Michael Meacher MP

It almost defies belief that, at a time when Britain produces a far lower proportion of electricity from renewable sources of energy (just 4%, compared with 15-20% in mainland Europe and 35% in Scandinavia), the Government is now paving the way to dismantle one of the most efficient wind farms in the UK to make way for a nuclear power station. The Kirksanton site in Cumbria, where the Haverigg turbines are located, has been approved by the Government for the German-owned power group RWE to build a new nuclear power station there. This could well be one of the 11 new nuclear plants to which Gordon Brown, though not Parliament which has never been consulted, has committed himself. It is extraordinary that the Government has not automatically at the initial screening process ruled out areas for nuclear where there are already productive sites for nuclear technologies, but that no doubt reflects the virulently pro-nuclear stance of the DBERR department. What makes the decision even more perverse is that the wind-farm site has been expanded to 8 turbines through a £6 million additional investment, not least because Haverigg has an unusually high 35% capacity factor (or efficiency) compared with ab average of 30%. Nor is this the only anti-renewables stance the Government has recently taken.

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Today’s Ministerial statement paving the way for 4 new coal-fired power stations is a very questionable decision. It was announced with the triumphal flourish that the era of unabated coal was now over. It certainly isn’t. Not only will existing coal stations continue to churn out huge quantities of CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions, most notably Drax the single biggest polluter in the country, without any requirement to abate, but even the new coal stations will not abate their emissions up till 2020 if the trials of carbon capture and storage (CCS) do not work. Nor is there any guarantee they will, when a commercial prototype has never been built anywhere in the world. And if they don’t work, the Government has given no guarantee that they will close the plants.

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Two separate critical energy issues have now come to the fore. One is the Russian-Ukrainian spat over energy pricing which has exposed UK, and Europe’s, over-dependence on Russian gas supplies. The other is the over-dependence of UK businesses and householders on the pricing policies of large energy suppliers in a privatised and liberalised energy market. Both these key problems, which are likely to cost Britain dear, result from both the Tories and New Labour regarding energy as just another market commodity and not as a crucial protected national asset essential for preserving our national security. That policy needs to change.

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THE RAPIDLY APPROACHING GLOBAL OIL SUPPLY CRUNCH
A snip at $48.50. Now that the price of a barrel of benchmark Brent crude continues to fall like a stone in the global recession, a drop of no less than two-thirds since the high point of £147.50 just four months ago, the relief is huge among motorists and hard-pressed consumers. Conversely, for the oil-producing countries (especially Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Venezuela) it is potentially cataclysmic, though some like the US may rejoice at that. But there is another dimension to this oil price slide which has been little noticed, but which long-term is extremely serious.
If oil prices remain well below a certain critical level for any significant period of time, large amounts of investment in expected oil production capacity will simply be written off, and the consequence could then be a recovery-stopping supply-side crunch within little more than 2 years. That critical level is widely reckoned within the oil industry to be $90 a barrel. A current price as low as half that critical level is already forcing many companies to drop oil projects, and the banking crisis is also squeezing project financing for foreign oil companies operating in OPEC and outside.
Russia’s Big Four energy companies – Gazprom, LUKoil, Rosneft, and TNK-BP – depend heavily on debt to finance operations and are scaling down their investments. They have already been forced to seek an allocation of more credit to refinance their external debts. But with Russia now facing a $150bn shortfall in its spending plans for 2009 and where Russian markets have lost a stunning 70% of their value in just 6 months since May, it is all too likely they will be forced to slash their investments further.
The consequences of this for the EU and the UK are very serious. Since the EU gets 40% of its gas from Russia where 70% of the gas fields are already in decline, any further major cutting back in future oil and gas investments could act as a pincer on EU and UK energy supply. Indeed the Russian Energy Industry has warned that if the decline continues, Russia may not be able to service even its own domestic gas needs by 2010 – this from a country where Gazprom if the largest extractor of gas in the world.
