Michael Meacher - Labour's Future

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

The test for the Government with the new foot and mouth outbreak will be whether the lessons of the last, disastrous, episode of February-April 2001 have been learnt. There were basically three.

The first, and most important, is that speed of response is at a premium. Last time, the disease was discovered late when at least 57 different sites had already become infected, and then the reaction was slow and dithering. As a result, 7 million cows, sheep, pigs and goats were slaughtered, about one in every 8 of all farm animals, 10,000 farms were stricken, 30 counties affected, and all at a final cost of some £8.5bn. In addition, the images of burning pyres on television put off the tourists as the whole countryside appeared to be shut down.

This time the Government is very conscious of the need to act quickly, and is trying rapidly to identify the strain of virus which might indicate its origin and where it may have spread. Last time the contagion had already spiralled out of control before it was detected, and from its discovery at an abattoir in Essex had already spread to Cumbria, Holland and France. This time the fear is that the disease may have been in the Guildford herd for several days (though so far there is no evidence to prove that), and may have spread from a market or illegal imports of meat (an increasing risk in a globalised economy).

The second vital requirement is that, once the strain of virus has been established, vaccination within the 10 kilometre protection zone should be carried out swiftly. Last time it was rejected because Tony Blair buckled under pressure from the National Farmers Union which feared losing its valuable beef market in Europe (under EU rules vaccinated animals cannot be sold for export). Inoculation is vastly better than mass slaughter. This time the NFU must be faced down.

The third lesson is that, following the strong criticism in the Anderson Report of 2001 that the Army was brought in far too late when the epidemic had already been rife for 4 weeks, the Army should now be involved much earlier if the disease has not been contained around the Surrey farm.

This is a critical test for Gordon Brown. There are already some hints that farmers in the infected area were not told about the original discovery on 2 August till a day later, and some only learnt about it from television. If that is true, a much more open and honest approach is going to be needed at each stage on the way ahead.

Posted by Michael Meacher at 02:22 PM | Permalink

Michael Meacher courted much controversy with his 'difficult' questions about 9/11 and the war on terror, but, he tells Matthew Tempest, he is absolutely not a conspiracy theorist

Matthew Tempest
The Guardian

Since losing political office as Tony Blair's environment minister, Michael Meacher has been saying - and writing - some controversial things.

Not Robin Cook controversial ("the weapons inspectors should have been given more time"); not Clare Short controversial ("the post-war reconstruction was mishandled"); but really controversial: "why weren't F16 jets scrambled quicker on September 11? What is the truth about the mysterious MI6 unit Operation Rockingham which 'liaised' with UN weapons inspectors? What was the role of the Pakistani intelligence services in the murder of journalist Daniel Pearl?

These are not the sort of questions that are designed to aid one's ascent up the greasy pole of a political career. Quite the opposite. Not only are they difficult to answer, they burst the bubble of etiquette and respectability at Westminster and get one labelled with the career-suicide stamp of "conspiracy theorist".

Not surprisingly, this is the first thing the now backbench MP for Oldham West and Royston wants to get off his chest when I meet him in his south-London home.

"I am absolutely NOT a conspiracy theorist. I am anything but paranoid. I have an extremely rational belief in systematically collecting the evidence and seeing where the facts and the documents take you.

"However, conspiracies do occur, but that would be a last-resort explanation rather than a first. I am also a believer in the cock-up theory."

Since writing an article for the Guardian last September, detailing unanswered questions about the events of September 11 2001 and the predetermination of the US to go to war in Iraq, Meacher has faced a torrent of abuse and derision beyond that borne by most mainstream politicians.

The US embassy in London dismissed the article as "monstrously offensive" and Meacher as not being "serious or credible", while many journalists found his arguments unconvincing and even deranged.

Despite this, Meacher is unrepentant about airing his concerns. "That analysis has been confirmed. In the past nine months [his unanswered questions] have proved both logical and correct. I'm not aware of a word that has not been accepted.

