Michael Meacher - Labour's Future

So Tony Blair wants to rescue religion from extremism and irrelevance. He certainly is brazen. You really cannot make yourself the obedient servant of Bush, the neo-conservative face of Christian fundamentalism, and then expect to be taken seriously as a voice of moderation. You cannot seduce people into an illegal war in Iraq through a systematic misrepresentation of the facts, and then expect to be accepted as a faith-driven messenger of peace in the cauldron of hatred in the Middle East which he has himself helped to exacerbate. You cannot ruthlessly centralise power and undermine accountability at every point in a decade of rule, and then expect credibility when claiming to be guided by a faith motivation for the last 25 years. As someone once said, ye shall judge them, not by what they say, but by what they do.

He is quite right in my view that religion has a major role to play in world affairs, but not as a convenient adjunct to help solve the political and economic problems of globalisation. He needs to learn that religion is not the servant of politics, even less of particular politicians, but rather an appeal for justice and peace to the world’s people which demands humility, not arrogance, serving others, not dominating them.

We should be very wary of those who claim a close link to God in pursuit of their own ambitious purposes. Bush claims it in pursuit of extending the American empire. Saddam Hussein claimed it in defence of his own tyranny. The Islamic jihadists claim it for the use of terrorist tactics in resisting Western domination. The Jewish settlers’ movement use it in claiming their God-given right to the land of Palestine. Tony Blair is right that there is a fundamentalist face to religion today that has done fearful damage across the world, but he should recognise that it is not confined to Islam or the Middle East.

Posted by Michael Meacher at 04:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

There is something really surreal about the current political scene. As the position of the two main parties becomes increasingly intertwined and the differences between the Blairite and Brownite variations of neo-liberalism become increasingly difficult to detect, the debate about the political fundamentals has dwindled almost to invisibility. Never was ideology more needed, and never was it more lacking.

It isn’t as though there’s little to debate. The free-market Washington consensus, which has governed the global economy for the past quarter century, is in crisis as a result of the sub-prime market fiasco and other excesses of two or more decades of deregulated markets. Yet neither in Parliament nor in the media is there any serious debate of long-term reform. The power structure in Britain has dramatically altered over the same period with the growing centralisation of power around No.10 balanced by the downgrading of Parliament, and linked to the dominance (till now) of the City, big business and increasingly the media. But nowhere is the loss of democratic accountability even discussed, let alone remedied. And since the Iraq war ended nearly five years ago, there has still not been a Parliamentary debate with a vote on the causes, handling and aftermath of the war.

In the absence of discussion about the real big issues, politics has become a matter of narrow positioning, re-positioning and counter-positioning between political elites round daily issues as they arise. Of course these issues have to be addressed, but addressed in terms of an overarching philosophy with which people can identify. The Progress think-tank talk of “a future agenda which is post-Blair, but not anti-Blair; building on the achievements of the past decade, not running away from them” is simply not fit for purpose.

Labour will only make a major and sustained recovery when it stands up for its natural supporters – potentially more than half the population – against the forces of the market which always favour the wealthy over the powerless. The new ultra-wealthy, epitomised by the £27m (£519,230 a week) paid to Bob Diamond of Barclays Capital, are seen by many as greed incorporated when living in the same society as those on a minimum wage of £200 a week. A ratio between top and bottom incomes, which was less than 50:1 only thirty years ago, has now risen to 2,600:1. Labour voters expect their Government to fight inequality, not side with it.

What Labour needs to do, to inspire its potential supporters that they have a Government on their side, is to change the power structure in the manifold different ways that will strengthen the hand of those at present with little or no power. It means implementing the Charter of Fundamental Rights which the other 26 EU States have all accepted without demur. It means restoring the same employment protection rights as are enjoyed elsewhere throughout Europe, particularly for temporary and agency workers. And it must involve protecting individual freedoms from being eroded by cutbacks in legal aid, restrictions on jury trials, limits on the right to protest, and undue detention without charge.

Money is power too, so raising the minimum wage, currently just £5.52 an hour, to at least £7 in the first instance, would empower many with little opportunities. Equally, ensuring through greater transparency in wage and salary determination that representatives of all the main grades in an organisation share a much bigger say in the allocation of annual pay increases would radically change perceptions about rights and power. And it means taking redistribution out of its taboo seclusion – reclaiming a good chunk of the £25bn a year identified by the Institute of Fiscal Studies as tax avoided or evaded by large corporations or very rich individuals (including the hyper-rich non-doms who pay no tax at all) and using it par excellence to provide decent social care for the most vulnerable elderly.

Labour is expected too to ensure that the market is kept in its proper place and not allowed to subvert the public values which give protection and rights and meaning to citizenship. The concept of ‘choice’ in the health services and education has been largely a pretext to open them up to the private sector, without any firm evidence of better outcomes and leading bizarrely to the Tories being poll-rated on health as better than Labour. This aberration should now be stopped if Labour’s reputation as the party of the universality, equity and accountability of public service is to be retrieved. There are other reasons too for a major change of direction here. PFI has proved enormously wasteful, over-extended IT projects have cost billions and still failed, and consultants have enriched themselves at taxpayers’ expense out of all proportion to public benefit. Yet preventive health services, where both better health and much greater cost-effectiveness could be secured, remain hugely under-subscribed. A change here could bring enormous dividends.

Above all, electors want a Labour Government dealing effectively with market failures and excesses. They would prefer temporary public ownership for Northern Rock if that avoids £56bn of loans and guarantees at their expense. Where privatisation has led to hospital infection and overcrowded trains, which they feel strongly about, they look to the State to reverse it if that is necessary. They want a changed relationship with the market which allows the private company brought in to upgrade the London Underground, Metronet, to walk away leaving the public to pick up their £2bn debts. And they expect a Labour Government to tackle Big Business on their behalf where that is necessary – the food industry over unhealthy food and obesity, the gaming industry over casinos, the drinks industry over alcohol-fuelled violence and anti-social behaviour, and the airlines over climate change.

It will not be easy for any Government to begin to move away from the privatisation, deregulation, unfettered market tenets of neo-liberalism which have governed Western political economy for the last three decades and to establish again a much more healthy relationship between the market and society. But the gathering international crisis where money and power have so clearly over-reached themselves offers a real chance. And re-inspiring the Labour project in the run-up to the next election may leave little choice.

Posted by Michael Meacher at 03:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

The Planning Bill, up for second reading in Parliament today, gives business exactly what it wants – de-regulation of the current planning system in order to prioritise economic growth over environmental, social and democratic objectives.

The Bill sets out that new National Planning Statements will be drawn up for an array of major developments – nuclear power and nuclear waste facilities, coal-fired power stations, airport expansions, major road schemes, and large waste incinerators. These Statements will pre-determine such issues as the need for, the safety of, and even the location of some projects, and will have more weight than any other statement of national, regional or local policy.

Then a new body, the Infrastructure Planning Commission, will decide on major project proposals in accordance with the National Policy Statements. The decisions of this new quango will be final, with Ministers no longer able to take decisions in this area. In other words, it removes all direct democratic accountability.

The public will also lose the right to be heard and to cross-examine witnesses in public inquiries. Instead, the Commission will decide whether individuals can give evidence, and in what way. But no questions can be asked about whether the project is really needed, or whether it’s safe, or where it’s located. Most people would describe this process as a complete bureaucratic stitch-up.

Even more extraordinarily, it is proposed in the case of major infrastructure projects that the community consultation will be carried out by the developer himself! As though the promoter of the development will seriously examine alternative development options!

The removal of the needs test will hugely favour supermarkets like Tesco and Wall Mart in getting more out-of-town supermarkets. If we didn’t already pick up the Government’s biases over the planning system, the Planning White Paper says that it aims to “promote competition and consumer choice, and not unduly or disproportionately constrain the market”.

The Government justifies all this by saying it is necessary to make it easier to get these major infrastructure projects through in order to tackle climate change. But the opposite is true, because these are precisely the projects that increase carbon emissions and increase pollution in the first place. The real way to tackle climate change is a massive increase in renewables and decentralised low/no carbon energy systems while phasing out fossil fuels.