A prolonged slump in the oil price at below $50 a barrel will thus inevitably lead to another cycle of shortages and soaring prices. This intense price volatility is the first stage of the Devil’s See-saw that is likely to accompany the coming of Peak Oil which is widely expected within the next 5 years. These very sharp boom and bust capitalist cycles in oil may well turn out to be even more globally destabilising than the financial crunch. What is clearly needed, though sadly highly unlikely, is an international conference (perhaps as a serious offshoot from the lightweight G20 conference a week ago?) to reach a binding agreement on the oil price for a 5 year period rolled forward which might then avoid the massive overshoot in prices at both peak and nadir which we are seeing at the present time, with potentially calamitous consequences.

Oil profits, over-high petrol prices and fuel poverty
Shell’s record quarterly profits announced yesterday of £6.7bn (over £20bn a year), following on BP’s record quarterly profits announced the day before of £6.4bn (also over £20bn a year), demands a response from the Government on three specific grounds.
First, it is unfair to the poor. Fuel poverty (expenditure of more than 10% of household income on fuel) now stands at between 4-5 million. Second, it is unfair to the motorist. The price of oil has fallen 56% since its peak in July, yet the price at the pumps has fallen by only 18% over the same period. Third, it is unfair to the taxpayer. When both business and households are now under severe pressure in the downturn, it is unacceptable that one group can make huge unmerited profits out of a global oil shortage and yet escape passing on a fair share in an economic crisis to the wider community. There are also precedents: Labour’s £4.5bn windfall tax on the private utilities in 1997 as well as the Tories’ windfall tax on the banks previously because of unearned profits from rocketing interest rates.
The oil companies must not be allowed to hold the country to ransom. A Robin Hood tax could take different forms. Gordon Brown has opposed a windfall tax on the grounds that he announced several years ago that he would not raise Petroleum Revenue Tax further, but that was in ‘normal’ times before the highly abnormal ones of this recession. Exceptional times deserve exceptional policies, as he himself rightly said.
Or, whilst avoiding taxing when energy prices are high, the Government could claw back some of the gains, estimated at £9bn, which will accrue to the energy companies through being given 100 million free permits to trade greenhouse gas emissions under the second phase of the EU Emissions Trading Scheme 2008-12. Ofgem has supported this, and Spain is already doing this.
It would offer a double whammy: help Britain’s climate change targets and fund lower social energy tariffs for low-income households as well as much more extensive energy efficiency measures. It is justified when windfall profits will be highest in countries with liberalised energy
markets where costs can be easily passed on to customers, where coal dominates, and where there are high levels of free allowances. All three conditions apply to Britain.
I shall raise this demand in an EDM on Monday, in a letter to Alistair Darling in preparation for this Pre-Budget Report next month, and at PMQs.

Gordon Brown meeting Britain’s oil chiefs to discuss higher North Sea output to bring down prices is prompted by oil prices hitting a record high of $135 a barrel, twice as high as a year ago and a staggering 12 times higher than a decade ago. The well-sourced website petrolprices.com is now predicting that petrol will reach £1.50 a litre by September, just 4 months away. Jeff Rubin of CIBC World Markets is forecasting “oil prices almost doubling over the next five years”. That would mean $270 a barrel by 2013. It perhaps explains why the government is now strongly backing BP to get a big new slice of the oil drilling licences soon to be issued in Iraq, and – astonishingly – has now also made clear it intends to annex a third of a million square miles of the seabed off Antarctica to pre-empt any rights to the oil it may contain. The fight for oil has begun in earnest.
But is there the oil to go round? The authoritative International Energy Agency foresees an oil supply crunch within 5 years forcing up prices to unprecedented levels and greatly increasing western dependence on Opec. And the oil industry itself in its own report Facing the Hard Truths about Energy, produced by 175 authorities including all the heads of the world’s big oil companies, for the first time predicted that oil and gas may run short by 2015.
