Michael Meacher MP

There is an extraordinary silence about the really big issues now facing Britain.   We are arguably on the cusp of the biggest downturn for a generation as all the sources of growth dry up.   The expansionary momentum from ultra-low interest rates and £200bn quantitative easing is clearly wearing off, export markets are flat or falling, and now Cameron warns us we face the most drastic spending cuts which will change the way of life of the entire population and lead (according to the CIPD) to 750,000 public sector jobs destroyed and unemployment pushed up to 3 million for 5 years.   So where’s the anguished debate about this fast-approaching Armageddon and the search for alternative policies to avoid it (which there are)?  (more…)

Very few people will have heard of Pavan Sukhdev or of the book he’s written and just published with the rather off-putting title ‘The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity’, published by the UN.    It’s actually one of the most important books available on the really ultimate issues like the nature of the human race, its role on this planet and its place in the universe.   I would like to say that my recently published book ‘Destination of the Species: the Riddle of Human Existance’, published by 0-books, is another, but that’s for others to judge.   But by any standards Sukhdev’s book is sensational.

His theme Saving species should be ‘more powerful than climate change’ has enormous implications for the post-neoliberal world economy.   It is a systematic expose’ of how the human race is bringing about the sixth mass extinction of life on Earth, all the previous convulsions having been caused by natural forces and only this one being driven by living beings themselves.   Biodiversity (the range of all living creatures on this planet) is being currently destroyed between 100 and 1,000 times faster than the usual rate of extinction in all previous history.   Does it matter? (more…)

Three key world issues will dominate this coming year: the handling of the global recession, the war in Afghanistan-Pakistan, and the reform of the world banking system. On each the entrails do not look promising. The world economy remains in a highly fragile state with enormously bloated public debt almost everywhere, excessively high unemployment, and whole economies only saved from collapse by huge infusions of public spending in one form or another – quantitative easing in the UK, huge tax breaks in the US housing market, enormous expansion of credit in China (with a real risk of a big bust after an artificially created boom), and consumer expenditure boosted in France and Germany by big incentives to spend. There is a chance that this salvaging operation on an unprecedented scale may work smoothly, but it would be surprising if there were not some unpleasant and dangerous upsets. In particular, the trade-off between reducing the budget deficits fast enough (to avoid a strike in the bond markets) yet avoiding hitting a precarious recovery over the head and pitching it into a double-dip slump is a very fine judgement. There will almost certainly be errors.

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When the present meltdown finally ends, what then? Although the turnaround may still be over a year away, there are already very different scenarios emerging.
The opt-out position, which includes the Cameron-Osborne pitch, insists that the brutal self-corrective devices of capitalism be allowed to play out, while keeping a firm lid on mounting debt incurred by Government remedial actions. If that means that unemployment soars by 3-4 million or more and the economy plummets by 5% or more of GNP, so be it, that is the price to be paid for the self-healing powers of the system – after all, the credit card and housing bubbles should never have been allowed to get out of control in the first place.
The minimalists, amongst whom Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling should be counted, accept that, once the Government’s recession-fighting policies have begun to turn the economy round, the most obvious causes of the financial breakdown have to be dealt with to prevent any recurrence, but then business-as-usual can safely usher in again an ever-upward era of growth. They want capital adequacy ratios to be raised, credit assessment agencies made independent, closer international financial monitoring, and the credit derivatives markets better supervised. But even in terms of financial regulation, that falls short.

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