These ‘reforms’ are fundamentally anti-democratic because they remove the need for the developer to consult and to gain consent. The public will not even have a right to be heard when far-reaching policy is being drawn up in the National Policy Statements, let alone when decisions are made on the ground. There will be no trust in this new process if people’s involvement is at the discretion of unaccountable bodies with (appropriately) ugly titles like the Infrastructure Planning Commission.

Ominously, this introduction of faceless grey bureaucratic quangos is paralleled by a similar device in the Government’s recent Housing Bill – OFTENANT, who will replace elected local Councils in setting criteria for allocating tenancies, determining rents, deciding how far housing need will be met and in what way, dealing with tenants’ complaints, and even regulating anti-social behaviour on housing estates.

Doing deals behind-the-scenes with the vested interests involved in big infrastructure projects is yet another example of this Government giving priority to corporate power over the public interest. That’s what we would expect of the Tories, not of Labour.

Posted by Michael Meacher at 01:22 PM | Permalink

Extract from my contribution [scroll down to 3.09pm] to the Queen’s Speech debate, 14 November 2007

I believe the Government urgently needs some commanding themes by which its distinctive vision can be clearly understood. I want to propose three.

The first is democratisation which the PM himself adumbrated in his first statement to Parliament. But it has to stretch a great deal further than simply giving Parliament a vote before the country goes to war. Parliament needs real new powers on a much broader front – electing Select Committee members, ratifying (or not) Cabinet nominations made by the PM, approving (or not) the membership and terms of reference of Committees of Inquiry proposed by the PM, and setting up our own Parliamentary Commissions to investigate matters (like extraordinary rendition) when the Government itself refuses to do so.

But it isn’t just in Parliament where there’s a democratic deficit. A far bigger one now exists outside. Power has become so centralised over the last 30 years and the regulatory authorities so enfeebled that so far from regulating corporate power, the biggest businesses have increasingly co-opted the power of the State for themselves for their own commercial ends. The current loosening of controls over major power station, airport and incinerator developments, the failure to regulate unhealthy food advertising because of objections from the food industry despite the epidemic of obesity, the withdrawal of the SFO investigation into corruption allegations against BAE, and the relaxation of the gaming laws to permit a flood of gambling casinos are just a few recent examples.

Accountability today has all but vanished. Perhaps the most telling case is Northern Rock. It is now costing taxpayers £23bn in loans, plus a £2bn interest charge – almost equal to the entire annual defence budget – yet nobody is held responsible. The Bank of England, the Financial Services Authority and the Treasury are all blaming each other. What action is being taken, and by whom, to face up to the fundamental mistakes made that led up to this crisis, including the reckless lending practices of the chief executive of Northern Rock as well as the flawed structure of regulation put in place a decade ago? Why wasn’t Northern Rock temporarily taken into public ownership, as was done in the case of the secondary banking crisis in 1974, in order to avoid a run on the bank and to retain depositors’ confidence without this colossal haemorrhage of public funds? The answer to that of course is that the neo-liberal agenda of privatisation, de-regulation and unfettered markets is still, unaccountably, being imposed above everything else, even at phenomenal cost to the taxpayer so that public ownership, even temporarily, is ruled out.

And what action is the Government going to take over the mania for securitisation, collateralised debt obligations and all the other opaque and dodgy financial derivatives which have so dramatically and comprehensively destabilised the markets? Despite all its de-regulatory instincts, does the Government now acknowledge that stricter regulation of financial markets is now necessary if the frenzy for newfangled financial instruments, which are actually designed to be deceptive over risk and value, is to be curbed?

Equally, at the other end of society, the checks and balances against the arbitrary use of power have all but evaporated. Civil liberties have been drastically eroded, and the introduction of ID cards and 2-months detention without charge, both of which I deplore, are still being mooted. Workers who have been in their jobs less than two years can still be arbitrarily dismissed without any rights, and temporary and agency workers remain an exploited underclass – mainly at the behest of the CBI which this Government should be much stronger in resisting. Accountability, or indeed any redress, against alleged misdemeanours by the police, judges, banks, private utilities or big corporations is almost non-existent. Today powerlessness is widely felt to be endemic throughout society, and it will require an awful lot more than focus groups or citizens’ juries to put it right.

Continue reading "A real vision for Labour" »

Posted by Michael Meacher at 08:16 PM | Permalink

Some useful proposals – though the devil may lie in the detail, not yet revealed – but disappointing on the vision and no razzmatazz of new ideas for a new leader, largely because Gordon Brown has already been leading on the domestic policy agenda for the past ten years and now has nothing much new to say.

It’s good that after two decades of neglect of social housing amidst the triumphalist ideology of private ownership, the national scandal of housing need is now at least being noticed. Council waiting lists are now above 1 ½ million and there are over 100,000 homeless, yet only 100 Council homes were built last year (down from 13,000 a year at the end of the Thatcher era). The housing stock is only growing by some 185,000 a year at present, yet the number of new households being formed each year is about 220,000. We are still going backwards. Building an extra 40,000 homes a year, as the Government proposes, is clearly nowhere near enough to meet the yawning gap of housing need. And how many of the 40,000 will be social housing anyway? And why are local authorities still not being allowed to build more Council houses themselves if they wish, borrowing against the security of their own existing housing stock?

Changes to the planning system, as is proposed, might seem sensible when some planning decisions have clearly taken far too long. The 8 years spent on the Heathrow Terminal 5 decision is usually quoted here (though much of that was accounted for by the time spent on Ministers’ desks after the planning report was submitted). But today’s proposals are motivated by very different criteria. National Policy Statements will be drawn up which will enable an array of major developments – nuclear power and nuclear waste facilities, coal-fired power stations, airport expansions, major road schemes, and large waste incinerators – to be put through without the public having a say on whether they are needed or safe, or where they are to be located. This rather conflicts with Brown’s stated wish to bring more democracy into public decisions.

A Climate Change Bill is very welcome, but again its contents leave a lot to be desired. It promises a review of progress in cutting carbon emissions every 5 years which is far too lax when the UK is way off track to meet the Government’s objectives. Clearly annual targets, published and enforceable, are urgently needed. Moreover, air travel and shipping emissions are omitted, even though they are the fastest rising sources of emissions. Nor are mere targets sufficient anyway when other Government policies, notably a tripling of airport capacity by 2030, are diametrically opposed.

Democratisation has also been one of Gordon’s ostensible goals, which is also desperately needed. But it has to stretch a great deal further than simply giving Parliament a vote before the country goes to war – a concession which after the Iraq debacle would probably be inevitable anyway. Parliament needs real new power on a much broader front – electing Select Committee members rather than letting the Whips use the patronage to gain a wider acquiescence, ratifying (or not) Cabinet nominations made by the PM, approving (or not) the membership and terms of reference of Committees of Inquiry proposed by the PM, and setting up their own Parliamentary Commissions to investigate controversial issues (e.g. extraordinary rendition) when the Government refuses to do so. Nor can the idea of greater democracy cut much ice when the Government is still intending to pursue the ID cards folly and, even worse, extend the 28-days detention without charge in defiance of the 800 year old habeas corpus.

And what is not in the Queen’s Speech is perhaps even more important than what is. There’s nothing about redressing the centralisation of power which is such an indictment of the current state of Britain. There’s nothing about redressing the grotesque inequality of income and wealth – nor was there is in the Pre-Budget Report a month ago. And there’s nothing about restoring the ethos of public service which has taken such a battering under Blair – indeed it’s taking a further hit currently with the huge cutbacks in BBC funding which threaten public service broadcasting. Et tu, Gordon?

Posted by Michael Meacher at 11:22 AM | Permalink

It’s not only civil servants that get off scot-free (as I blogged here) when they screw up. The Northern Rock fiasco shows it applies also in spades to bankers and so-called finance regulators in today’s finance capitalism.

Matt Ridley, the Old Etonian zoologist chairing Northern Rock, owed his position almost entirely to being heir to Viscount Ridley, and had no knowledge of financial services and no capacity for independence to control a headstrong chief executive taking fearful risks. A month into the crisis he is still there.