The geopolitical implications of this gathering crisis for world oil supply 2010-15 are immense. The risk of further military interventions and conflicts in the Middle East is clearly high. Total world oil reserves are estimated at 2.5-2.9 trillion barrels, of which half has now been already consumed, while half of the 51 oil-producing countries reported output declines in 2006. Non-Opec production is expected to peak and decline within the next five years, driven mainly by burgeoning demand from China and the US, together with restricted output from Iraq. Then in the following five years Opec’s diminishing spare capacity will probably become increasingly unable to accommodate short-term fluctuations, depending on how fast world demand grows and how extensively Opec invests in new capacity. The latter may well not raise production capacity high enough or quickly enough, whether for political reasons or because internal decision-making is too slow or the security environment too hostile.
There are of course exits from this doom-stricken scenario, though none is at all credible. First, discovery of major new oilfields could alter the picture. However, though billions have been spent on the search for new fields, discovery peaked in the mid-1960s and the last big ones were found in the 1970s. Only Iraq has undeveloped super-giant oilfields – at West Qurna, Athabascan tar sands (from Alberta, Canada), extra-heavy oil (from the Orinoco belt in Venezuela), oil shale, and mature source rocks. But the almost insurmountable problem is recoverability, whether poor quality oil (extra-heavy oil), poor quality reservoirs (oil from source rocks), or both (oil shale). Worse, production may be uneconomic because of a very low net energy gain, ie it requires almost as much energy to extract the oil as is made available for subsequent use. And the enormous hike in greenhouse gases generated could produce a turbo climate change effect that would wipe out any benefit from a global post-Kyoto agreement.
But even if supply constraints are ineluctable as the explosion of Chinese growth coincides with falling non-Opec oil production and the beginnings of a slow but remorseless slippage in Opec capacity, the coming crisis could still be eased by significant demand restrictions. Clearly there is substantial room for energy-saving when half the energy generated every day is wasted and when propulsion of an average car is only about 20% efficient, heating of a standard oven only 25%, and electricity generated in some power stations only some 35%. The question, however, is whether improvement can be secured globally on the level and timescale required to push back the crisis more than a few years. Equally, taking the CO2 out of fossil fuels, especially coal, may be crucial, but a decade at least is needed even to test the carbon capture technology in pilot projects, let alone begin to mainstream it. But the most direct means of constraining world demand would be the proposed Rimini protocol, which prescribes that oil-importing countries cut their imports to match the world depletion rate (ie annual production as a percentage of remaining global reserves) now running at about 2% a year. Of course, the fundamental political problem remains that the most powerful oil-hungry countries will not agree. If not Kyoto, why Rimini?
What is most disturbing of all is that the big powers, so far from seeking major adjustments of their energy policies on either the supply or demand fronts or making a major switch into renewables, are actually massively intensifying their competitive struggle short-term for the limited oil reserves left. Despite an unwinnable war in Iraq, the US is still constructing at least five large permanent military bases there in order, according to evidence given to a US Congressional Committee, to control access to Gulf oil, including in Saudi and Iran. As one neocon recently put it, “one of the reasons we had no exit plan from Iraq is that we didn’t intend to leave”. The US is also trying to force through a new Iraqi oil law that would give western, primarily American, oil multinationals control of Iraqi oilfields for the next 30 years.
The US maintains 737 military bases in 130 countries under cover of the “war on terror” to defend American economic interests, particularly access to oil. The principal objective for the continued existence and expansion of Nato post-cold war is the encirclement of Russia and the pre-emption of China dominating access to oil and gas in the Caspian Sea and Middle East regions. It is only the beginning of the unannounced titanic global resource struggle between the US and China, the world’s largest importers of oil (China overtook Japan in 2003). Islam has been dragged into this tussle because it is in the Islamic world where most of these resources lie, but Islam is only a secondary player. In the case of Russia, the recent pronounced stepping up of western attacks on Putin and claims he is undermining democracy are ultimately aimed at securing a pro-western government there, and access to Russian oil and gas when Russia has more of these two hydrocarbons together than any other country in the world.
