Michael Meacher MP

Yesterday  an innocuous little announcement was dribbled out of Whitehall with little or no pick-up in the media.    It said that the Government had decided to wind up the Appointments Commission.   Since this Commission was set up as an independent body precisely to stop political interference in public appointments, particularly in the health service under the Thatcher Government, it starts to ring alarm bells when this notice of abolition has been issued by the Department of Health whose Minister, Lansley, has just announced ‘reforms’ which will effectively eviscerate the NHS.   It strongly suggests the Tories are set on packing the NHS with compliant placemen/women to ram through highly contentious changes to privatise large chunks of the health service.   Nor is that the only area where patronage is now being used corruptly for highly partisan political ends. (more…)

As the nomination period for the Labour Leadership contest ends with David Miliband taking 165 CLP nominations to his brother’s 147 with the others far behind, and the prospect of a new era opens up, one sentence reported from the Mandelson memoirs came forcibly to mind about why this hadn’t happened long before – namely that the members of the Brown Cabinet knew for at least 18 months before the election that Labour was headed for a bad defeat, and likely a catastrophe, but believed they could do nothing about it.   Why not?   That says it all about the state of today’s Labour Party. (more…)

The most remarkable, and disturbing, aspect about the simultaneous release today of 92,000 internal records of US military actions in Afghanistan to the Guardian, Der Spiegel and the New York Times is how blind, complacent, negligent or sycophantic the US (and other Western) media have been over a 6-year period (Jan 2004-Dec 2009) in getting anywhere near the truth about the war in that country.   Or, putting it another way, how come the US establishment military and political have been able so comprehensively and for so long to conceal the truth?   That in itself, apart from the facts which are horrifying enough, deserves detailed investigation and a full-scale inquiry into news management in war situations.

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There are two groups in Britain who are above the law – the bankers and the police.   Members of both groups have, in very different ways, done immense damage to the economic and social fabric of this country in recent years, and not one has been held to account.   Leading bankers in all the main banks have acted with almost unbelievable folly and recklessness which has now cost taxpayers over $650bn, a sum that will rise by 2014 to £1.4 trillion (equal to Britain’s whole GDP), yet not one banker has been prosecuted, imprisoned, demoted, sacked or permanently (or even temporarily) barred from any involvement in the financial sector they virtually destroyed.   Now the Tomlinson affair shows that the police are equally immune from public accountability, and can even kill citizens with impunity.   For this is not an isolated episode, but comes on top of a long list of similar incidents. (more…)

The Gulf of Mexico saga which may – or may not – be now coming to an end has more compelling implications than has been realised.   It’s not just that BP has suffered a catastrophic accident, has already paid out £2.5bn in clean-up costs, is facing even bigger compensation claims for years ahead, and has experienced the biggest reputational nosedive in modern history from third largest corporation in the US to public enemy no1.   It’s the way its record in so many other respects has been crawled over and found abysmally wanting.

It’s not even just that the Gulf of Mexico disaster comes on top of the worst US industrial disaster of the last decade, also laid at the door of BP, when its Texan oil refinery blew up in 2005 killing 15 workers.   It’s the fact that these were not just one-off episodes, but rather typical of a  safety and environment-lax, no-holds-barred, gung-ho profits culture which arrogantly accepted no checks on its industrial and financial dominance.   As the evidence now coming to light reveals, the abuse of power runs right through the whole BP record.   So how should we now respond? (more…)

The EU Commission decision to hand over to Member States the right to decide whether to accept the production of GM crops on their territory or to ban them is a mark of desperation which will not resolve the irreconcilable divide between pro- and anti- States.   What is wrong about this contrivance is that it evades any decision on the basis of principle (i.e. whether GM food entails a risk to human health and to the environment, and how conventional and organic crops can be protected from contamination) and simply takes the unheroic line of least resistance.   And for several reasons Britain emerges from this 12-year struggle with arguably the most dishonourable record in Europe. (more…)

Should whistle-blowers be protected, together with the organisation that seeks to give publicity to their revelations – Wikileaks?   The upcoming trial of Bradley Manning, a US Army intelligence analyst, is a case in point.   He is charged with leaking a highly classified video of US soldiers in an Apache helicopter killing unarmed civilians in Baghdad.   The air crew is heard falsely claiming they came across a firefight, laughing over the dead, and then attacking a van trying to rescue the wounded.   Wikileaks published the video under the title Collateral Murder.   The US military establishment was hugely embarrassed.   Should Manning and Wikileaks be punished? (more…)

What a crisis!   Bank profits + 20%, public spending – 25% (might it be – 40%?).   The nation (or at least the government) seems to have forgotten about ‘moral hazard’ – that if people aren’t punished or properly brought to book for their bad bahaviour, they may draw the lesson that they can do it again with impunity.   The City of London is certainly an immoral place, but we should hardly encourage it – yet that’s exactly what the government’s doing.   And it’s not just an abuse of morality, it’s hard-headed economics that is being abused, in two clear ways. (more…)

Three issues have just come to light in the last couple of weeks which have an unrelated, but similarly, theme.   That is massaging of public statements which is deliberately designed to mislead, and in my view in the grossest cases should be made into a civil offence with penalties designed to deter.