Adam Applegarth, the chief executive, borrowed recklessly on unreliable wholesale markets, even up to 75%, for his mortgage lending. Like the US sub-prime lenders, he packaged up the mortgages of borrowers and through securitisation sold on the debt for cash, and used an aggressive sales drive to drum up yet further business. When a lending freeze seized up international money markets in the aftermath of the unfolding US sub-prime disaster, his plan collapsed. He too is still there.

Callum McCarthy, chair of the Financial Services Authority which is in charge of banking supervision, blithely believed that the dangers of excessive bank borrowing for mortgage lending were minimal and failed to recognise early on that Northern Rock’s methods made it unduly vulnerable to wholesale money market volatility. The FSA issued no warnings until too late and manifestly failed in its regulatory duties. He is still there.

Mervyn King, Governor of the Bank of England, refused when the credit crunch bit to inject liquidity into the markets to bail out the banks so as not to condone irresponsible lending, thus sealing Northern Rock’s fate, but then did an about-turn by pumping £10bn into the markets to stop the rot spreading, thus achieving the worst of both worlds. The regulatory system could hardly have made more of a mess. But despite presiding over the first run on a British bank for 140 years, he still survives.

Sir John Gieve, his deputy, was the link between the Bank and the FSA., and as such has been accused of being asleep on the job. By failing to read the reports from Northern Rock and then going on holiday in the first two weeks as the crisis gathered, he failed to note and take action on the warning signs. He too remains in post.

Over the last 5 years while Northern Rock pursued such obviously dubious business methods, the chief executive took home £10m, his deputy £7m, the finance director £6m, the zoologist chairman £1m, and the non-exec directors another £1m. None has resigned or paid back any of their enormous gains to ordinary depositors who found their savings disintegrating.

It is a sorry story of mammoth ineptitude, yet nobody is held to account. Indeed one of the main lessons of Northern Rock is to expose just how far the accountability of Britain’s financial leaders has now utterly vanished.

There is one more casualty too. The 1997 reforms which brought independence to the Bank of England also removed banking supervision to the new FSA. This has been the first real test of the new regime, and it has clearly worked badly, with inept handling by almost all the lead players and the regulatory authorities forced belatedly into hasty and contradictory decisions. Split regulation was obviously not such a good idea, and is certainly not how the US Fed and the European Central Bank head off trouble brewing in the financial markets. Time to think again, Gordon.

Posted by Michael Meacher at 05:05 PM | Permalink

See also The Guardian

Party democracy is the single most important issue at this Conference because it underpins everything else by giving reality to Party opinion on every other issue.

I was encouraged when Gordon made his first statement to the Commons on democratising Parliament, and then when he issued his consultation on Extending and Renewing Party Democracy. It was like a breath of fresh air.

But removing Contemporary Motions and votes on important policy issues is a huge step backwards, not an advance towards Party democracy. The bottom line is this: what is the point of Conference at all if it’s just a talk shop, and there’s no way you can influence the Party Leadership and Government to change course? The Labour Party isn’t a discussion organisation, it’s about power. That’s why people joined it, and that’s why people are committed to it.

Ever since the Labour Party was formed a hundred years ago and the Labour Party Rule Book was drawn up in 1918, we have been a democratic party where the ultimate authority lay with our annual delegate Conference. Now of course we want to support a Leadership we ourselves have elected, but that Leadership is accountable to Conference, and if that accountability is removed, then we become just another organisation where the real power is exercised behind the scenes in backroom deals with the business interests who run industry, finance and the media.

I know that the deal is that we try out this new arrangement for 2 years and then review it. But let’s get real – once this change is made, it’s not going to be changed back again in 2 years.

I say Enough is enough. If we let this go through in today’s vote, then the Labour Party as a power organisation is reduced virtually to impotence.

But before we do vote on this, let’s be clear this was a consultation document, and the consultation ended a week ago. So what were the full results? Are we going to see all the results before we vote? Surely this should be remitted until we’ve all had a chance to digest the whole range of opinions in every section of the Party on an issue like this, which is not just another issue, but fundamental to the entire policy-making process.

This proposal would remove a key pillar of Party democracy. We should reject it because the Labour Party was born a democratic party, it has flourished as a democratic party, and for all our sakes it should remain a democratic party.

Posted by Michael Meacher at 04:54 PM | Permalink

The news that foot and mouth has been detected again on a Surrey farm is ominous when we had just been assured by Defra that it had been eliminated. But it also raises another crucial issue: who is to blame for these outbreaks which have already cost the farming industry £50 millions, and shouldn’t those responsible, if they have failed in their duty, be held to account in whatever appropriate way, not just walk away?

This matters because it isn’t just an isolated incident, but typical of many other cases where official authority has made mistakes with disastrous consequences.

In this case, the outbreak of foot and mouth in August near Pirbright in Surrey occurred because, according to the official report, the virus had probably leaked from the poorly maintained drains at the Institute for Animal Health (IAH) facility there, owned and licensed by the Government, into surrounding soil. It was then probably carried to the surface by floodwater and spread to animals on a nearby farm through contaminated soil stuck to the vehicles of building contractors working on the site.

The crucial point is that Government officials knew for 4 years previously that drains underneath the laboratory were insecure and that the virus could escape, but failed to carry out the repairs. They failed to do so because there was a long-standing dispute between the IAH and Merial, a private vaccine company which leases a building on the site, over responsibility for the drains.

It is clear, given the manifest biosafety risks involved especially after the catastrophic foot and mouth outbreak in 2001, that the IAH, and the Defra officials behind them, should have resolved this issue 4 years ago, if necessary in court, in order to ensure that the drains were properly maintained so as to prevent any escape of the virus. Those responsible should now be called to account, not least (on the evidence available) with the loss of their jobs, since the cost to the public interest has been enormous.

Continue reading "Civil servants should be held accountable for their mistakes" »

Posted by Michael Meacher at 10:36 AM | Permalink

(Photo: Labour Behind The Label)

The news that three major discount clothing retailers - Asda, Tesco and Primark - import clothes from factories in Bangladesh where workers are forced to work up to 80 hours a week for only 4p an hour in some cases has made the supermarket chains launch an investigation into press reports about conditions in these factories. As though they didn't know!

Bully for the investigative media - what's left of it - but the point is it shouldn't have to depend on such freelance initiatives. The big private companies are major players in the UK and international economy, and the way they operate have huge ramifications - for consumers, suppliers, workers, job opportunities and job losses, labour standards and workplace rights, the environment and climate impacts, resource and energy use, waste generation and pollution, as well as for competitiveness and more generally for the country's social/economic image.

So as in this particular case involving gross exploitation of workers in Bangladesh, the public is entitled to know the facts, the economic realities, and the shameful treatment that lies behind cheap merchandise in our shops. The lesson of this episode is that the scope of the Freedom of Information Act should be extended to, say, the top 1,000 biggest private companies whose influence on our society and way of life equals, if not surpasses, the impact of the public sector. This must be one of our demands on the new Brown Government which has made such a point about strengthening accountability.

Posted by Michael Meacher at 12:40 PM | Permalink

The carefully choreographed distancing of UK foreign policy from the US – first announced, then denied, coded message now clearly received – will be received with palpable relief by the Labour Party and the overwhelming majority of British people. The umbilical cord by which Blair insisted on embedding himself in Bush was humiliating, demeaning and ultimately fruitless because it never produced a shred of reciprocity.

However, once again we should look very carefully at what actually happens, not just at a gesture waved in our direction. Two issues immediately stand out.

One is, what would happen if, in the 18 months left to Bush, the neocons in a last fling launched their long-planned strike against Iran, almost certainly bombing raids whether by the US itself or possibly Israel? Would Gordon Brown the next morning come down in favour of Bush or would he repudiate such madness and back the British people? At the one leadership hustings that took place in May, I asked him this question. He evaded it with several minutes of waffle – it won’t happen, diplomacy is winning through, multilateral alliance are being forged, etc. etc. Since he hadn’t answered the question, I immediately asked it again. I was treated to a repetition of the same waffle. It’s worrying he won’t tell us.