The struggle has also spilled over into West Africa, reckoned to hold some 66 billion barrels of oil typically low in sulphur and thus ideal for refining. In 2005 the US imported more oil from the Gulf of Guinea than from Saudi and Kuwait combined, and is expected over the next 10 years to import more oil from Africa than from the Middle East. In step with this, the Pentagon is setting up a new unified military command for the continent named Africom. Conversely, Angola is now China’s main supplier of crude oil, overtaking Saudi Arabia last year. There is no doubt that Africom, which will greatly increase the US military presence in Africa, is aimed at the growing conflict with China over oil supplies.
As Joe Lieberman, former US presidential candidate, put it, efforts by the US and China to use imports to meet growing demand “may escalate competition for oil to something as hot and dangerous as the nuclear arms race between the US and the Soviet Union”.
This article originally appeared in Comment is Free on 29 June 2008: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/jun/29/oil.oilandgascompanies

The oil price today at $135 a barrel – twice as high as a year ago, a staggering 12 times higher than a decade ago – is a wake-up call to the Government which they have been shamefully neglecting for far too long. Whether it’s because of surging Asian demand (Chinese and Indian economic growth rates of 8-10% a year for the last decade, and set to continue), market speculators, or OPEC keeping more oil in the ground to maximize future profits, it is really pointless for DBERR and the hapless Minister Malcolm Wicks to make a humiliating appeal to OPEC to please increase oil supplies. There’s no more chance of that than New Labour winning Crewe.
With petrol prices now expected to hit £1.50 a litre by as early as September and oil prices expected to double again within the next 5 years – many think sooner – nothing will solve this problem except a fundamental shift out of oil as fast as is practicable. Oil is primarily used for transport and for heating, in addition to industrial applications. For heating, it means urgent switching out of fossil fuels to to renewables (solar, wind, biomass, ground/air heat pumps, microgeneration), replacing renewable obligation certificates by feed-in tariffs that have worked so remarkably well in Germany. For cars, it means putting far greater R&D resources into hybrids and into far faster development of hydrogen fuel cell cars. For planes, since there is no practicable alternative to oil/kerosene, and since biofuels are an even worse cure than the disease, the pressure is now on prioritising flights, switching wherever feasible to localised food production, and sharply regulating carbon emissions in the interests both of climate change and energy efficiency.
The irony of all this is that the Energy Bill now going through Parliament is already obsolete. It is a real tragedy that the drastic change in both climate change and energy policies are being driven abruptly and painfully by the inexorability of failing global supplies rather than planned for in a radical but controlled manner.

With French and German companies lining up to build new nuclear power stations in Britain, the die now seems cast for nuclear. Or is it?
The Government’s goal is certainly ambitious. Ten countries – primarily the UK, USA, France and Canada, but also including Japan, Korea, Brazil, Argentina, South Africa and Switzerland – have set up a body called the Generation IV International Forum to develop a successor nuclear energy system to the previous Generations I (Magnox) and II (AGRs and the Sizewell B Light Water Reactor) and to follow the Generation III systems now being built. The latter includes the French Areva Evolutionary Pressure Reactor (EPR), the prototype of which is currently being constructed at Olkiluoto in Finland, with another being built in France. It is intended that these Generation III models plus (hopefully) improved versions in future will lead reactor orders through to 2030, after which it is hoped that Generation IV will kick in, the goal of which is nuclear sustainability.
However, the roadmap to get there is beset by profound practical problems which may well prove insurmountable. Generation II and III nuclear power plants operate in a ‘once-through’ mode, which means that only half of the 0.7% fissionable uranium U-235 content of natural uranium goes into the fuel while most of the heavy metal ends up in enrichment tails and in spent fuel as waste. This therefore requires a constant and increasing supply of natural uranium to meet the rising demand for electricity, while at the same time it intensifies the already unresolved problem of what to do with vast accumulations of radioactive waste.
