Michael Meacher - Labour's Future

The Rt. Hon. Gordon Brown M.P.
The Prime Minister
10 Downing Street
London SW1

Dear Gordon,

Thank you for your response regarding the financial collapse of Northern Rock at yesterday’s PMQs. However, I feel that this issue cannot simply be resolved by finding a new buyer for the troubled firm, for the following reasons:

1. The means by which Northern Rock and other banks turned profits, by buying and selling mortgage bundles to other companies which may not have fully understood the terms of such loans, signal a remarkable and alarming shift in the banking industry. While previously the emphasis was placed on long-term investments and success, there is now a demonstrated pressure within the financial services industry to turn quick profits at any cost. This change in perspective must be reversed industry-wide, if we hope to prevent another bank failure of this scale.

2. The Northern Rock crisis has cost the British financial services industry dearly, and may still cost a great deal more has been so far acknowledged when Ben Bernanke has already estimated the losses from bad mortgage loans at $150 billion, a figure that may itself substantially grow when no less than $1.3 trillions of sub-prime loans were set up in the two years to 2006, nearly half of which may be irrecoverable. Our economy cannot withstand another blow of this magnitude, considering mortgage and credit card debt already now amounts to some £1.35 trillions. In order to truly protect lenders and buyers, immediate action to improve regulation of the financial services sector is clearly overdue and very necessary.

3. It is evident that Northern Rock was able to conduct business in this matter because of the lack of an independent, regulatory agency that could effectively monitor individual financial transactions. The Financial Services Authority, it has emerged, does not have inspectors dedicated to the regulation of banks or to monitor potentially worrying investments or to test financial products against risk of serious public detriment. This urgently needs correcting.

4. No regulatory agency had demanded transparency and no auditor had condemned the securitisation process on the grounds that it confounded the valuation of risk. What is now needed is a Committee of Inquiry into the governance, accounting and auditing of the banks. This should investigate offshore structures, complex derivatives, the lack of accounting transparency, and the overriding need to align commercial incentives with public accountability.

I very much hope you may now decide to set these reforms in hand.

Yours ever,

Rt. Hon. Michael Meacher M.P.

Posted by Michael Meacher at 04:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

It’s not only civil servants that get off scot-free (as I blogged here) when they screw up. The Northern Rock fiasco shows it applies also in spades to bankers and so-called finance regulators in today’s finance capitalism.

Matt Ridley, the Old Etonian zoologist chairing Northern Rock, owed his position almost entirely to being heir to Viscount Ridley, and had no knowledge of financial services and no capacity for independence to control a headstrong chief executive taking fearful risks. A month into the crisis he is still there.

Adam Applegarth, the chief executive, borrowed recklessly on unreliable wholesale markets, even up to 75%, for his mortgage lending. Like the US sub-prime lenders, he packaged up the mortgages of borrowers and through securitisation sold on the debt for cash, and used an aggressive sales drive to drum up yet further business. When a lending freeze seized up international money markets in the aftermath of the unfolding US sub-prime disaster, his plan collapsed. He too is still there.

Callum McCarthy, chair of the Financial Services Authority which is in charge of banking supervision, blithely believed that the dangers of excessive bank borrowing for mortgage lending were minimal and failed to recognise early on that Northern Rock’s methods made it unduly vulnerable to wholesale money market volatility. The FSA issued no warnings until too late and manifestly failed in its regulatory duties. He is still there.

Mervyn King, Governor of the Bank of England, refused when the credit crunch bit to inject liquidity into the markets to bail out the banks so as not to condone irresponsible lending, thus sealing Northern Rock’s fate, but then did an about-turn by pumping £10bn into the markets to stop the rot spreading, thus achieving the worst of both worlds. The regulatory system could hardly have made more of a mess. But despite presiding over the first run on a British bank for 140 years, he still survives.

Sir John Gieve, his deputy, was the link between the Bank and the FSA., and as such has been accused of being asleep on the job. By failing to read the reports from Northern Rock and then going on holiday in the first two weeks as the crisis gathered, he failed to note and take action on the warning signs. He too remains in post.

Over the last 5 years while Northern Rock pursued such obviously dubious business methods, the chief executive took home £10m, his deputy £7m, the finance director £6m, the zoologist chairman £1m, and the non-exec directors another £1m. None has resigned or paid back any of their enormous gains to ordinary depositors who found their savings disintegrating.

