Consulting Association, code name for 40 construction companies who pooled information (often untrue) about workers which was then used to deny them employment, it is now clear that this huge conspiracy within the building industry, involving all the biggest names – not just McAlpine, but Balfour Beatty, Taylor Woodrow, Amec, Carillion and Skanska – lasted 40 or more years and ensnared a total of at least 34,000 building workers on the blacklist.   Because this victimisation was so widespread and lasted so long, this is a conspiracy more grave and far-reaching even than the phone-hacking scandal.   Hoever there is one major difference which explains the contrast in the attention these two scandals have received.   In the phone-hacking case the victims were footballers, film and TV stars and other celebrities in the news.   In the blacklisting case they were working class men. (more…)

Blair’s failure to co-operate with the Parliamentary select committee investigating the effectiveness of the Freedom of Infomation Act (FOI) shows just how important this Act is and why it now needs to be strengthened and extended.   What he’s afraid of is of course how much more it will reveal of the unsavoury background to his autocratic style and how what really happened diverges sharply from the slick spin with which it was presented.    Since Blair got almost all the big decisions of his premiership wrong – his sycophancy to Bush, his neocon support for US militarism, the war in Iraq and his deceitful presentation of the reasons for it, his strong support for Britain joining the Eurozone, his unabashed enthusiasm for neoliberal capitalist de-regulation and privatisation, his massive extension of PFI, his schmoozing with corporate Big Business, his visceral dislike of the trade unions, his corruption by spin and money, and above all the way he blew his chance to use the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity with an unprecedented majority in Parliament to make any long-lasting radical reform of British society in the interests of the Labour Party which elected him – it’s not surprising he wants to keep as much under wraps as he can. (more…)

It is difficult to exaggerate the magnitude of Britain’s current economic disaster.   The latest figures issued yesterday showing a 0.7% contraction in the second quarter are nothing less than momentous.   The UK economy is now 4.5% below its pre-crash peak in March 2008.   This is stunning for 3 reasons.   First it indicates that in the last 4 years the economy has shrunk by over £70bn, an amount equal to three-quarters of the total UK deficit.   Second, it is far worse than Germany, the US and even Russia, all of which have now grown since their pre-crash peak, and worse even than Spain and Japan.   Only Italy and Ireland have done worse than Britain in the EU.   Third, and most seriously of all, it shows the weakest recover by far of any of the 5 deep recessions that have plagued Britain over the last century.   At this point in the cycle, compared with  just over 4 years from the start of the downturn, even the Great Depression of 1930-34 had given way to 2% growth – in today’s terms an increase in the size of the economy of some £60bn as opposed to the current fall of £75bn. (more…)

Et tu, Brute?   We have now reached a point where it seems impossible to present a plausible rationale for continuing with the government’s economic strategy (for want of a worse word).   Osborne, a nasty piece of work even at the best of times, is now being assailed by all those global or national financial authorities who’ve previously supported him.   Even the IMF has officially told him: “Recovery has stalled.   Post-crisis repair and rebalancing of the UK economy is likely to be more prolonged than initially envisaged.   Confidence is weak and uncertainty is high”.   The latest GDP figures will show the UK economy flatlining now for 2 years and still in recession for the 3 months to June.   Manufacturing and construction have contracted and services have failed to grow.   Bank lending to industry is now at the worst trend since 2009, with a £3bn fall hitting SMEs hardest.   Britain is now the only country in the G20, apart from Italy, which is in double-dip recession.   Apart from that, everything’s fine. (more…)

Can you believe it?   The Tory view of society seems to be a version of Dante’s Inferno, with seven descending circles into Hell.   At the top are the 0.003% of the population whose wealth on the latest estimates is now valued at £414bn, including gains in the last 3 years of £155bn.   These are very precious people, so they need to be pampered with every tax concession that can be dreamed up, including vast use of tax havens over which the government conveniently casts a blind eye.   Then come the top 1%, about 300,000 persons with incomes over £3,000 a week.   They too must be kept firmly on side with tax cuts.   Then there’s the top 10% earning over £50,000 ayear who should be protected from anything as offensive as a tax increase, whatever the state of the economy.   Then there’s the broad mass of median incomes, Ed’s squeezed middle.   They need to be shorn like geese when trouble arises, with maximum feather-plucking consistent with minimum hissing, as Carnot observed.    Then at last, on the bottom-most ring leading to Hades, we come to the poor and the poorest. (more…)

As the disasters one after another, all interconnected via the underlying neoliberal ideology, betoken a real fin de siecle, Labour is still failing to shoot into a wide open goal.   As HSBC is exposed sitting atop a mountain of corruption which bears comparison with the utterly discredited (and destroyed) BCCI, where is Labour calling for taking it into public ownership, closing down immediately all the corrupt and rotten parts of the banking empire, prosecuting all the senior directors (not just the Mammon-worshipping Green) responsible for a decade of the worst malfeasance, and re-launching the clean elements into a network of smaller banks directly servicing British industry and the public interest? (more…)

With business leaders, even the director general of the British Chambers of Commerce, now slamming Osborne’s policy for indecision, equivocation, shoert-termism and political manipulation, Labour must now be poised to take a decisive lead in the crucial area of economic policy.   But if it is going to consolidate a lead which at present is much too dependent on the Tories’ obsessively sticking with manifestly failed policies, Labour must put right 3 fundamental failures which have so far drastically held it back.   (more…)