The second key issue is, will Brown withdraw British troops from Iraq when the British commander on the spot, Sir Richard Dannatt, says, as he has, that the presence of occupation troops is actually exacerbating, not helping, the security situation, or will he keep them there as long as the Americans insist on having a diplomatic fig-leaf to cover their own occupation? Clearly Bush, success or no success with his surge, is not intending any significant reduction in US forces in the year and a half before the end of his Presidency. It is all too likely that American troops will remain in Iraq, albeit with some limited cuts in numbers, far beyond that. After all, the reason they invaded Iraq has nothing to do with stopping Saddam’s brutalities or replacing him with democracy; they’re there because of the oil. As peak oil rapidly approaches and competition with China intensifies over the remaining repositories of oil left in the world, the US is not going to give up any time soon its priceless economic, political and military prize astride the three countries – Saudi, Iran and Iraq – with far and away the biggest global concentration of oilfields left.

So if Bush clicks his fingers and says No to a full British withdrawal within a 6-12 month period at most, will Gordon Brown defy him, or will our poodledom continue? We are entitled to know.

Posted by Michael Meacher at 03:49 PM | Permalink

Cash for peerages, dropping the Serious Fraud Office inquiry into BAE-Al Yamamah, and the sacking of the parliamentary ethics watchdog because he had the audacity to criticise senior ministers’ conduct, says it all. When the interests of those with power are threatened, the upholders of justice are themselves attacked.

So who in future will have the independence and protected authority to speak out in defence of the nation’s integrity? I have a proposal to make to Gordon Brown.

The Lord Chancellor is widely seen as an anachronism who combines into one person executive, legislative and judicial power.

However, the original function of the office, a thousand or more years ago, is strikingly up-to-date and remarkably necessary: keeper of the Sovereign’s conscience. The Chancellor was there to prevent the abuse of power by the King (or more commonly, on the King’s behalf, to cut down over-mighty barons) and to provide an independent source of justice – through the Court of Chancery – for people who could not get it through the cumbersome and expensive common law.

Could we not restore the office to its traditional and resonant role? The Chancellor would cease to be a Minister and a member of the Upper House – after all, Thomas More was never a peer. He or she would be appointed by the Sovereign – and for once, this means by the Sovereign without advice from the Government of the day. He or she would serve for a fixed term, longer than a single Parliament, and would be removable only by a two-thirds majority of both Houses.

On leaving office, the Chancellor would be forbidden from taking up any paid appointment, as a guarantee of his or her integrity.

The Chancellor would be responsible for all judicial appointments, including the magistracy, but he or she personally would not act as a judge. That would mean that all judicial appointments were made by a totally independent person responsible only to the Head of State, not by a quango appointed by Government.

The Chancellor could also serve as the Sovereign’s legal adviser on matters of State – and Parliament’s adviser too. For example, the Chancellor, rather than Ministers, might make the declaration that Parliamentary Bills do or do not comply with the Human Rights Act. The Chancellor might advise the Sovereign and Parliament on fundamental questions arising from devolution or the EU, including interpretation of the EU constitution (if it ever arrives).

The Chancellor would advise the Sovereign and Parliament at their request on the legality of any act of State, including war. How much might we have been saved if that had happened before the Iraqi disaster!

This would also end the double anomaly of the Attorney General. He advises the Sovereign, but if the Sovereign wants alternative advice, he or she cannot seek it except on the advice of the Attorney General. He is accountable to Parliament, but denies Parliament the legal advice they need to hold him to account.

But most creatively, the Chancellor would re-invent the role of keeper of the country’s conscience. As such, he or she would take general responsibility for all the mechanisms in the British State which are intended to safeguard the people against wrongdoing or injustice – not only the courts and tribunals, but all the regulatory agencies, all complaints authorities, all forms of Ombudsman, all investigatory bodies, all Commissioners for special groups such as children.

He or she would not appoint all their members, but would have a power to intervene if their appointments systems, procedures or indeed outcomes were defective.

It would also be an excellent idea if the Chancellor could take final responsibility for the accuracy of all official information and statistics, to prevent manipulation to suit the powers-that-be.

He or she should also take charge of the Honours system, apart from political honours (though perhaps the latter should be scrapped). There would then be no cash for peerages scandal in future.

As the Sovereign’s official conscience, the Chancellor would act as a universal clearing-house for whistleblowers. Anyone at all who wished to report any ‘unconscionable’ act or abuse of power – whether in the public or private sector – could do so to the Chancellor. All such reports would be investigated under his or her ultimate supervision. They would also enjoy absolute legal privilege and the whistleblower would have immunity against any kind of penalty, unless the reports were frivolous, malicious or dishonest.

This office would have immense responsibility and authority. Totally independent of any vested interest, including government, the Chancellor could be a powerful protector of the law and good conduct when there is so much concern today about sleaze and cynicism about politics.

Why then end the Lord Chancellorship, as the Government is pledged to do, just when we need it most in modernised form?

(Originally published in Tribune)

Posted by Michael Meacher at 05:22 PM | Permalink

What a week! First we have Gordon Brown’s constitutional reforms strengthening Parliament’s powers to hold the Executive to account – though we have yet to see the small print about how they would operate and there are several important gaps which need to be plugged in the consultation period and many new powers added. Now we have the DCLG proposals to give local people power to determine, or at least influence, how some of their tax revenues are spent – to enforce their own priorities, not the Council’s. There’s also talk of giving people the right to petition Councils, which Councillors would then be obliged to consider. Excellent, and it should be piloted quickly.

But why limit it to Councils? Why shouldn’t both these proposals be considered for application to Parliament as well? The Treasury always wisely keeps a precautionary contingency fund in reserve of about 10%, amounting to some £50bn a year. If as little as 5% of this were set aside for allocation by the citizenry in accordance with their own priorities, it would allow some £2.5bn a year to be devoted to national projects which the people themselves wanted, not just a tiny conclave of Departmental negotiators carving up the national cake in secret discussions with the Treasury. It would revive interest in national politics more than any number of Ministerial press notices spinning the good news about their latest expenditure plans.

And if Councils can be petitioned, why not Parliament too? In fact there’s already of course a precedent via the No.10 website. When 1.8million people recently supported a call opposing road pricing on this website, the cognoscenti thought this was an own goal by giving the opposition a platform to have a go at the government on a very sensitive and difficult issue (on which the Government are obviously right). Of course there are always plenty within the Westminster –Whitehall bubble who want to keep out the people at all costs and get on with governing as only they know best, but they never believed in democracy in the first place.

MPs should set up our own Parliamentary website, and where petitions or proposals attracted overwhelming interest and support, Parliament should consider, perhaps via its Liaison Committee composed of all its Select Committee chairs, whether some might be tabled for debate and vote on the floor of the House. That might at last inject some real excitement into the parliamentary process which is now largely moribund.

However, despite all these plaudits, I have one major criticism. If the Government is opening up the channels of democracy at last which have been so long blocked, why is the Party leadership going in the opposite direction when it comes to Party Conference? The latter has already been largely neutered by the leadership’s refusal to acknowledge or accept any resolution where it is defeated. Now it is being proposed that there won’t even be a vote at all at the end of debates, in other words Conference is treated as a glorified talkshop around the only event in the week that matters – the Leader’s speech. And maybe this is the precursor to getting rid of Conference altogether, as we are moved steadily down the road towards American-style rallies without the inconvenience of a Party impertinent enough to want to have a say.

When it’s the electorate, some attempt is being made at last to give them a teeny-weeny taste of power, but when it comes to the Party, even that tiny pretence of influence that the Party liked to think it might have is now, it seems, to be flattened.

Posted by Michael Meacher at 03:50 PM | Permalink

It’s excellent news that Gordon Brown has so quickly put up-front his proposed constitutional reforms to end the antiquated and anti-democratic so-called royal prerogative powers – though we do need to look at the small print of exactly what is the detail of the changes to be made.