It is a sorry story of mammoth ineptitude, yet nobody is held to account. Indeed one of the main lessons of Northern Rock is to expose just how far the accountability of Britain’s financial leaders has now utterly vanished.

There is one more casualty too. The 1997 reforms which brought independence to the Bank of England also removed banking supervision to the new FSA. This has been the first real test of the new regime, and it has clearly worked badly, with inept handling by almost all the lead players and the regulatory authorities forced belatedly into hasty and contradictory decisions. Split regulation was obviously not such a good idea, and is certainly not how the US Fed and the European Central Bank head off trouble brewing in the financial markets. Time to think again, Gordon.

Posted by Michael Meacher at 05:05 PM | Permalink

The naivety of the private equity industry is breathtaking. With the continuing political furore still in full swing about the Babylonian excesses of this latest capitalist symbol of greed incorporated, the industry set up its own review chaired by City banker Sir David Walker. It's just reported, so what do they think needs to be done? What a surprise! Nothing, except set up a code of conduct to increase the supply of information. And yes, you've guessed it - it's voluntary, so nobody has to do anything. Everything in the garden's lovely. What a monumental whitewash.

First, do they really believe that setting up their own inquiry, led by a City banker who has done 12 years at Morgan Stanley and who heartily approves of the buyout business, is going to carry one scintilla of credibility? It's obviously just a cover-up to try to pre-empt real action by the authorities. It will be blown away with contempt for the chaff it is.

Second, it completely ignores the really big issues which are far more important than simply greater transparency. The taper relief tax loophole which enables private equity partners to plunder their victims, under the deceptive title of 'carried interest' (an annual 20% rake-off of profits running into gains of millions per partner), and then pay tax at a lower rate (somtimes 5%) than the cleaners of their offices, needs to be stopped immediately.

Then there's the tax fiddle which powers the whole private equity engine. The tax relief which permits large-scale leveraging of some of the biggest companies in the country, buying them by raising enormous sums of debt which are greatly reduced by tax deductions, should be ended. This tax concession was originally aimed at helping small venture capital businesses which need early assistance to survive in the market, but it has now been purloined by the asset-stripping sharks to oil their predatory excesses. It should be stopped in the next Budget.

There is another very good reason too for reining in private equity. The sheer scale of recent multi-billion private equity deals is now exposing banks to a default risk on a scale not seen since the stock market crash of the late 1980s. Ironically, this very realrisk is driven by the banks' perception that they can't afford not to participate because the potential rewards of some of the biggest deals are so enormous, yet if they do take part and the firm fails as the easy-come credit bubble collapses as interest rates continue to rise, their exposure could bring them down. As ye sow, so shall ye reap.

Posted by Michael Meacher at 09:57 AM | Permalink

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

Posted by Michael Meacher at 02:04 PM | Permalink

Posted by Michael Meacher at 09:24 AM | Permalink

Meacher: why Spectator readers should vote for me

A leadership election opens up, uniquely, the opportunity to debate and decide on the future course of a government. I am standing because I believe there are several areas of policy where a fundamental change of direction is now needed. And though Spectator readers may initially be sceptical about the relevance of my policies to them, I believe that if they read on with an open mind, they'll find much that they agree with. I'm sure they'll agree, for instance, that New Labour and Tory policies have become similar, almost overlapping, which means that politics has become increasingly fixated on personalities, as though a blanket consensus on policy had been achieved. This is ridiculous. Old-style Toryism was rejected in 1997, and now New Labour - the continuing moving-right show - has clearly faded. It's time, not for Old Labour either, but for a mainstream Labour approach - which may well represent majority opinion within the electorate but has been suppressed for over a decade - to be reasserted as a modern progressive politics with new solutions to today's profound problems.

Continue reading "From the Spectator (3 March 2007)" »

Posted by Michael Meacher at 10:09 AM | Permalink

(From the Independent)

Labour leadership contender answers your questions, such as 'Why not sell your flats to help fight against poverty?' & 'What's your guilty pleasure?'
Published: 05 March 2007

Are you a socialist? What does that mean today? MIKE WOODBRIDGE, Brighton

Yes, I am. A socialist believes that while the market has its proper place, the fundamental principles underpinning society should be equity, social justice, equality of opportunity, and democratic accountability. Even where the market is a dominant force, socialists believe it should be regulated to ensure high environmental, social and labour standards.

