Michael Meacher MP

When it is said, as it often is, that where America goes, Europe (and particularly the UK) will follow soon, it is worrisome that we do not have our own self-confidence and our distinctive vision.   When it is said about the funding of politics, it is deeply disturbing.

It has just been estimated that spending in the current US Congressional elections will exceed $3.7bn (£2.5bn).   In one State alone, California, $100m (£69m) has already been spendt by two multi-millionaires in the race for the Republican nomination – that’s before the real battle starts against the Democratic candidate.   Such huge sums of money are spent, not only on saturation TV coverage with personal attack advertising, but also on chartered jets, hotels, political consultants (charging up to $90,000 a month), and vote delivery.   Is this where we’re heading? (more…)

At least Cameron got one thing right when he said yesterday that lobbying was the next scandal to hit politics.   One of the worst aspects of the corruption associated with New Labour over the last decade has been the multifold increase in lobbyists’ infiltration into every niche of the parliamentary domain, bribing, suborning, secretly manipulating, spinning their scams, nearly always offering payment to oil the wheels for under-the-counter influence.   So much of the New Labour project was built on this money-driven marketisation of politics, so many New Labour apparatchiks were actively engaged in it themselves, that nothing was done to stop it  – indeed it was enthusiastically encouraged on the side. (more…)

     Everyone agrees that the MPs’ expenses saga is the worst poloitical scandal of modern times.   But has it hit the right target?   The worst offenders have actually got off scot free.   First, flipping homes (i.e. changing the designation of one’ main home into a second home, and vice versa, in order to make lucrative home improvements at taxpayers’ expense and then maximize gain by selling free of capital gains tax) has perversely gone entirely unpunished.   Maybe the fact that several members of the Cabinet and shadow cabinet profited handsomely from this wheeze might have something to do with it?

     Second, those who bought large houses (and sometimes very large houses) as their second homes not only had the taxpayer pay well above average levels in mortgage interest, but then extraqcted equally disproportionately large capital gains on the sale of ahouse for which they had contributed nothing.   This obvious loophole was never blocked.

     Third, some of the excesses in the expenses extravaganze lovingly detailed by the Telegraph were huge in total, amounting to anything from £20,00 to £40,000 or more.   Yet it is the foot-soldiers who have been taken to court and held up to public odium over sums that are far less.  

     Elliot Morley, David Chaytor and Jim Devine, if they are guilty (believe it or not, they haven’t even been brought to trial), should certainly be held to account.   But why them?    By any standards they are certainly not the worst or the biggest offenders.   But one factor does unite them which might provide a clue.   They are all back-benchers and all on the Left.   Those on the loyalist Right who’ve committed far bigger sins have not been held up to public opprobrium, but allowed to slip away quietly.   I wonder why?

The stench of corruption in the long-running BAE saga over the al-Yamamah and other massive arms deals is almost suffocating, and now to cap it all BAE (for the moment at least) has escaped criminal prosecution. Just about everything in this episode stinks:
* Kickbacks for securing these gigantic deals (£43bn revenue to BAE for the Saudi deal) were channelled through offshore shell entities to disguise where these payments came from and who to, as MOD defence sales must have been aware,
* The SFO corruption inquiry launched in 2004 revealed huge sums paid into Swiss bank accounts associated with middlemen like the Syrian billionaire Wafic Said, a close friend of the Thatcher family, but as the Swiss prepared to disclose bank records to the SFO which might implicate the Saudi royal family, Blair ordered Lord Goldsmith, the attorney general, in a secret and personal letter to stop the investigation,
* The inquiry was then only resurrected when the US Justice Department discovered that BAE had been paying Prince Bandar, son of the Saudi Defence Minister, over £1bn through the previous decade in £30m quarterly payments, apparently through an MOD account, yet the British government refused to hand over documents about these Bandar payments, no doubt because Ministers had been insisting for 20 years that there had been no secret commission payments,
* Other BAE deals now being uncovered include the sale of hugely expensive radar to poverty-stricken Tanzania, with a third of the £28m contract price now revealed to have been diverted into secret offshore bank accounts, yet the deal was forced through by Blair who, in the words of Clare Short, “absolutely, adamantly, favoured all proposals for arms deals”.

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Peter Moore’s release from Iraq/ran over the Xmas period has been a cause for national rejoicing. But the story behind the 2-year kidnapping and imprisonment is much more sinister, as revealed by the remarkable Guardian investigation. Moore’s job as a computer specialist was to instal a sophisticated tracking system to uncover the huge sums of international aid money from Iraqi institutions that went missing, diverted to Iran’s militia groups in Iraq. The extent of this has been estimated in evidence given to the US Congress at about £11bn in recent years. This is a staggering figure of institutional corruption, even by the standards of the notoriously leaky, incompetent and bribe-ridden Iraqi ministries, and it raises a series of uncomfortable questions. When was this grand larceny of aid monies and oil revenues first noticed, and why wasn’t determined action to identify and stamp it out taken much earlier before it reached these enormous levels? After Moore was abducted, has it now been stopped? If so, which ministries and which politicians/bureaucrats were involved, and what action has been taken against them? Above all, how was this allowed to develop on this huge scale under the nose of the US/UK authorities in the first place?

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