Having US Congressional-style confirmation hearings by appropriate Select Committees for key public positions is something I have long advocated. It should apply to Cabinet Ministers as well as key appointments outside Parliament. It should also include the power of recall by Parliament where appropriate for a further hearing where events justified it.

Requiring explicit Parliamentary approval before the country is committed to war is clearly right. But it does also mean that Parliament must be given, well in advance of the point where the advance to war becomes virtually unstoppable, the full evidence – not selective, not spun, not manipulated – on which the decision to go to war is based. That is what I proposed in my Private Member’s Bill on this issue earlier this year.

It is also sensible that MPs should be able to scrutinise the working of the honours system. But better still would be to abolish the whole system.

Drawing up a Bill of Rights is also clearly desirable, but everything depends on what is included in it – and what not. And since Blair-Brown have just gone out of their way to reject the Charter of Fundamental Rights which was supported by every one of the other 26 EU Member States, it is important to insist that basic rights must include collective rights, not just individual rights.

But if Parliament is genuinely to hold the Executive to account, what is so far missing from Gordon Brown’s proposals is the right for Parliament to set up its own Parliamentary Commission to investigate issues which may go beyond the scope or resources of a normal Select Committee inquiry, and where the Executive may be unwilling to initiate action itself. Obvious recent examples are an inquiry into the Iraq War and the whole question of extraordinary rendition. That is the real test of how meaningful these reforms are going to be.

Continue reading "Good news from Gordon?" »

Posted by Michael Meacher at 01:05 PM | Permalink

From today's Times:

Politics is in a curiously disorientated state in Britain today. On one side, old-style Toryism was voted out in 1997, and has now been replaced by a soft veneer of environmentalism and family-centredness that contrasts sharply with the excesses of private equity capitalism. On the other, the persistent shifting to the right under new Labour has now blown itself out, as the polls indicate, leaving a large segment of political space occupied by mainstream Labour opinion and probably a majority of the electorate as a whole largely disenfranchised.

This key part of the spectrum urgently needs representation to give it fresh direction — not old Labour either, but a modern progressive politics addressing the big issues now being ducked and championing key groups now being marginalised.

First, we need a change of direction to heal the divisions that are increasingly straining the fabric of our society. The Government has made some progress in reducing poverty, but not nearly enough. Inequalities are actually increasing. The average pay of the chief executives of the top FTSE 100 companies is now £46,150 a week, 250 times the minimum wage and 500 times the state pension, while at the same time there are still 12.5 million people, including more than 2 million children, living in households below the Government’s poverty line. This matters because reducing inequality leads to less violence, better health, longer life expectancy, lower teenage birth rates and higher educational attainment.

We need a new approach to cutting crime if we genuinely believe in being as tough on the causes of crime as on crime itself. It’s not sensible to go on banging people up even faster than we can build new prisons without tackling much harder the causes of criminality, and putting much more emphasis on reducing recidivism. Despite unprecedented increase in the use of custody, reconviction rates have soared. The hardline policy isn’t working.

We must drastically reduce the prison population, confining it to violent and dangerous offenders. We should provide instead secure units in the community where lesser offenders are required to attend compulsory courses on anger control, money management and parenting, and also to receive education and skills training and treatment for drug addiction and mental health needs, and are made to do unpaid work to repay the community.

Probably the best crime reduction value for money comes from parenting programmes and youth inclusion panels, bringing together local services to focus support on 8 to 13-year-olds at highest risk. Of course there are increased costs involved in intensive rehabilitation, but if prison places and reoffending costs can be significantly reduced, there should be a substantial net saving in public expenditure.

We need too to arrest the overcentralisation of power in this country. Key decisions, such as the replacement of Trident and the restoration of nuclear energy, should not be taken without consultation of the Cabinet, Parliament and public opinion.

Indeed, the most direct way to win back public trust and reconnect with the electorate is for the Government to be seen as genuinely accountable, listening and being prepared to adjust in the face of strong public demand.

It also means Parliament reasserting its authority by taking the right to ratify (or not) nominations to the Cabinet made by the Prime Minister, by appointing committees of inquiry where the Government refuses to do so (as over rendition flights), by ending the Royal Prerogative whereby the Prime Minister can unilaterally declare war and authorise military action, and through its select committees tabling its own motions for debate and voting on the floor of the Commons. Giving the public the right to initiate legislation through referendums is another issue to explore.

We also need much more vigorously to tackle the greatest threat facing the world today: climate change. It must permeate every policy area of Government — not just energy, but transport, industry, building, agriculture, public expenditure and taxation, and foreign policy. It is not enough merely to talk of the end of oil dependence when our electricity generation from renewable energy is, at just 4 per cent, by far the lowest in Europe.

We need an overall plan to meet the scientists’ target of reducing carbon emissions by at least 60 per cent by 2050. It is a colossal challenge, but a win-win-win-win scenario. It will increase energy efficiency hugely, create large savings for industry and some of our poorest households, protect our economy against sudden destabilising external shocks and safeguard us from climate catastrophe.

Finally, we must stop being subservient to the US. We can’t go on being America’s glove puppet, as we have been over Iraq and Lebanon, and, most worryingly, Iran. We need a foreign policy that robustly reasserts our own essential British interests and our commitment to the UN. The first demonstration of that should be strong opposition to any potential US or Israeli attack on Iran, and insistence that the nuclear impasse must be resolved by negotiation or by UN sanctions, not by violence.

We should take the advice not of the US but of British military commanders on the spot in speeding up our troop withdrawal from Iraq. And we should push for a wider international peace conference for a joint settlement of interconnected Middle East issues that cannot be solved one by one. The latest reports of a US change of heart about talking to Iran and Syria make this now a serious possibility.

It is because I believe that radical new policies of this kind would reenergise politics in this country that I am standing for the leadership of the Labour Party.

www.michaelmeacher.info

Posted by Michael Meacher at 02:04 PM | Permalink

(From Tribune.)

When Sir Hayden Phillips was appointed in the wake of the cash for honours episode, a lot more was at stake than simply new arrangements for party funding. In the background was a long-laid plan for the Americanisation of British politics

Sir Hayden’s key recommendation – a £50,000 cap on donations, with some restrictions on national or local spending – would, if accepted, lead inexorably towards ever greater dependence of all the political parties on rich donors, whether companies or individuals, as in the US. Apart from reproducing in Britain the cancer at the heart of the American plutocracy, it would emasculate even further the sense of shared involvement which has always been at the heart of British political democracy.

The essence of the US political model is that parties exist for fund-raising and vote-getting purposes at elections, not for political education or for participation in the political process through lobbying of leaders or ministers. Political leaders, who are dependent for their election on a war-chest drawn from rich donors, overwhelmingly big business, owe no allegiance to operating political parties or to any particularly distinctive political or class ideology. American politics is thus driven by this alliance of convenience between a narrowly drawn political elite and the business plutocracy that sustains it on condition of rewards and kickbacks from whichever party wins.

British politics is still a long way from reaching this point. But the signs of seismic change in this direction in the last days of the Blair era are all too apparent. A donation cap of £50,000 would virtually cripple the mass financing of the Labour Party via the trade unions whilst still allowing the Conservative Party to draw in full on its traditional source of funding from wealthy corporate and individual donors, only spread more widely than before. Though some of the finance gap, probably only a small part because of public distaste, may be met by State funding, the dependence of British politics on rich donors would be remorselessly increased.

There are several ironies in this situation. A scandal that arose from the demand to clean up British politics from the alleged corruption of selling peerages in exchange for huge cash contributions has now been turned on its head by efforts to suppress the one element in the current system that is genuinely democratic – the contribution by millions of union members to a political fund legitimised by a regular vote. By contrast, large-scale contributions by companies are not subject to any vote of either shareholders or employees.

Another irony is that the Hayden Phillips proposals seem to be targeted at reducing or eliminating trade union influence when the real corrosive power behind the scenes is wielded by business funding. The Phillips review proposes “individualisation” whereby each union member opts in or out each year of contributing to political parties. Collective trade union funding would largely come to an end. Yet all the evidence suggests that union monies have had no influence whatever in subverting the political process over the last two decades, while corporate monies exert very considerable power in overriding democratic channels and due legal process. The Ecclestone affair, the kow-towing to Murdoch, Blair’s over-close relationship with BP and BAE Systems (and those are just the ones we know about), the alleged cash for peerages episode itself, together with the policy of keeping employee workplace rights firmly under the thumb of the employers, all point in this direction.