Cameron has often said Britain is open for business.   What it seems he meant was Britain is open for sale.   There is no other country in the world which would throw open its strategic industrial sectors to a foreign power.   That is exactly what the Tories are now proposing to do with handing over the building and ownership of 5 new nuclear power stations to the Chinese.   Energy supply is a national security issue as much as military defence, and to hand over control of 5-10% of Britain’s future power supply is taking a risk that no other country would countenance.   This is a classic example of the neoliberal (Tory and New Labour) fixation with allowing the market to take all the decisions, even the biggest ones, without regard for the national strategic interest. (more…)

The whole episode of the killing of Ian Tomlinson brings into stark relief the deep doubts about the criminal justice system in its treatment of the police.   First, the IPCC whose role is to hold the police to account resisted calls to open an investigation for 7 days after Tomlinson’s death.   They only reversed this decision when the Guardian released video footage taken by a visiting US fund manager showing Tomlinson hit by a baton and pushed to the ground by a policeman.   Had those pictures not been taken and had the Guardian not made them public, the whole matter would have been swept under the carpet from the start because the City of London police detective superintendent put in charge of the inquiry because of the IPCC’s passivity told the family that Tomlinson had simply “run out of batteries” and may have had a heart attack because of the demo. (more…)

The exposure of HSBC, significantly by the US, as having engaged in massive money-laundering for years on behalf of Mexican drug cartels, terrorists and pariah states like Iran and Syria has become a test case of how the authorities deal with big-time criminality by the economic elite.    The damning report by the US Senate sub-committee of the “pervasively polluted” culture at HSBC covers the period 2004-10 when Stephen Green was chief executive (2003-6) and then chairman (2006-10).  Green, a former Anglican priest who sought to balance God and Mammon, but erred 99.9% closer to the latter than the former, later became and is still now Trade Minister in Cameron’s government.   Green has form.   He was chairman of the British Bankers’ Association during the LIBOR-rigging scandal, in which role he publicly dismissed claims that there might be something wrong and waved on business as usual – rather like the pardoner in Chaucer’s tales. (more…)

If you burgle some houses and remove some £20,000 worth of swag, and you’re caught, you’ll be sent to prison.   If you run a bank and by your recklessness and folly require bailouts costing the taxpayer £70bn + £850bn asset support costs, or if you launder billions for drug cartels, terrorists or pariah states through offshore accounts, you don’t get prosecuted.   The fact that there’s one law for the 99% of the population and another for the 1% economic elite could hardly be clearer.   The underlying theme connecting all this unending stream of huge scandals – the financial bubble imploding in 2008, the MPs’ expenses fiddles, Murdoch’s phone-hacking to increase newspaper sales, police corruption in protecting people in high places, Barclays’ LIBOR interest rate-fixing, G4S able to rake off hundreds of millions from the State despite utter incompetence, and now HSBC money-laundering on an industrial scale – is that if you de-regulate all controls to private markets driven by the urge to maximize profits, this is what you get: an economic system rotting on the inside where the super-rich get away with it and dump all the blame, and the costs, on to everyone else. (more…)

Nothing shows more starkly the relentless grip on the public consciousness (and above all the politicians) that the corporate sector has secured than the absurd fixation with outsourcing.   It is automatically assumed to be more efficient, more innovative, more dynamic.   Sometimes it is, sometimes it all ends in tears and the State has to pick up the bits: privatising the gains, socialising the losses.   G4S is only the last in a long line of fiascos including Whitehall IT (£12bn loss to the taxpayer), Stats testing, the Rural Payments Agency disaster, the London tube maintenance PPI collapse (cost to the Taxpayer £2-3bn), numerous health PFIs, the Child Support Agency debacle, etc. – and not forgetting the banks (bailout costs to the taxpayer £70bn, wider costs in guaranteed loans, special liquidity devices, asset support schemes, around £850bn).   The banks were before the crash paying £25bn a year in corporation tax to the Exchequer, but paying back the bailout and follow-on costs at that tax revenue rate (if ever recovered) would take 60 years.   Not a great deal for the taxpayer. (more…)

The most strking aspect of the Coalition’s adult social care package is that it is riddled with internal conflicts.    The Minister in tonight’s Commons debate stressed the importance of preventive action, but how is that possible when intervention is confined only to when the elderly person’s condition reaches the critical category?   The whole thrust of the government is to shrink the State, but the support for Dilnot which they affected will certainly expand it.   Osborne torpedoed Labour’s social care proposale just before the last election by claiming they represented a ‘death tax’, but is now bringing forward his own ‘death tax’, only this time it will be £35-50,000 rather thyan Labour’s £20,000.   He has now broken off the inter-party talks in order to introduce a vacuous White Paper without the costs – or as Sir Alec Douglas-Home neatly put it in 1964: a menu without the prices. (more…)

It is a delicious paradox that the one persistent theme in the Coalition’s ideology is privatising everything in the public sector that moves, yet nothing has exposed the inadequacies and incompetences of privatisation so ruthlessly as the Government’s enthusiasm for it.   The highlight at the moment is the Olympics security fiasco caused by mismanagement at G4S private company in failing to meet its contract target to provide 17,500 guards for the Olympic Park.   As a result the State has had to step in by providing 3,500 military personnel plus substantial extra police reinforcements (who as a result will not be available for their normal duties in safeguarding the public).   A Tory MP on the Commons Public Accounts Committee castigate G4S for charging ‘colossal fees’ for ‘very poor service’.   It would be better to nationalise G4S to improve its management capability, lower its charges, and secure reliability of service. (more…)