Why, as a socialist, do you own so many houses? GARY BROWNE, Glasgow

As I have regularly stated in the register of Members' interests, I own four flats. I have saved throughout my life, and put my savings into property. I don't think [that] is contrary to socialism.

Given your views on poverty, why not sell some of your houses and give the money to charity? Or are you just another hypocritical politician? V AHMAD, Birmingham

I already give a significant amount to charity . I agree there is an urgent need to build much more social, affordable housing but selling my flats which are already occupied would not contribute one iota to that.

Isn't it delusional of you to challenge Gordon Brown for the Labour leadership? MAURICE BURKE, Birmingham

No. There should be a contest because only an election enables us to debate the real policy issues. I also believe that members of the Labour Party should have the right to choose their own leaders. I believe, too, that as New Labour, of which Gordon Brown is perhaps the main architect, has moved continually ever further to the right, the mainstream majority of the party has been left disenfranchised and without a voice. It is not sensible to assume the results of any election before the electors have had a chance to deliver their opinion which may sometimes come as rather a shock to the chattering classes. Not too many people I guess expected David Cameron to come from behind and win the Tory Party leadership.

Don't you think Gordon offers Labour the best hope of winning the next election? VALERIE EVANS, Cardiff

Have you seen the last two polls? Both put the Tories 11 per cent ahead, and one poll found that if Gordon was leader, the Tories would be 13 per cent ahead.

I am a Labour supporter, but I despair that Gordon Brown has been such a coward over the war, talks nonsense on 'Britishness' and seems so in love with Rupert Murdoch that he will hand the next election to Cameron. Do you agree - and if not, which bits do you disagree with and why? DAVE FISCHER, Sheffield

Cameron has certainly, at this stage at least, improved the Tories' poll ratings, but not, I think, for the reasons you give.

A majority on the Labour left support John McDonnell and see your campaign as a spoiler which will only split the vote and stop a contest. Will you stand down if John has more nominations when Blair resigns? SUSAN PRESS, Calder Valley

There is no evidence whatever that a majority of people on the Labour Party left and the affiliated trade union movement support John McDonnell for leader. I have a great deal of respect for John, but I don't believe he can get the necessary 45 nominations, whereas I believe I can. I am not splitting the vote, but rather giving the centre-left the chance, to run a candidate who can pass the nominations threshold. But I do agree that whichever of the two of us has the larger number of nominations, the other should stand down when Tony Blair resigns.

Why not use that photo of you on Blackpool beach (very Daniel Craig) for your campaign posters? CONOR MURPHY, Reading

Good try. At least it shows I'm healthy.

Do you think Blair should stand down now?STEVE HARRISON, Bolton

The sooner he stands down, the better.

Why did you vote in favour of the invasion of Iraq?DEAN PALMER, Norwich

I made the biggest mistake of my political life when I supported the war, on the grounds that the Prime Minister repeatedly gave chapter and verse about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction and assured us that if only we knew all the intelligence available to him, we would have no doubts about the necessity for this action. I still find it deeply disturbing for democracy that a prime minister can so massage and fabricate the evidence in order to push through a preconceived war plan.

Do you think Blair lied to his MPs and lied to the country over Iraq?JEFF TERRY, Dundee

I think the highly selective manipulation of such evidence as there was, together with the highly prejudicial use to which it was put, was deeply dishonest.

You claim you were misled that Saddam had a WMD programme. Yet you say the West has no right to tell Iran not to develop nuclear weapons. Aren't you being rather inconsistent over Iraq and Iran?JIM ROLAND, London NW11

No, these are two quite separate arguments. Yes, we were certainly misled over Saddam's alleged WMD programme. While we should try to prevent Iranian nuclear weapons by negotiation and UN sanctions, we cannot say that nuclear weapons are indispensable for our own security, and then say Iran does not need them for their own security, especially when Iran (unlike the West) is surrounded by seven states which are nuclear-armed and some very hostile.

Do you truly believe that the US government knew about 9/11 but failed to prevent it?CHRIS QUIGLEY, by email

Clearly the US government did not know the precise time and location of the al-Qa'ida attack, but equally clearly there was a great deal of intelligence beforehand which, for whatever reason, it seems that they did not follow up.