First it was revealed that the scientists who drew up the key WHO guidelines advising governments to stockpile drugs in the event of a flu pandemic had previously been paid by drug companies that stood to profit. As a result Big Pharma, in particular Roche (Tamiflu) and GlaxoSmithKline (Relenza), made £4.8bn out of governments stockpiling drugs following panic predictions that didn’t come true.   The UK, where warnings were issued that 65,000 could die, spent £1bn.   The issue here is the lack of transparency in how decisions are made about pandemics and the concealment (or lack of prominence) given to a conflict of interest among scientists making the recommendations. (more…)

The Coalition Government have made a good start in Parliamentary reform, which may seem a rather anoraky subject, but actually is all about accountability, openness, and increasing the influence of elected MPs against the dead hand of the Whips – all of which is essential in any real democratic system.   The Government has already now opened up the whole public expenditure database to detailed scrutiny, is now implementing the Wright committee recommendations for election of the chair and members of Select Committees by the whole House in place of a stitch-up between the Whips, and tomorrow is expected to lay a Standing Order which cedes partial control of the Parliamentary agenda to an elected Back-Bench Business Committee.

None of this of course would have happened without a long, bruising struggle at the end of the last Parliament to get the all-party Wright committee proposals fully taken on board, debated on the floor of the House, and overwhelmingly voted for.   Alongside this committee the pressure also came from Parliament First, a vigorous all-party back-bench committee then chaired by Mark Fisher and now by me, all of whose members are passionately committed to restoring  Parliament to its real role in effectively holding the Executive to account and making MPs much more into transparent instruments of the popular will.

The ballot for electing 22 Select Committee chairs will take place tomorrow.   Having served as an MP for nearly 40 years, including 11 years as a Minister and 25 years on the Front Bench, I am standing for chair of the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) since this too has always been at the heart of Parliamentary democracy and in the current straitened financial climate has an even more important role today.   (more…)

The release of the COINS (Combined Online Information Systems) data yesterday on the range of Government spending is a major step forward.   It will expose many dark corners in Whitehall, make the Government far more accountable, and allow taxpayers far more knowledge of exactly how £650bn of their money is spent and whether it is justified.   Even first glances open up some quite crucial policy questions:

*  It cannot be right to spend £24bn a year on tax credits when this is largely a huge disguised subsidy to employers paying below-poverty wages to millions of people on very low earnings.   Obviously the right policy (at vastly less cost in taxes) is a big uplift in the mandatory minimum wage.

*  Equally £1.8bn spent on consultants (20% up on the previous year), including £600 million spent out of the NHS budget on management consultants, must be grossly out of scale for genuine value for money.

*  The Government has also apparently incurred bad debts of some £600 millions a year, a high proportion of which should surely be recoverable.

*  Another finding that sticks out like a sore thumb is that DECC last year spent more than half its £3bn a year budget on dealing with nuclear waste – a huge annual sum that the nuclear industry should be forced to pay themselves, and which should be the clinching argument why any further nuclear build cannot be afforded.

So, bully for the coalition.    Yet lots is still not revealed. (more…)

Why such fuss about the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico?   True, the leakage is large, but still nowhere near the size of previous oil spills.   So far at least 60,000 tons have leaked from the Deepwater Horizon explosion, but the Gulf War oil spill (1991) involved 1.4 m tons, the Atlantic Empress tanker (Trinidad & Tobago, 1979) 287,000 tons, Fergana Valley (Uzbekistan, 1992) 285,000 tons, the nowruz oil field (Persian Gulf, 1983) 260,000 tons, and Amoco Cadiz (Brittany, France, 1978) 223,000 tons.   The Exxon Valdez spill off Alaska with which the current Gulf of Mexico is being compared amounted to some 34,000 tons.   So what’s so special this time?   Answer: because it directly impacts on the US.

No matter that 2,000 major spillages in the Niger Delta has never been cleaned up by Shell, or that rivers and wellls in at least 7 African countries have been badly polluted, or that huge stretches of 3 Latin American countries have been ruined by spillages, blowouts and toxic dumping, or that at least 4 of the 7 ugly Oil Sisters currently confront dozens, even hundreds, of lawsuits even up to $30bn a time (Ecuador).   All this can be spun out, got rid of  modestly out of court, or brazenly faced down.   But not when America is involved and the US President himself takes up the issue.   That cannot be right. (more…)

One of the little noticed aspects of this newly spatchcocked Tory-Liberal Government is that     Nick Clegg, farmed out as Deputy Prime Minister (‘not worth a bucket of warm spit’ as the US Vice-presidency was once delicately described), will actually have a job to do: taking on constitutional renewal.   Attention has focused on electoral reform – the commitment to bring in a referendum on AV.   But that is far the weakest option for electoral reform since it contains no element of proportionality, and is actually less important than other changes in the structure of power that are now at last coming on the agenda. (more…)

What a contrast.   After 16 children are found to have been abused in Birmingham in recent years, half of them from care homes, 6 social workers are sacked for falling so far short of acceptable standards of care management.   On the same day a Roman Catholic cardinal insists that priests who have abused children, but admitted the fact in the privacy of the confessional, are protected by sacramental absolution from being identified and made to face the consequences of their offences. (more…)

‘A Future Fair to All’ is apparently New Labour’s slogan for the coming election.   Does that include, on behalf of the victims, holding to account the perpetrators of public scandals?   The last week alone has had quite a slew of them:

1  Will the managers of Stafford Hospital be brought to book (sacked?   and    prohibited from any senior role in social care in future?) for the deaths of 1,200 patients in their care whom the Francis Report found would not have died if they had received proper care?

2  Will News of the World, including its owner Rupert Murdoch and his editors including Andy Coulson, be held to account (fined?   and warned that any future repetition could lead to editors being sacked or even divestment of the paper from its current owners?) for illegal hacking into telephones on an industrial scale?

3  Will MI5 be subject to account (sacking of senior managers or director where found to be responsible?) for knowingly allowing torture to be applied to British citizens, not only Binyam Mohammed but several others?

4  Will those allegedly responsible for violence, mistreatment and racist abuse at the Bedfordshire detention centre at Yarl’s Wood be made liable (sacked?) if the charges are proved?

Vacuous slogans need to be brought to life with real action in cases of the worst abuses.