Michael Meacher - Labour's Future

The problem for New Labour after Crewe is that there is a large and growing section of the population which is increasingly disenfranchised because it feels no party that is likely to be in power represents its interests and will tackle the deep-seated problems that now afflict Britain. And this is widely seen as applying across the board, not just about the odd issue.

The biggest problem facing Britain today is averting recession brought on by reckless bank lending exacerbated by the packaging of near-worthless mortgage assets into tradeable products. The government has pumped nearly £100bn into trying to unblock financial markets, but the underlying causes have not been tackled.

Structured investment vehicles, which spread the sub-prime mortgage contagion across the world, should require approval by a revamped Financial Services Authority to prevent their poison contaminating future markets. Credit agencies should no longer be paid by the companies whose creditworthiness they assess, as (amazingly) they now are. Banks should be required to hold robust capital reserves to discourage excessive lending driven by the out-of-control City bonus culture. Investment banks should be made separate from commercial banks.

But, sadly, New Labour is very unlikely to carry through these reforms because they conflict with its light-touch, deregulatory policy towards the financial markets and its commitment to City interests. Conservative policy would take deregulation even further.

Housing is where the credit crunch will strike hardest and where help is most needed. There are already 4 million applicants for council and housing association accommodation, plus 80,000 registered homeless. To prevent this huge pool of housing need expanding, houses at risk of repossession could be bought up by public authorities, their owners being converted to tenants until they are able to buy again. And to tackle the enormous lack of social affordable housing, housebuilders could be required to build at least 15% of their houses for this sector.

Yet neither New Labour nor Cameron's Tories will envisage market intervention of this kind, whatever the housing misery. New labour proposes to build an extra 15,000 social houses a year by 2016 (though that is less than half of what is needed to clear the backlog), as well as providing an extra £200m now for housing (welcome, but little more than enough for 1,000 more houses), together with more shared equity (almost irrelevant to the core of housing deprivation today). The Conservatives have made clear they would build no new council housing at all. Both parties are obsessed with home ownership - fine if you can afford it, but for the quarter of the population who can't, a cavalier dismissal of their needs.

Inequality, already extreme, is set to get worse. New Labour, originally relaxed about people becoming "filthy rich", notoriously still celebrates wealth over fighting poverty, presiding over a quadrupling of the wealth of the top 1% since 1997. In a series of U-turns easing tax liabilities for the rich over inheritance tax, non-domicile status, capital gains tax for private equity, tax-haven loopholes, and now foreign earnings for multinationals, it has bent over backwards to accommodate the super-rich.

It has indeed also reduced child poverty by 600,000 over the last decade, but this remains stubbornly very high at nearly 3 million. The Conservatives, who tripled poverty and unemployment in the 1980s, can only be expected to build even further on this structure of deeply unequal Britain.

Flexible labour markets - a euphemism for unfettered hiring and firing - have scarcely changed since Thatcher steamrollered market power over employment rights. To our shame, the charter of fundamental rights, which all the other 26 EU states accepted without demur, is still blocked in the UK by New Labour. At last Gordon Brown's legislative programme for next year is proposing increased rights for temporary and agency workers, but only subject to the agreement of the CBI. Against this background of New Labour concurrence with market forces the Tories are already talking of eroding basic employment protections still further.

The same picture applies across the whole political landscape. The privatisation of industry was forced through by Thatcher in the 1980s; New Labour has pushed through the privatisation of major areas of public service which even Thatcher drew back from. PFI, a variant of privatisation which offers poor value for money and compromises public expenditure for 30 years ahead, was developed by the Tories in the 1990s; it has now been extended by New Labour to over £100bn of public contracts, committed or planned.

The Tory war-cry "public sector bad, private sector good" has been underlined by New Labour in the light of the Northern Rock collapse, the Metronet scam on the London tube, the scotching of the Serious Fraud Office inquiry into alleged massive BAE corruption, the MRSA bug and contract hospital cleaning, and the loss of vast quantities of sensitive personal data by private contractors.

So in making a choice between New Labour and the Tories, the only two contenders with a chance of power, where's the beef? At a conference I addressed a week ago, a man came up to me afterwards in despair: "After 20 years of Thatcher Toryism and 10 years of New Labour, all we're offered is a return to Cameron. When are we going to be given an alternative we believe in?" That alternative is social democracy. New labour has taken us back a century to Edwardian-style inequality, the prewar dominance of private markets over public justice, and the centralisation of power in the hands of the financial, industrial and political elites, unprecedented since the 1930s.

Labour will not revive until it addresses the profound needs of Britain today rather than reinforcing a neoliberal paradigm which derives from the raw capitalism of its political opponents and which anyway has had its day and is now being buried under the chaos of the financial markets and the coming recession.