You have suggested that the US government knew about the 9/11 attacks (which is pretty obvious I reckon, but fair play to you nonetheless). How complicit do you believe the UK Government was in 7/7? PAUL HUGHES, by email

Not at all.

Do you also believe that the FBI shot John F Kennedy, that Princess Diana was murdered and the US government has covered up the landing of aliens?BEN TROTTER, Cirencester

No. Such allegations are cheap and rather silly.

What steps will you propose to counter global warming? DR GEORGE BLAIR, by email

We should rapidly increase our use of renewable sources of energy (windpower, solar, and micro-generation in people's homes). We should require the airline industry, like every other industry, to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions each year. We should increase vehicle excise duty sharply for gas-guzzling cars and use the proceeds to subsidise bus and rail, and smaller-engine cars. We should give each family a carbon entitlement which then has to be reduced each year.

How often have you flown in the past 12 months? FIONA MILLS, Edinburgh

Not at all.

You criticise the 'Westminster bubble' but said you spent the last two months talking to MPs about your campaign. Does this not show you have the same disrespect for people's views as the rest of the Westminster bubble? MARSHA JANE THOMPSON, by email

I said that when people around the country come to vote, they may well take a quite different view of things from the inward-looking Westminster scene, and should be listened to. But I also extensively canvassed my colleagues in the Parliamentary Labour Party because they alone are the ones who make the nominations.

Why did it take you so long to announce your intention to stand for the Labour leadership when John McDonnell has been campaigning up and down the country for months?MAX MITCHELL, by email

I have been told that John McDonnell announced his candidature without consulting his colleagues. I thought it right first to consult extensively to confirm that my candidature would have the necessary range of support.

What are your guilty pleasures (apart from homeowning)?ALICE SHERWOOD, Tadworth

Wouldn't you like to know! Dropping childish comments in the waste paper basket is one of them.

You always look a bit boring. Are you? ROB JACKSON, by email

No. Why? Are you?

Posted by Michael Meacher at 12:28 PM | Permalink

From

There are three reasons why there should be an election for a new leader when Tony Blair finally goes. Only an election confers democratic legitimacy on the succession. Second, party members expect to have a choice about who should lead them. They have hardly been listened to for most of the last 13 years, and have every right to demand that their voice be listened to now. And third, there are major differences of view about the government's direction of travel which need to be understood, debated and voted on within the party. There are other, better alternatives.

New Labour has over-centralised power at the top, which has undermined democratic accountability at all levels. Its economy, driven exclusively by market forces, has played down intervention to secure a stronger manufacturing industry, a more balanced regional policy, and a lift out of its low pay, low skill, low productivity base. Its authoritarian civil society has eroded civil liberties across the board. Its deregulatory philosophy plays down environmental standards and labour rights.

Its indifference to, indeed embrace of, inequality -- "New Labour is relaxed about people getting filthy rich", as Peter Mandelson told us so charmingly -- has presided over a sharp increase in the gap between rich and poor. And its obsession with privatisation is leaching away the public service ideals which lie at the heart of a caring and committed society.

Because Labour and Tory policies are now so similar, politics has increasingly focused on personalities. But that is a fundamental misapprehension. A large part of the electorate on the centre-left, perhaps even a majority, has effectively been disenfranchised for the last three decades. Old-style Toryism was discarded by the voters in 1997, and now New Labour -- the continuing moving right show -- has clearly run its course. It's time, not for old Labour , but for a new implementation of core Labour values in a modern progressive politics addressing today's profound problems.

We need a new foreign policy which is based on fundamental British interests, not subservience to the US, particularly over the middle east. If our political status is to rise across the world, it is not sustainable to continue as America's glove puppet. We need a new social policy if the growing divisions within our society are to be healed. It is not sustainable for £9 billion of city bonuses to be doled out last year while 12.5 million people, a fifth of the population, remain in poverty.

We need a new penal policy if we are going to be genuinely as tough on the causes of crime as on crime itself. It is not sustainable to go on banging people up even faster than we can build prisons without trying to deal with the underlying causes of criminality and doing more to reduce recidivism. We need a new climate change and energy policy if we are not to become over-dependent on imported fossil fuels. It is not sustainable, let alone not legal, to go on fighting wars to grab control of the remaining reserves of Middle East oil when anyway the oil will soon run out.