But radically increasing dependence on business and other wealthy donors is only part of the present landscape that is moving. Several other proposals currently floated are coming together like pieces in a broader jigsaw. There is already talk of introducing primaries for the election of party leaders. No.10 has been strongly pressing for a loose “supporters’ network” as an addition to, and perhaps eventual substitute for, party membership. The advantage for the proponents of this political model is that ‘supporters’ could be readily targeted by email while bothersome members continually demanding a participatory role in policy-making could be dispensed with. Already Labour Party Annual Conference has been reduced to a grandstanding for the Leader’s speech, and now the idea of it being held less frequently, say biennially, is being talked about. Party subscriptions have been raised to £36 a year – a further discouragement to low-paid members when ‘supporters’ are not charged anything at all.

Again there is a bitter irony here. All of these measures will conspire to increase power in the hands of the political leadership. Yet the single biggest failure of the British political system today is the over-centralisation of power within a narrow, unelected clique around the Prime Minister which excludes the Cabinet and the elected Parliament, together with the almost total breakdown in the democratic checks and balances for holding the Executive and particularly the Prime Minister to account.

Britain now has in effect a President without the counter-balances of the Presidential system in the US where a separately elected Congress can act as an effective check against arbitrary Presidential rule. In Britain, by contrast, the unitary hierarchy of power from Prime Minister downwards undermines the constitutional necessity of a separation of powers, as the current questions over the independence of the Attorney-General’s advice about the legal case for the Iraq War and the closing down of the SFO investigation into suspected corruption in the Al Yamamah arms deal with Saudi Arabia make only too clear. There is no case whatever for changing party funding arrangements in a manner which will consolidate yet further Prime Ministerial power linked to private deals with big business – quite the reverse.

For several decades, the power of the Prime Minister has grown. It is still growing, and now needs to be cut back as a matter of urgency. The current proposals however for restructuring party funding do not represent the modernisation of politics in Britain. They reflect rather the emasculation of the existing balance of power which will lead inexorably towards the Americanised system where corporate coffers buy political parties. That’s not democracy, but plutocracy.

Posted by Michael Meacher at 09:51 AM | Permalink

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Posted by Michael Meacher at 04:46 PM | Permalink

This piece on the outcome and effects of last night's vote appears on the New Statesman website, as does an article from a Trident supporter, Tom Watson MP.

Whatever the arguments over the wisdom of retaining nuclear weapons, he and I both seem to agree that the way in which the matter was handled within the PLP and indeed the Labour Party as a whole needs to change drastically if we are to see Labour regain electoral support.

Continue reading "Closing down options for disarmament" »

Posted by Michael Meacher at 12:11 PM | Permalink

Posted by Michael Meacher at 09:24 AM | Permalink

The consultation on Trident has been a sham. By fixing a vote in the House of Commons for next Wednesday, No 10 is bouncing us into a momentous decision years before expert opinion says it is necessary.

As leader, I would re-open this decision. I would arrange a full and proper consultation lasting at least six months, embracing all the relevant options and making sure public opinion is properly heard, followed by at least a two day debate in Parliament, ending with a fresh and much more authoritative vote.

Posted by Michael Meacher at 12:25 PM | Permalink

Meacher: why Spectator readers should vote for me

A leadership election opens up, uniquely, the opportunity to debate and decide on the future course of a government. I am standing because I believe there are several areas of policy where a fundamental change of direction is now needed. And though Spectator readers may initially be sceptical about the relevance of my policies to them, I believe that if they read on with an open mind, they'll find much that they agree with. I'm sure they'll agree, for instance, that New Labour and Tory policies have become similar, almost overlapping, which means that politics has become increasingly fixated on personalities, as though a blanket consensus on policy had been achieved. This is ridiculous. Old-style Toryism was rejected in 1997, and now New Labour - the continuing moving-right show - has clearly faded. It's time, not for Old Labour either, but for a mainstream Labour approach - which may well represent majority opinion within the electorate but has been suppressed for over a decade - to be reasserted as a modern progressive politics with new solutions to today's profound problems.

Continue reading "From the Spectator (3 March 2007)" »

Posted by Michael Meacher at 10:09 AM | Permalink

Tonight's vote today in favour of having an all elected chamber represents a huge step forward. It was good to see all the options where there would have been a majority appointed element being rejected so decisively.

Now we must have legislation to act on the will of the Commons – because we voted as we did to reflect the weight of public opinion, which wants a 21st century bicameral parliament, not a 19th century one. We have to see the government commit itself to a bill that will turn tonight's vote into law and give us a properly elected second chamber, where the elections are run on an open list system and places on that list are decided by party members, not by party apparatchiks and the leadership.

Posted by Michael Meacher at 07:36 PM | Permalink

(From the Independent)

Labour leadership contender answers your questions, such as 'Why not sell your flats to help fight against poverty?' & 'What's your guilty pleasure?'
Published: 05 March 2007

Are you a socialist? What does that mean today? MIKE WOODBRIDGE, Brighton

Yes, I am. A socialist believes that while the market has its proper place, the fundamental principles underpinning society should be equity, social justice, equality of opportunity, and democratic accountability. Even where the market is a dominant force, socialists believe it should be regulated to ensure high environmental, social and labour standards.

Why, as a socialist, do you own so many houses? GARY BROWNE, Glasgow

As I have regularly stated in the register of Members' interests, I own four flats. I have saved throughout my life, and put my savings into property. I don't think [that] is contrary to socialism.

Given your views on poverty, why not sell some of your houses and give the money to charity? Or are you just another hypocritical politician? V AHMAD, Birmingham

I already give a significant amount to charity . I agree there is an urgent need to build much more social, affordable housing but selling my flats which are already occupied would not contribute one iota to that.

Isn't it delusional of you to challenge Gordon Brown for the Labour leadership? MAURICE BURKE, Birmingham

No. There should be a contest because only an election enables us to debate the real policy issues. I also believe that members of the Labour Party should have the right to choose their own leaders. I believe, too, that as New Labour, of which Gordon Brown is perhaps the main architect, has moved continually ever further to the right, the mainstream majority of the party has been left disenfranchised and without a voice. It is not sensible to assume the results of any election before the electors have had a chance to deliver their opinion which may sometimes come as rather a shock to the chattering classes. Not too many people I guess expected David Cameron to come from behind and win the Tory Party leadership.

Don't you think Gordon offers Labour the best hope of winning the next election? VALERIE EVANS, Cardiff

Have you seen the last two polls? Both put the Tories 11 per cent ahead, and one poll found that if Gordon was leader, the Tories would be 13 per cent ahead.

I am a Labour supporter, but I despair that Gordon Brown has been such a coward over the war, talks nonsense on 'Britishness' and seems so in love with Rupert Murdoch that he will hand the next election to Cameron. Do you agree - and if not, which bits do you disagree with and why? DAVE FISCHER, Sheffield

Cameron has certainly, at this stage at least, improved the Tories' poll ratings, but not, I think, for the reasons you give.

A majority on the Labour left support John McDonnell and see your campaign as a spoiler which will only split the vote and stop a contest. Will you stand down if John has more nominations when Blair resigns? SUSAN PRESS, Calder Valley

There is no evidence whatever that a majority of people on the Labour Party left and the affiliated trade union movement support John McDonnell for leader. I have a great deal of respect for John, but I don't believe he can get the necessary 45 nominations, whereas I believe I can. I am not splitting the vote, but rather giving the centre-left the chance, to run a candidate who can pass the nominations threshold. But I do agree that whichever of the two of us has the larger number of nominations, the other should stand down when Tony Blair resigns.

Why not use that photo of you on Blackpool beach (very Daniel Craig) for your campaign posters? CONOR MURPHY, Reading

Good try. At least it shows I'm healthy.