"Indeed, some of it has been confirmed - for instance, Paul O'Neill's account of his time serving Bush, where he reveals that Iraq regime change was a priority from day one of the administration."

For the record, Meacher believes the biggest mysteries surrounding 9/11 were why more effort was not put into catching the hijackers beforehand, why fighter jets were not scrambled from US Andrews airforce base 10 miles from Washington until the Pentagon had already been hit, and why little or no effort was made to catch Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan.

The Senate's Kean commission into 9/11 finds a confused chain of command on the day, but confirms that while the Pentagon was hit at 9.38am, planes from nearby Andrews were only scrambled at 10.38am, a few minutes after the vice-president, Dick Cheney, had authorised shooting down hostile planes. Planes from Langley airbase were already in the air, but had not received orders to shoot down hostile aircraft.

Curiously, for a man who seems out on a limb in British politics, Meacher hasn't yet seen Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, which provides similar succour to his theories, especially concerning the US military's semi-detached efforts in and around Tora Bora, the al-Qaida stronghold in Afghanistan where Osama bin Laden was believed to be hiding.

"Oh I must see it!" he declares, when told that it backs him up on several counts.

Meacher says his postbag was "95% supportive" after his initial article in the Guardian. Probably as a result of its attendant publicity, he was asked to write the foreword to a new US book entitled: The New Pearl Harbour: Disturbing Questions about the Bush Administration and 9/11.

He's quick to intervene: "Writing a foreword does NOT mean I agree with everything in it. It is an unconventional book which says things which deserved to be listened to and have an airing.

The book suggests that there may have been explosives inside the World Trade Centre before the attacks - does he believe that?

"Well, I'm not a technical expert and I have no idea and I just don't know.

"But it's a worthwhile thing for the Kean commission to examine even if it's just to disprove it. After all, there were two previous bomb plots against the Twin Towers, and bombs would alter the whole concept of what happened on 9/11, but that should have been up to Kean to look at."

More recently, Meacher wrote another high-profile piece in the Guardian demanding to know the truth about Operation Rockingham, an intelligence cell mentioned to the intelligence and security committee by weapons expert Dr David Kelly the day before his death.

Meacher alleged, on the basis of the evidence of former weapons inspector Scott Ritter, that the previously unheard of unit was designed to spread misinformation about Iraqi WMD capabilities.

On page 90 of Lord Butler's inquiry into intelligence failures over Iraq is a five-paragraph explanation of Operation Rockingham, calling it a briefing and liaison unit for the Unscom inspections. Meacher believes the explanation is there as a result of his probing.

"It's a pedestrian few paragraphs, but I've seen it and I'm glad it's there and it shows that they've taken it [the article] on board. I believe it [Rockingham] had a key role in seeking to handle intelligence to provide the 'right' material for its political masters.

"Obviously that will be denied, and I'm not expecting Butler to prove it, but I suspect the reason that they felt the need to include it [the explanation] is because of the article."

In all of this, it's easy to forget that Meacher in fact voted for the war. As a minister at the time, the alternative would have been immediate resignation.

"I voted for it because I believed what the PM said. He reeled off weapons inventories, and I presumed that this must be reliable.

"In fact, I've long called for military interventions for humanitarian purposes [he wrote a pamphlet on the theme as far back as 1991], but there would have been no legal basis for that, and the 'humanitarian' reasons for the war have only been used retrospectively."

His high-profile and well-informed campaign against GM crops since being sacked from the environment post in 2003, as well as his difficult questions over 9/11 and the Bush administration have led some senior Green party officials to hope he could be persuaded to jump ship, and become the first ever Green MP in Britain.

"Never, never, never, never, never," he chides. "I respect the Greens. In fact, I respect the Lib Dems and I respect Respect, but there is no question of me switching.

"I've always been a mainstream politician, and I shall die Labour."

There doesn't, thankfully, seem much prospect of that yet, as Meacher boasts of having lost weight since losing office, and "feeling fitter and more energised than I have ever done".

No chance of this 64-year old quitting parliament at the next election, then?