So what should be done? To end the continuing horrendous carnage in Iraq, to complete our troop withdrawal and break the impasse over Palestine, we should use our political clout to initiate a wider international peace conference bringing together all the relevant actors for a joint settlement of the related middle east issues of contention which from experience cannot be resolved singly. That must include not only Iraq and Palestine within such a grand bargain, but above all a negotiated, not a military, settlement over Iran. If the US were to attack Iran, I would not put at risk a single British soldier or a single RAF pilot in support of such a crazed venture.

Domestically, the Unicef report marking Britain bottom of the table for children's experience shows how urgent it is to reverse the growing rich-poor divide. Less inequality leads to less violence, stronger community life, better health, longer life expectancy, lower teenage birth rates, as well as more social mobility and higher educational attainment. We should start by raising the national minimum wage (one of Labour's best achievements) quickly to £6 an hour, and then soon to £7 an hour. And recognising that wealth creation is not an individual but a team effort, we should move towards a system where there is no more than an acceptable ratio between top pay and bottom pay, so that pay rises at the top draw up the lower paid behind them too.

Globally we are at war against climate change. Business as usual, while relying on improved technology as a get-out card, is a fool's game. We need a profound change in every aspect of government and our way of life -- not just energy, but transport, industry, building, agriculture, public expenditure and taxation, and foreign policy, in order in every area to give absolute priority to combating climaten change. We need a crash programme, as we have done before in wartime, to develop renewable sources of energy, in which we are very well endowed, plus a massive programme to improve energy efficiency and energy conservation.

Peace, social justice, climate survival - those should be our top priorities. That is why the future lies with a centre-left agenda, and clearly there must be a centre-left candidate to lead this agenda forward who has the necessary nominations in the Parliamentary Labour Party to stand. I am fully confident I do have that necessary level of support, and that is why I am standing.

Posted by Michael Meacher at 03:39 PM | Permalink

Two current stories throw a searchlight on contemporary Britain. Farepak collapses, taking with it the £41m that 150,000 customers had saved towards their Christmas hampers. The customers have no rights because Farepak is technically not a deposit-taking bank. Three Natwest bankers are extradited to the US accused of conspiring with senior executives of the now-collapsed Enron to defraud their employers of £20m. There is a row about why they were sent to the US, but that misses the point. Why were no charges brought in this country when their alleged crimes were committed in Britain against a British firm?

It is now typical for the government to turn a blind eye to mega-scale crime or cheating of customers while relentlessly pursuing the pettiest of offenders with Asbos. Corporate crime in particular now almost always goes unpunished, indicating just how far corporate power, allied with a pro-big business government, insulates its holders against redress.

Continue reading "With great power ... (from Comment is Free)" »

Posted by Michael Meacher at 05:53 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

This article first appeared in The Guardian.

Only a world environment court can curb capitalism's excesses

Unseen by most, our world is being transformed at an exponential rate. It is a process driven by unfettered industrial exploitation, growing technological control, soaring population growth and now climate change, the effects of which open up an apocalyptic scenario for the human race.

Man's ecological footprint is now outpacing many of the natural phenomena that govern our world. Indeed, we have almost become our own geophysical cycle. Our biological carbon productivity is now exceeded only by the krill in the oceans. Our civil engineering works shift more soil each year than all the world's rivers bring to the seas. Our industrial emissions eclipse the total emissions from all the world's volcanoes. We are bringing about species loss on a scale of some of the massive natural extinctions of palaeohistory. We are altering the nitrogen cycle. Even in the remotest parts of the world, contaminants like lead and DDT appear in the food chain.

The ravages are there for all to see. Some 420 million people live in countries that no longer have enough crop land to grow their own food. Half a billion people live in regions prone to chronic drought. By 2025 that number is likely to have increased fivefold. Deserts are likely to become hotter. Marine ecosystems are at risk, including salt-water marshes, mangroves, coastal wetlands and coral reefs. In 1998, the hottest year on record, large areas of forest burned down after prolonged drought. By 2050 it is projected that the Amazon will have died back.

Shifts away from equilibrium unlock other changes that interact with the original shifts and grossly magnify their effects until the whole process spirals out of control and makes our planet uninhabitable.

Continue reading "The planet's polluters should be put in the dock" »

Posted by Michael Meacher at 03:22 AM | Permalink