Do you think Blair should stand down now?STEVE HARRISON, Bolton

The sooner he stands down, the better.

Why did you vote in favour of the invasion of Iraq?DEAN PALMER, Norwich

I made the biggest mistake of my political life when I supported the war, on the grounds that the Prime Minister repeatedly gave chapter and verse about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction and assured us that if only we knew all the intelligence available to him, we would have no doubts about the necessity for this action. I still find it deeply disturbing for democracy that a prime minister can so massage and fabricate the evidence in order to push through a preconceived war plan.

Do you think Blair lied to his MPs and lied to the country over Iraq?JEFF TERRY, Dundee

I think the highly selective manipulation of such evidence as there was, together with the highly prejudicial use to which it was put, was deeply dishonest.

You claim you were misled that Saddam had a WMD programme. Yet you say the West has no right to tell Iran not to develop nuclear weapons. Aren't you being rather inconsistent over Iraq and Iran?JIM ROLAND, London NW11

No, these are two quite separate arguments. Yes, we were certainly misled over Saddam's alleged WMD programme. While we should try to prevent Iranian nuclear weapons by negotiation and UN sanctions, we cannot say that nuclear weapons are indispensable for our own security, and then say Iran does not need them for their own security, especially when Iran (unlike the West) is surrounded by seven states which are nuclear-armed and some very hostile.

Do you truly believe that the US government knew about 9/11 but failed to prevent it?CHRIS QUIGLEY, by email

Clearly the US government did not know the precise time and location of the al-Qa'ida attack, but equally clearly there was a great deal of intelligence beforehand which, for whatever reason, it seems that they did not follow up.

You have suggested that the US government knew about the 9/11 attacks (which is pretty obvious I reckon, but fair play to you nonetheless). How complicit do you believe the UK Government was in 7/7? PAUL HUGHES, by email

Not at all.

Do you also believe that the FBI shot John F Kennedy, that Princess Diana was murdered and the US government has covered up the landing of aliens?BEN TROTTER, Cirencester

No. Such allegations are cheap and rather silly.

What steps will you propose to counter global warming? DR GEORGE BLAIR, by email

We should rapidly increase our use of renewable sources of energy (windpower, solar, and micro-generation in people's homes). We should require the airline industry, like every other industry, to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions each year. We should increase vehicle excise duty sharply for gas-guzzling cars and use the proceeds to subsidise bus and rail, and smaller-engine cars. We should give each family a carbon entitlement which then has to be reduced each year.

How often have you flown in the past 12 months? FIONA MILLS, Edinburgh

Not at all.

You criticise the 'Westminster bubble' but said you spent the last two months talking to MPs about your campaign. Does this not show you have the same disrespect for people's views as the rest of the Westminster bubble? MARSHA JANE THOMPSON, by email

I said that when people around the country come to vote, they may well take a quite different view of things from the inward-looking Westminster scene, and should be listened to. But I also extensively canvassed my colleagues in the Parliamentary Labour Party because they alone are the ones who make the nominations.

Why did it take you so long to announce your intention to stand for the Labour leadership when John McDonnell has been campaigning up and down the country for months?MAX MITCHELL, by email

I have been told that John McDonnell announced his candidature without consulting his colleagues. I thought it right first to consult extensively to confirm that my candidature would have the necessary range of support.

What are your guilty pleasures (apart from homeowning)?ALICE SHERWOOD, Tadworth

Wouldn't you like to know! Dropping childish comments in the waste paper basket is one of them.

You always look a bit boring. Are you? ROB JACKSON, by email

No. Why? Are you?

Posted by Michael Meacher at 12:28 PM | Permalink

It is essential that House of Lords reform, being debated today and tomorrow in the Commons, ends with a clear decision to have a fully elected second chamber. Any extension of Prime Ministerial patronage, which is already far too pervasive and corrupting, over admissions to the Lords would reinforce the gross over centralisation of power which is one of the most damaging trends in Britain today. The power of the Prime Minister has grown, is still growing, and needs to be cut sharply back.

Posted by Michael Meacher at 10:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

We learnt today that the Trident renewal vote will take place on March 14th. There is no way a genuine consultation can take place under such an unwisely truncated timescale. Taking a decision to buikld a new generation of nuclear missile capable submarines now is, in the words of nuclear weapons expert Dr Richard Garwin, “premature ... I see no reason why they should not last 45 years.”

Dr Garwin was speaking to the Defence Select Committee in January. Forcing us into an unnecessary vote now will undermine the important work of the committee in considering the arguments and informing the public and MPs. The government is bouncing us into taking an expensive £65bn decision - to take the MOD estimate - by deliberately preventing a real debate in the country.

UPDATE: CND have called an emergency lobby of Parliament on that day - download and forward the flyer to build the lobby.

Posted by Michael Meacher at 02:24 PM | Permalink

From

There are three reasons why there should be an election for a new leader when Tony Blair finally goes. Only an election confers democratic legitimacy on the succession. Second, party members expect to have a choice about who should lead them. They have hardly been listened to for most of the last 13 years, and have every right to demand that their voice be listened to now. And third, there are major differences of view about the government's direction of travel which need to be understood, debated and voted on within the party. There are other, better alternatives.

New Labour has over-centralised power at the top, which has undermined democratic accountability at all levels. Its economy, driven exclusively by market forces, has played down intervention to secure a stronger manufacturing industry, a more balanced regional policy, and a lift out of its low pay, low skill, low productivity base. Its authoritarian civil society has eroded civil liberties across the board. Its deregulatory philosophy plays down environmental standards and labour rights.

Its indifference to, indeed embrace of, inequality -- "New Labour is relaxed about people getting filthy rich", as Peter Mandelson told us so charmingly -- has presided over a sharp increase in the gap between rich and poor. And its obsession with privatisation is leaching away the public service ideals which lie at the heart of a caring and committed society.

Because Labour and Tory policies are now so similar, politics has increasingly focused on personalities. But that is a fundamental misapprehension. A large part of the electorate on the centre-left, perhaps even a majority, has effectively been disenfranchised for the last three decades. Old-style Toryism was discarded by the voters in 1997, and now New Labour -- the continuing moving right show -- has clearly run its course. It's time, not for old Labour , but for a new implementation of core Labour values in a modern progressive politics addressing today's profound problems.

We need a new foreign policy which is based on fundamental British interests, not subservience to the US, particularly over the middle east. If our political status is to rise across the world, it is not sustainable to continue as America's glove puppet. We need a new social policy if the growing divisions within our society are to be healed. It is not sustainable for £9 billion of city bonuses to be doled out last year while 12.5 million people, a fifth of the population, remain in poverty.

We need a new penal policy if we are going to be genuinely as tough on the causes of crime as on crime itself. It is not sustainable to go on banging people up even faster than we can build prisons without trying to deal with the underlying causes of criminality and doing more to reduce recidivism. We need a new climate change and energy policy if we are not to become over-dependent on imported fossil fuels. It is not sustainable, let alone not legal, to go on fighting wars to grab control of the remaining reserves of Middle East oil when anyway the oil will soon run out.

So what should be done? To end the continuing horrendous carnage in Iraq, to complete our troop withdrawal and break the impasse over Palestine, we should use our political clout to initiate a wider international peace conference bringing together all the relevant actors for a joint settlement of the related middle east issues of contention which from experience cannot be resolved singly. That must include not only Iraq and Palestine within such a grand bargain, but above all a negotiated, not a military, settlement over Iran. If the US were to attack Iran, I would not put at risk a single British soldier or a single RAF pilot in support of such a crazed venture.

Domestically, the Unicef report marking Britain bottom of the table for children's experience shows how urgent it is to reverse the growing rich-poor divide. Less inequality leads to less violence, stronger community life, better health, longer life expectancy, lower teenage birth rates, as well as more social mobility and higher educational attainment. We should start by raising the national minimum wage (one of Labour's best achievements) quickly to £6 an hour, and then soon to £7 an hour. And recognising that wealth creation is not an individual but a team effort, we should move towards a system where there is no more than an acceptable ratio between top pay and bottom pay, so that pay rises at the top draw up the lower paid behind them too.