"Not only shall I fight the next election, I could go on for another 10 years yet!"

Posted by Michael Meacher at 06:39 PM | Permalink

Public health warning: our leaders' seduction by science is dangerous

This article originally apeared in The Times

We have reached an extraordinarily odd situation in the saga of genetic modification. The public continues to reject it, the supermarkets will not stock it, the industry itself has pulled out of GM cultivation, but the Government is still keen to go ahead. Why? Tony Blair said recently: “It is important for the whole debate (on GM) to be conducted on the basis of scientific evidence, not on the basis of prejudice.” But being mesmerised by science is at best short-sighted and at worst disingenuous.

Science quite often gets things wrong. Biologists initially refused to accept that power stations could kill fish or trees hundreds of miles away in Scandinavia; later the idea was universally accepted. Scientists did not originally agree that chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) were destroying the ozone layer; but when the industry — ICI and DuPont — abruptly changed sides in 1987, ministers and scientists soon lined up with them. The Lawther working party roundly rejected that health-damaging levels of lead in the blood came mainly from vehicle exhausts, only to find that blood-lead levels fell 70 per cent after lead-free petrol was introduced. The Southwood committee of BSE scientists insisted in 1989 that scrapie in cattle could not cross the species barrier, only to find by 1996 that it did just that.

Much more subtle, and more serious, is the manipulation of science for wider political or commercial purposes. Scientific conclusions don’t usually emerge innocently as an individual’s inspired discovery, but out of a process dependent on financial pressures.

Continue reading "Public health warning: our leaders' seduction by science is dangerous" »

Posted by Michael Meacher at 03:58 AM | Permalink

Biotech giant Bayer has halted GM cultivation in Britain because of flawed trials and financial risk. If only the government was so wise, says Michael Meacher.

The Guardian

Why did Bayer do it? The company's decision to pull its genetically modified Chardon LL maize so soon after the British government authorised its cultivation is a huge setback for the industry and a major embarrassment for the prime minister's championship of GM.

Bayer said the conditions imposed by the government were too restrictive - richly ironic when the government is leaving no stone unturned to get GM crops approved and grown in Britain. Ministers had already gone out of their way to wave through GM maize following the farm-scale evaluation (FSE) trials, even though the trials' conclusion did not justify the go-ahead.

The government's decision was flawed on several counts. No valid conclusions can be drawn from these trials because the weedkiller atrazine was used on almost all the conventional maize - a highly toxic chemical with damaging side effects which is now banned EU-wide. Any tests based on atrazine as a comparator are now irrelevant. New trials with a new chemical are needed; the government, however, disagrees.

Continue reading "You reap what you sow" »

Posted by Michael Meacher at 03:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Six years ago when I was appointed Minister for the Environment, I had never heard of genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Today it has come close to taking over my life and some argue has already cost me my job as Minister.

I first became interested in this as the sheer magnitude of what the GM project meant for the nation's food supply gradually dawned on me. At first we were assured by officials in MAFF (before it became DEFRA as it now is) that this was an interesting and important new technology which would solve some of agriculture's challenges by reducing the use of herbicides (chemical weedkillers) and helping to feed the world.

However, several problems began to emerge. First, when the issue started hitting the headlines in 1998, the public was clearly deeply sceptical, even hostile, and for very good reason. They remembered BSE. The Government, the scientists and officialdom all assured them in 1990 that it could never cross the species barrier and infect humans. Then in 1994 it was found that it had done exactly that, and several dozen people have now died very unpleasantly of new variant CJD. Before that there were other food scares too - salmonella and e-coli. And more recently of course we have been through the trauma of foot and mouth.

The net effect of all this was to leave the Government with a huge credibility problem, and I felt drawn to try to get to the bottom of what appeared to be an unfolding environmental crisis. Were GM foods a genuine breakthrough or a 'frankenstein foods' nightmare?

Continue reading "GM: why I think it matters" »

Posted by Michael Meacher at 03:21 AM | Permalink