Social democracy has always been the answer to the failure of private markets, and so it will be again. It means a rebalancing of tax, income and wealth between poor and rich, a proper and necessary regulation of financial markets, a radical restoration of public accountability in parliament and throughout public life, a new and just settlement for civil liberties in society and for rights at work, and a fundamental reformulation of energy, environmental and climate change policies that can genuinely offer hope of human survival. It's what a good half of Britain is desperately waiting for.

This article appeared on 27 May in Comment is Free: http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/michael_meacher/2008/05/the_social_democratic_solution.html

Posted by Michael Meacher at 09:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The current debate about whether there should be a referendum on the proposed EU Reform Treaty isn’t really about the precise arguments for or against it at all. Rather it’s about people’s different conceptions of what the EU is about or what it’s for.

If you’re a Eurosceptic who thinks the EU should be a loose trading relationship with little or no political super-structure, you’ll support a referendum in the expectation that it will be lost, which might then open the way to leaving the EU and achieving the neo-conservative goal of closer alignment with the US.

However, the arguments actually used are that having an elected EU President for a 30-month term, creating an EU Foreign Minister in all but in name, making the EU a legal entity in certain contexts, and sacrificing the veto by the switch to QMV in 60 (mostly minor) policy areas constitutes a shift of power to Brussels – which it is – though whether it’s a significant shift is a fine judgement. It’s also argued too that Blair promised a referendum on the EU Constitution before the 2005 election (to keep the Murdoch press sweet) and that this Reform Treaty is almost the same– which it is – though it involves nothing like the leap in integration agreed in the Single European Act in 1986 and the Maastricht Treaty in 1992 when there were no referendums. And anyway Blair changed his position on having a referendum 6 times in his last 5 years as PM, so there’s plenty of evidence to quote for his supporting either side of the argument.

What drives the pro-referendum lobby therefore is not their ostensible claims, which are anyway not as strong as they pretend, but rather their underlying view of Europe and their hostility to any move towards even the slightest pooling of sovereignty, whatever the corresponding gains might be.

If you’re a Europhile, the argument will be that there’s no loss of power since Member States will still have to reach unanimous agreement over common policy objectives and a declaration confirms that foreign policy will remain under the control of Member States – though the declaration is not legally binding. It will also be argued that Britain retains an opt-in if it wishes to co-operate with other States in tackling such issues as terrorism and crime – though if Britain did opt-in to an agreement and then found that the final draft was unacceptable, it might not be able to opt out again.

Again therefore the anti-referendum lobby is equally motivated less by force of argument over the minutiae of the Treaty than by their underlying concept of Europe and their sense of Britain’s purpose within it. The key issue here then is how precisely that purpose is delineated.

Continue reading "To referendum or not to referendum" »

Posted by Michael Meacher at 11:17 AM | Permalink

I think there are four key challenges now facing the EU. First, Europe's economic problems cannot be solved with supply side reforms alone. Weak domestic demand in many cases, made worse by the constriction of the Stability and Growth Pact, should be tackled by setting up a counter cyclical European Recovery Fund and by developing ECOFIN as a real political counterpart to the European Central Bank.

Second, the EU's response to the global economy should be smarter than simply posing a choice between liberalisation and protectionism. It should seek to stabilise exchange rates and prevent speculative capital flows from destabilising healthy economies through a Tobin tax. It should press for an international clearing union to smooth trade imbalances by requiring countries to recycle their surpluses to maintain global demand. And it should take the lead in benchmarking social and environmental standards into world trade rules.

Third, the EU should give its social model a more distinctive European form. To deal with collapsing corporate provision, it should set up a European social fund into which companies should contribute a proportion of their profits to meet at least some of the spending needed to guarantee security in retirement as well as providing at least minimum standards for a European childcare guarantee.

Fourth, it must democratise EU politics so as to enable Europeans to feel involved in a common political debate about their future. Maybe a new Preseident of the European Council should lead on Europe-wide elections so that electors voted more as Europeans.

Posted by Michael Meacher at 01:54 PM | Permalink

Tonight's vote today in favour of having an all elected chamber represents a huge step forward. It was good to see all the options where there would have been a majority appointed element being rejected so decisively.

Now we must have legislation to act on the will of the Commons – because we voted as we did to reflect the weight of public opinion, which wants a 21st century bicameral parliament, not a 19th century one. We have to see the government commit itself to a bill that will turn tonight's vote into law and give us a properly elected second chamber, where the elections are run on an open list system and places on that list are decided by party members, not by party apparatchiks and the leadership.

Posted by Michael Meacher at 07:36 PM | Permalink

It is essential that House of Lords reform, being debated today and tomorrow in the Commons, ends with a clear decision to have a fully elected second chamber. Any extension of Prime Ministerial patronage, which is already far too pervasive and corrupting, over admissions to the Lords would reinforce the gross over centralisation of power which is one of the most damaging trends in Britain today. The power of the Prime Minister has grown, is still growing, and needs to be cut sharply back.

Posted by Michael Meacher at 10:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The natural reaction to recent reports about Hayden Phillips' interim review on party funding is to suggest that Tony Blair’s backing for the £50,000 donation cap will destroy the union link and thus the party with it.