Globally we are at war against climate change. Business as usual, while relying on improved technology as a get-out card, is a fool's game. We need a profound change in every aspect of government and our way of life -- not just energy, but transport, industry, building, agriculture, public expenditure and taxation, and foreign policy, in order in every area to give absolute priority to combating climaten change. We need a crash programme, as we have done before in wartime, to develop renewable sources of energy, in which we are very well endowed, plus a massive programme to improve energy efficiency and energy conservation.

Peace, social justice, climate survival - those should be our top priorities. That is why the future lies with a centre-left agenda, and clearly there must be a centre-left candidate to lead this agenda forward who has the necessary nominations in the Parliamentary Labour Party to stand. I am fully confident I do have that necessary level of support, and that is why I am standing.

Posted by Michael Meacher at 03:39 PM | Permalink

Update 19February 2007: links to NPF reports added.

According to these reports from last weekend’s NPF, Des Browne was less than complimentary about the efforts of NPF members to consult with Labour Party members on the issue of renewing Trident.

Lest you assume that this indicates a reluctance to hear the views of Labour Party members, you might be relieved to hear that the party has produced a consultation process of its own, for MPs to poll their constituents. When you read the questions, you’ll probably be disappointed again.

The questionnaire opens with this neutrally phrased gem:

Do you agree that in an increasingly uncertain world the Government should maintain our independent nuclear deterrent?

It takes a very long time to build a submarine and with the current fleet of subs reaching its expiry date do you think that the Government needs to make this tough decision now?

In both cases, the questionnaire asks for a ‘yes/no’ response. This follows a long letter from the MP which sets out the MP’s position as being in favour of Trident renewal and that not renewing it will “be to take a gamble with the nation’s security”. It also makes the claim that not taking the decision now means “We would effectively be abandoning our deterrent.”

This is plainly not true. As the evidence of Dr Richard Garwin to the Defence Select Committee showed, building new submarines now is premature, as the life of Vanguard submarines (which carry the missiles) could be extended until the 2030s. Renewal of such systems is not unusual - B-52 bombers are still flying today, more than 30 years beyond their projected life span.

It seems that the Party apparatchiks have not learned from the fiasco of the questionnaire on 90 days detention, which was so unbalanced, the then Home Secretary Charles Clarke had to apologise. Labour activists across the country are agreed on the need to renew the Labour Party. Fake or biased consultations like this are not going to help.

Posted by Michael Meacher at 01:54 PM | Permalink

(from Comment is Free)

It is astonishing that the decision to go to war, the gravest decision ever facing a nation, is still taken in this country by one person alone, the prime minister, and there is no requirement to seek parliamentary approval. What is even more astonishing is that even where the prime minister of the day does allow a parliamentary vote, and that vote is opposed to war, the prime minister still has the absolute power to ignore the result of the vote and to commit the nation to war.

This applies both where the vote is taken after the declaration of war, as in the case of the Attlee government over the Korean war and the Major government over the 1991 Gulf War, and where the vote is taken shortly before the start of a war, as was the case of the Blair government with Iraq. In any case, the prime minister would be within his or her constitutional rights to override a parliamentary vote.

It is equally true that there is, at present, no requirement at all to have a parliamentary vote on a substantive motion to take the country to war. That was the case when Britain went to war in the Balkans in the 1990s and there was lengthy fighting in Bosnia and Kosovo. It is also true that even where a vote is called, it can be arranged at such a time - for example, at the last minute when British troops are fully deployed just before the outbreak of hostilities - that parliament is in a very difficult position to abort the build-up to war. This happened over the Iraq war on March 18 2003.

This is not an argument that it was wrong to take Britain to war in Iraq and therefore the decision-making procedures should be changed to prevent such a result in future. The issue is a much wider one - that irrespective of the rights or wrongs of particular wars, the decision to go to war is so paramount to the life of the nation that it should be taken, and only taken, by an elected parliament on a substantive vote, and well before events had moved to such a point that parliament had little or no alternative but to ratify a decision already reached.

This issue, perhaps more than any other single issue, raises the question of democratic accountability in Britain, which has withered away in the face of a marked centralisation of power over the last 30 years. Many of the previous checks and balances have been eroded, and some of the pre-existing autocratic prerogatives in the hands of successive prime ministers have been consolidated further. The right to take the country to war irrespective of parliamentary or public opinion is the clearest example of the latter.

Under the royal prerogative which dates back centuries, the powers of the Crown exercised by the prime minister, without consultation of cabinet or parliament, include the rights to declare war or make peace, sign or ratify treaties, confer honours, make appointments, establish commissions, and grant pardons. The democratisation of these prerogative rights is now being increasingly challenged by all the political parties. In opposition, Labour stated that it would ensure "all actions of government are subject to political and parliamentary control, including those actions now governed by the arbitrary use of the royal prerogative", and emphasised in particular going to war and the ratification of treaties as central areas of concern.

But in addition to the democratic dimension, there is also the strong constitutional argument that the evidence cited to justify such a momentous decision as going to war should be full and transparent, subject to the strict dictates of national security. In the case of the Iraq war, that would mean that the full advice of the attorney general on the legality of the war, the evidence on the existence and threat of weapons of mass destruction, and the proper reporting of the key French position on possible use of the veto in the security council would be laid before parliament. All of these matters would then be much more thoroughly scrutinised, and any manipulation of the evidence would become much more problematic.

For all these reasons, therefore, I am introducing a bill into the Commons tomorrow (2 February) which requires that the approval of parliament must be sought before British armed forces can be deployed in military action. For this purpose it also requires the prime minister to lay before both Houses of Parliament a report setting out the objectives, legal basis and likely duration of the military action proposed. The bill does allow for situations where the prime minister determines that deployment is urgently necessary before approval of the House of Commons can be achieved. But in such circumstances, which would be rare, it requires that the prime minister must still lay the report before parliament within seven days after troop deployment has begun.

Nor are the demands of this bill out of step with constitutional practice elsewhere. In the US for example the War Powers Resolution of 1973 requires that if the approval of Congress for waging war is not secured within 60 days, the president must withdraw US forces within a further 30 days. But in the UK the bill is a crucial change whose implementation is long overdue.

Posted by Michael Meacher at 03:41 PM | Permalink

The debate last week on Iraq and the wider Middle East was covered fairly extensively in the media but a crucial issue went mostly unremarked: it was an adjournment debate put forward by MPs, not a full debate of the House. It’s not surprising that it happened in that way, given the immense reluctance of the government to have the decision to go to war in Iraq and that the consequences of that decision formally examined in a Parliamentary debate.

At a time when public trust in politicians is at a low ebb, refusing to take part in the debate and hiding from it (as well as Tony Blair’s absence from the chamber, the government did not appoint tellers, so there could be no vote and presumably, to their way of thinking, no awkward headlines) is a poor tactic to pursue.

All this underlines the thinking behind my decision to propose a Waging War (Parliament's Role and Responsibility) Bill when I found that – for the first time in 30 years – I had actually got a place in the Private Member’s Bill ballot. I don’t expect my Bill to become law – I came 18th in the ballot and the chances of such a bill getting through the required stages would be slim even if a government were supportive. But if we are to restore some belief in the political system, this wouldn’t be a bad place to start.

Image: © Parliamentary copyright.

Posted by Michael Meacher at 08:59 PM | Permalink

Two current stories throw a searchlight on contemporary Britain. Farepak collapses, taking with it the £41m that 150,000 customers had saved towards their Christmas hampers. The customers have no rights because Farepak is technically not a deposit-taking bank. Three Natwest bankers are extradited to the US accused of conspiring with senior executives of the now-collapsed Enron to defraud their employers of £20m. There is a row about why they were sent to the US, but that misses the point. Why were no charges brought in this country when their alleged crimes were committed in Britain against a British firm?

It is now typical for the government to turn a blind eye to mega-scale crime or cheating of customers while relentlessly pursuing the pettiest of offenders with Asbos. Corporate crime in particular now almost always goes unpunished, indicating just how far corporate power, allied with a pro-big business government, insulates its holders against redress.

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