Even the optimistic IAEA-OECD Red Book of world uranium reserves puts the total at 4.7 million tonnes, and that assumes a purchase price of at least $130/kg. In fact prices are currently nearly twice as high, yet primary uranium production is falling. But even if the Red Book figures were roughly correct and not significantly inflated, their total of known uranium resources is expected to be exhausted by 2030.
If fast reactors were to be introduced by then – which is the centrepiece of the strategy – a further 10 million tonnes, twice the known resources, would have to be ready for production, and this could only come from ‘speculative and undiscovered resources’. The nuclear power industry answers this by reference to the universality of uranium in the Earth’s crust and in seawater; but the enormous energy needed to extract it from these low concentration sources would actually exceed the energy output of the fission of the fuel thus provided, so in terms of net energy availability it is irrelevant.
These pressures are already being felt. The US gets half its nuclear fuel from diluted former nuclear weapons’ highly enriched uranium from Russia, and even Russia itself with its insufficient primary production will be forced to rely on ex-weapons material to power its planned expansion. The UK’s aim of security of energy supply will not be aided by 100% import of nuclear fuels on top of increased dependence on imported fossil fuels, notably gas. Japan has closed 7 nuclear power stations built on an earthquake fault line. Olkiluoto is already 2 years behind schedule after just 2 ½ years building and already has a £1bn cost overrun, and there can be no reliable evidence on the economics of nuclear power until the new designs of the Westinghouse AP1000 and European EPR water reactors have been fully tested over many years in service. Contrary to claims by the industry, unresolved questions of cost and the looming shortage of uranium are the biggest challenge to its revival.
To overcome the fragility of this recovery, the industry looks to Generation IV development of the fast reactor by 2030 as the key to ultimate nuclear sustainability. However if for this purpose the fast reactor were adopted in ‘breeder’ mode, an even greater quantity of highly radioactive actinides (plutonium, neptunium, americium and curium) would be generated, exacerbating still further the waste management problem. If on the other hand the fast reactor were adopted in ‘burner’ mode, as currently seems likely to prevail, the waste problem is alleviated, but there is no sustainability.
The Generation IV fuel systems offer at present 6 types, of which two are emerging as likely candidates. One is the very-high-temperature gas-cooled thermal reactor (VHTR) which can be used for coal gasification as well as thermo-chemical hydrogen production. The US Government favours this because a hydrogen economy is seen as the solution to the exhaustion of oil reserves and the petrol (gasoline) derived from it. The main problem with the VHTR, which has a coolant system outlet temperature of about 1,000ºC, is likely to arise from irradiation characterised by the Wigner Effect and from progressive disintegration by neutron bombardment.
Indeed a similar problem with the Wigner energy in pile 1 at Windscale (now Sellafield) caused the fire and melted the fuel elements. Given the very high temperatures needed for this complex and quite likely unstable process, its viability would need rigorous and exhaustive testing before such a problematic reactor were ever adopted.
The second favoured Generation IV candidate is the sodium-cooled fast reactor system (SFR). The idea here is that as supplies of natural uranium decline, it is replaced by a plutonium-based fuel which is incrementally augmented by fresh plutonium in a repetitive cycle, providing claims of sustainability. It is envisaged that there is a gain in the plutonium in a surrounding ‘blanket’ of uranium 238 over and above the plutoniun consumed in the reaction, with a doubling time of 15-20 years. But again there are two key problems. It is a burner reactor, not a breeder, so that whilst reducing waste management problems it does not provide for sustainability.
Secondly, even if fast reactors of this kind could be successfully deployed – a big if – the doubling time of 15-20 years would require supplies of natural uranium to be maintained for decades, if not centuries, until the fleet of ‘once-through’ reactors can be progressively replaced. And the uranium simply isn’t available for that timespan. So, a nuclear renaissance? Forget it.