Certainly, if it goes through – if the NEC does not stop it in its tracks at its emergency meeting tonight - it would be an unmitigated disaster for Labour. Let’s not beat about the bush: the suggestion of a £50,000 donation cap is a right wing ploy designed to damage us, made easier by New Labour’s ill conceived courting of rich businessmen exemplified by the Ecclestone/F1/tobacco advertising affair.

Continue reading "Money and power" »

Posted by Michael Meacher at 12:22 PM | Permalink

It’s only Sunday night and the fringe is buzzing merrily away. This may be day one of the conference but I’ve spoken at several fringe meetings already. Tonight’s was a first for me – the Make Votes Count rally alongside Patricia Hewitt, Charles Clarke and John Denham. I’m a later convert than some to the need for electoral reform and the introduction of proportional representation, but FPTP produces results out of all proportion to the views of the electorate. It is intellectually unsustainable and does not give the winner of a general election a mandate that is acceptable for any political party.

Continue reading "Past the post is past its sell-by date" »

Posted by Michael Meacher at 11:55 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The government is keen to deploy e-voting despite evidence of ballot rigging

From The Guardian

For the first time, vote-rigging may become a serious issue at a general election - perhaps in just three months' time. With several cases of alleged vote-rigging and fraud already under investigation - in Reading, Birmingham, Cheshire, Derbyshire, Lancashire, Greater Manchester and West Yorkshire - the Electoral Commission is pressing guidelines on detecting voting fraud on senior police and election officers.

Meanwhile, the government remains keen on electronic voting and is aiming at "an e-enabled election some time after 2006". Will this raise turnout or simply increase the risk of fraud? Several pilots have been held. In 2003, six local authorities electronically counted ballot papers where votes had also been cast electronically. Surprisingly, there has been no manual checking of the e-counting results.

However, a full-blown test run of e-voting has been carried out elsewhere, with very instructive results. It shows that e-voting is neither secure nor tamper-proof, and allegations are surfacing that it may have affected the result. This dry run was the recent US presidential election.

Electronic voting machines made by the Diebold company use the Gems (Global Election Management Systems) software, which was used to count over a third of the votes in three-quarters of the states in the election. It was also used in electronic touch-screen machines predominantly employed in electoral battleground states like Florida.

E-voting machine companies refuse to open up their software for public viewing. The certification of their machines is also kept secret. Computer investigators claim that the machines are extremely insecure and vulnerable to hacking via the internet, particularly via remote modems.

Beverley Harris and Andy Stephenson, US computer experts who researched this question in their recent book, Black Box Voting, have shown that electronic control from remote modems is invisible to the election supervisor, and party observers cannot see the intrusion. It leaves no record, even in the audit log, if an illicit "back-door" is used to get into the program.

The central tabulator audit log is a security requirement mandated by the US Federal Elections Commission, which is intended to detect vote-tampering. Diebold says that altering its audit log is impossible. But the firm's internal memos, which have been made public, show that it has known the audit log could be corrupted and changed since 2001.

According to Harris, a manipulation technique she found in Diebold's AccuVote central vote tabulator is able to read totals from an untraceable bogus vote set within its software. "By entering a two-digit code in a hidden location, a second set of votes is created; and this set of votes can be changed in a matter of seconds, so that it no longer matches the correct votes," she has said. And she has demonstrated this live on television. Her conclusion is: "You can easily edit the election."

In November 2003, in a governorship election in Alabama, 6,300 votes changed overnight - which gave victory to the Republican candidate. In Texas that same month, three Republican candidates won, each with exactly 18,181 votes. In King County, Washington, in a September 2004 primary, it was discovered that three hours were missing from the audit log. Modem "trouble slips" were acquired that revealed King County's modem access number - which would have allowed anyone surreptitiously to take control of the county's central server (vote tabulator) on election night from an isolated location. In all such cases, there is a lack of any paper trail to conduct a recount if demanded.

Stephenson also discovered that Jeffrey Dean, the senior programmer of the Diebold Gems central tabulator system counting a third of the votes in the Bush-Kerry election in 37 states, has a police record. He pleaded guilty to 23 counts of embezzlement involving sophisticated manipulation of computer accounting records.

Diebold's CEO, Walden O'Dell, raised more than $100,000 for George Bush's election last November. It is also widely reported that he helped raise $600,000 for Bush-Cheney 2004 last June. Soon after that, he sent a letter to Ohio Republicans repeating his pledge to "help Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president". Altogether, Diebold has given over £1m to the Republicans.

We must be extremely cautious of the surge towards electronic voting. Before importing US voting systems into Britain, any software secrets in the machine technology must be made transparent. Software must be properly certified, and there must be paper trails. If these conditions cannot be met, electronic voting should not be introduced. There are better ways of increasing turnout than simply changing the voting technology.

Posted by Michael Meacher at 01:50 PM | Permalink