The EU announcement today that Britain has to meet a mandatory target to produce at least 15% of its energy from renewable sources by 2020 changes the entire energy equation for the UK. It renders the Energy Bill which received Second Reading in the Commons last night largely obsolete.
The crucial point is that the target relates to Britain’s total energy needs, not just electricity generation, but also transport fuel and heating. Since the contribution that renewables make to transport fuel is next to nothing and to heating is relatively small, the implication is that the UK will be required, if the target is to be met and it’s a mandatory one, to generate some 30-40% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2020. Since the figure today is just 4%, that’s an 8-fold increase in only 12 years!
What that means is that the Government will have to deliver on their ambitious promise to provide 33GW from offshore wind-power by 2020, as well as kick-starting a range of new renewable and decentralised technologies in which Britain can take a lead, including wave and tidal power. It means building new power stations which with CHP can, as in Scandinavia, achieve 90%+ efficiency levels and can burn cleaner fuels like biomass as well as fossil fuels. It means switching from Britain’s current renewable obligation certificate system to feed-in tariffs which give fixed-price rather than variable support and have been pioneered so successfully in Germany. And it means a massive improvement in our currently lamentable performance on energy efficiency – the Government’s own Environmental Technology Support Unit has stated that a 20-30% improvement by both industry and individual households is entirely practicable and affordable.
There is a further implication. If we do all these things – and we’ve got to in order to meet the mandatory EU target – then we will not need any nuclear power stations. That has enormous implications for Britain’s future energy policy. The Government’s case for nuclear was always weak (largely based on the nuclear fixation of DTI/DBERR officials), and now even that weak case will not be necessary.
The Government’s claim was that nuclear was needed to keep the lights on and to help meet Britain’s climate change commitments, and they also said that there would be no public subsidies and that the nuclear waste problem was perfectly manageable. The evidence is that all four statements are far from true.
First, nuclear can’t keep the lights on because no nuclear plant can now be built in time to meet the 2017-2020 energy gap when 20GW of new capacity will be needed to replace obsolete nuclear and coal plants. Anyway nuclear stations regularly take twice as long to build and cost twice as much as was planned. The Finnish plant currently being built is already 2 years late after just 2 years building, and the cost overrun is already over £1bn.
Secondly, nuclear cannot slash our carbon emissions while delivering energy security because nuclear provides such a tiny part of our energy requirements – just 3 ½ % at present, and falling. Half of our energy demand is for heat, which is mainly gas-based, and the next biggest demand is for transport fuels, which are mainly oil-based. Electricity generation represents the smallest component of energy demand, and new nuclear would be only a small portion of that.
Third, it clearly is not true that there will be no hidden subsidies. Paragraph 3.73 of the Energy White Paper indicates that the Government intends to put a cap on the cost of decommissioning for nuclear operators, and the rest – which could still be huge – will be paid by the taxpayer. Paragraph 3.52 is the give-away: “If the protections we are putting in place through the Energy Bill prove insufficient, in extreme circumstances the Government may be called upon to meet the costs of ensuring the protection of the public and the environment”. And these circumstances will not be extreme because the costs of decommissioning after 150 years – the time between the start of a new nuclear plant and when the waste is finally put into a geological repository – cannot be estimated and are potentially exponential. The decommissioning costs of existing plant are already £75bn with a further £21bn required to dispose of the waste – that’s equal to 7% of Britain’s entire annual GNP.
Nor, fourthly, is the nuclear waste problem manageable. There are already 10,000 tonnes of long-life radioactive toxic waste in this country, and Government estimates it will be 500,000 tonnes by the end of this century, even with no new nuclear build. So where is all the old waste and new additional waste going to go? There has been virtually no progress at all in answering that problem since the last Conservative Government abandoned the search for a nuclear waste dump in 1997.
Against this depressing background, perhaps today’s EU announcement will now point Britain in a profoundly different and much more hopeful direction. It is after all a mandatory requirement.

Gordon Brown’s renewables conversion on the Damascene road to climate change is extremely welcome, but like all miracles needs to be examined very closely. It is magnificent that the bar for green achievement has now been so dramatically raised, but until plausible mechanisms to get there are set out, the claims ring not a little hollow.
Britain has long been committed to a 60% reduction in carbon emissions by 2050 compared to the baseline 1990, as demanded by the Commission on Environmental Protection in the 1990s. In the base year 1990 Britain’s carbon emissions were about 160 million tonnes CO² (mtC), so by 2050 they have to be down to some 64 mtC, i.e. a reduction of 1.6 mtC every year for 60 years. So in the ten years since 1997 they should have been cut by about 16 mtC. In fact, initially over that period carbon emissions were cut significantly, but then over the latter part of the period they rose substantially, with a net increase over the whole decade of 2%. If then over the last 10 years emissions have gone up by 3 mtC rather than down by 16, what assurances are there that in the next 43 years emissions will be cut by 2 mtC every year from now on to meet the 60% reduction target by 2050?
To Gordon Brown’s credit he is now going further and committing to an 80% cut by 2020, which is indeed what the world’s scientists are now saying is necessary. But that only sharpens the question still further. To meet that tougher target, how exactly are we going to cut by 2.7 mtC every year from now to 2050?
When it comes to Brown’s new targets on renewables, acclamation must give way to incredulity. At present, Britain generates just 4% of its electricity from renewable sources of energy. In most of the EU it’s 10-20%, and in Scandinavia it’s 30-50%. The PM is now committing the UK to meet the EU target of 20% of its energy (not just for electricity generation) from renewables by 2020. Since it is all primary energy that is being referred to (i.e. for space heating and transport), that would mean some 40% of our electricity must come from renewables. To paraphrase, c’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas l’ecologie. How precisely is a 10-fold increase in renewables to be achieved in the next 13 years?
What makes these objectives less than credible is that it is Gordon Brown himself who has blocked most of the mechanisms that might have delivered these targets. When the Government (I know because I was a Defra Minister at the time) was planning to put into statute a requirement on the top thousand companies in the UK to report annually on their emissions so that the public would know whether each year they were reducing them or not, Gordon Brown unceremoniously ditched the commitment in 2005 because at a CBI dinner just beforehand he wanted to flaunt his de-regulatory credentials. He also dropped in 2000 the fuel duty escalator which increased the price of petrol each year by more than the rate of inflation in order to encourage motorists to use their car less wherever they could because of the environmental damage involved. And it is Gordon Brown who has continued to provide huge subsidies year after year to the fossil fuel industries of oil, gas and coal which are the basic cause of the whole climate change problem.
The other oddity of this sudden spurt of greenery is that it sits uncomfortably alongside a raft of policies pulling in exactly the opposite direction. The Government is still committed to triple airport capacity in the UK by 2030 (and only yesterday announced a third runway at Heathrow) which with the huge number of extra flights entailed would make it virtually impossible to reach these ambitious new climate change targets. Gordon Brown is still committed to a massive nuclear energy revival which, given the enormous costs, would certainly squeeze out any sustained expansion of renewables. And the Government has continued to block measures which would give a major boost to the woefully low standards of energy efficiency in housing and other measures like the Merton Rule to expand the use of renewables in house construction.
So, Gordon, bully for you with your latest aspirations, but how exactly are you going to achieve them?

Gordon Brown wants to reassure Bush at the Mansion House tonight that the ‘special relationship’ still lies at the heart of UK foreign policy. After a teeny-weeny bit of independence in beginning to withdraw British troops from Iraq, we have to genuflect again. The real question we should be asking is: are we seeking a closer relationship because we believe that US policies are broadly right or simply because that is where the power is?
There is of course no special relationship, almost by definition, since the essential tenet of the neo-con philosophy is unilateralism, Might is Right, and self-interest overrides everything whatever their ‘friends’ may say. We are no more likely to carry influence if we play the deferential courtier than if we play the critical friend. As we found out painfully throughout the Blair years, playing to the American tune unremittingly on every occasion gained not a singly demonstrable concession.
So are American policies right? Of course there is a considerable US-European consensus across a broad spectrum of policy which nobody seriously doubts. But there are some very important areas of discord where we have a responsibility to make our voice heard.
Iraq is a prime example, though far from the only one. It is becoming clear that the US intend a permanent military presence in Iraq as long as Saudi, Iraqi and Iranian oil lasts, amounting in total to more than half global oil reserves. For this purpose the US is strong-arming an oil law through the Iraqi Government which is virtually expropriating all future Iraqi oil revenues which on some official US estimates could reach the stupendous level of £30 trillions, 12 times the UK GNP! The Americans are now building five colossal military bases across Iraq to enforce their will. We should be telling them this is a recipe for an endless insurgency which is not only flagrantly illegal, but an unwinnable quagmire which can only erode the West’s position to the benefit of Iran, China and Russia.
Second, the US won the Cold War in 1989, but then blew it by passing up a priceless opportunity to win over Russia as a long-term ally. Russia let the Berlin Wall be torn down, pulled the Red Army back inside its border, removed the Communist Party from absolute control, and embraced American-style capitalism. Putin went out of his way to aid American forces after 9/11 and did not use his Security Council veto to block the US invasion of Iraq. What has been his reward? The US, exploiting Russian weakness at every turn, moved NATO into Eastern Europe and then into the former Soviet republics. The US bombed Serbia for 78 days in 1999 despite Russian protests, and is now placing a missile system in Poland and the Czech Republic as well as unilaterally abrogating the ABM Treaty which has produced stability for 30 years. Is it any surprise that Putin is now so suspicious and uncooperative towards the West? This is fundamentally the wrong policy, and we should be saying that loud and clear to the US before we alienate yet further one of the great powers that should be our ally.
Third, instead of continually fudging his options over Iran, Gordon Brown should be making clear that whilst we support economic and diplomatic pressures to deter an Iranian nuclear bomb, we do not and will not support a military attack on Iran. It would have catastrophic consequences – setting the whole Middle East alight, provoking intensified Iranian intervention in Iraq, seriously disrupting the world oil supply a quarter of which passes daily through the straits of Hormuz, unleashing murderous retaliation maybe as far as Western capitals, All without being able ultimately to prevent an Iranian bomb, and indeed generating a national unity behind the mullahs when otherwise an unpopular regime might steadily unravel because of economic failure.
It is our duty to make clear to the Americans now our strong opposition to their perverse and counter-productive military threats towards Iran. Otherwise, the Cold War will be succeeded by another long term geo-political conflict, only conducted at much higher temperature.
Graphic: Project Gutenberg

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

In yesterday’s Budget, Gordon Brown pre-empted the Tories by, in effect, doing their work for them – cutting corporation Tax and cutting the basic income tax rate. What he has not done is produce a real Labour Budget which would dramatically cut growing inequality by ending glaring tax loopholes that favour the rich. (E.g. non domicile tax status for the super rich and the taper relief exemption for private equity investors) while at the same time raising the basic State pension to pensioner credit level as of right for all pensioners and linking all future increases in the pension to earnings.
He has not tackled environmental issues adequately. His policy of bringing the airlines into the EU Emissions Trading Scheme in several years time will not deter the fastest rising cause of greenhouse gas emissions. Bringing in a carbon entitlement for individual households in 2012 is far too late. He has done nothing to increase the pathetically low level of electricity generation in UK from renewable sources of energy, still stuck at 4% when the rest of the EU level is 20-25%. Building standards and energy efficiency still remain disappointingly low and he has refused, wrongly, to earmark all green taxes for expenditure on better green alternatives (e.g. bus rail and smaller engine cars).

Michael’s speech to the People’s Assembly against the War, yesterday evening in Westminster.