Yesterday  an innocuous little announcement was dribbled out of Whitehall with little or no pick-up in the media.    It said that the Government had decided to wind up the Appointments Commission.   Since this Commission was set up as an independent body precisely to stop political interference in public appointments, particularly in the health service under the Thatcher Government, it starts to ring alarm bells when this notice of abolition has been issued by the Department of Health whose Minister, Lansley, has just announced ‘reforms’ which will effectively eviscerate the NHS.   It strongly suggests the Tories are set on packing the NHS with compliant placemen/women to ram through highly contentious changes to privatise large chunks of the health service.   Nor is that the only area where patronage is now being used corruptly for highly partisan political ends.

Two other examples have arisen in the last week or two, unconnected, which illustrate the sensitivity of who makes the appointment.   The coroner’s choice of Freddy Patel as the pathologist to undertake the autopsy on Ian Tomlinson after the G20 demonstrations, perhaps influenced by pressure from the police, clearly changed the course of justice after his death.   Equally, the DEFRA choice of a scientist, Prof. Jones of the Sainsbury Laboratory at the John Innes Centre at Norwich, to carry out a taxpayer-funded trial to determine whether GM crops should be grown in the UK was obviously designed to achieve a predetermined answer since he has been exposed as having close commercial links with the US biotech giant Monsanto.   It is clearly relevant that the new Tory Secretary of State at DEFRA is Caroline Spelman who has been a partner with her husband in their own biotech firm.

Should not all such sensitive public appointments have to be vetted and confirmed/rejected by Parliament through hearings before the appropriate Select Committee?   Winning an election should not give the governing party the right to rig appointments across the spectrum in order to achieve some preconceived political or partisan purpose.

Rather surprisingly, but under intense pressure, slasher Osborne conceded that exact principle just two weeks ago.   After the furore over the Treasury-appointed OBR suddenly producing future employment projections after the Budget which most economists thought pure fantasy and which were clearly aimed to protect the Prime Minister at PMQs, Osborne accepted that the Treasury Committee should be given powers to reject the Treasury’s recommendation of a successor to Sir Alan Budd as head of the OBR.   I never thought I would agree with Osborne, but if this is conceded over the OBR (albeit only after enormous embarrassment to the Government), why not for all such important and sensitive political appointments?   Including not just Quango heads, but also the appointment of  Cabinet Ministers?

On that happy note I’m off on holiday; see you again in a fortnight!

As the nomination period for the Labour Leadership contest ends with David Miliband taking 165 CLP nominations to his brother’s 147 with the others far behind, and the prospect of a new era opens up, one sentence reported from the Mandelson memoirs came forcibly to mind about why this hadn’t happened long before – namely that the members of the Brown Cabinet knew for at least 18 months before the election that Labour was headed for a bad defeat, and likely a catastrophe, but believed they could do nothing about it.   Why not?   That says it all about the state of today’s Labour Party. The Blairite interregnum not only cloned the PLP in the Leader’s image, creating a pool of loyalists on a scale as never before, it also fundamentally changed the culture of the Labour Party.   A premium was put on conformity with the party line over all other considerations, ostensibly to avoid the party in-fighting of the 1980s, but in reality to enforce a disciplined obedience to whatever Blair as leader decided.   The carefully built-up democratic traditions of the Labour Party were circumvented, sidelined, and finally simply ignored by the leadership.

The culture of member activism steadily faded, party control was unprecedentedly centralised, conference was downgraded to a mere leadership rally, and party officials were suborned into ensuring that the leadership’s preferred candidates won the party’s parliamentary selections around the country to ensure that the praetorian guard around the leader in the House was regularly topped up.   The strategy worked well, at the price of destroying the party’s democracy and replacing the vigorous internal struggle over the party’s soul in the 1970-80s with almost total quiescence in the 1990-2000s, the silence of the graveyard.

Two lessons immediately arise from this sad saga.   One is that it has left embedded the fallacy that being young, clever, articulate and telegenic is the necessary criterion for leadership, as though ideology, values, principles, and policy vision didn’t matter.   In fact they matter overwhelmingly more than anything else.   The other is that we now need a leadership which is not wholly disrespectful and dismissive of its membership (apart from canvassing at election time), which does not define itself in opposition to its own party members, and which does not demand obsequiousness by a careful calibration of patronage, iron discipline, intimidation, and rule-busting shenanigans.   What is needed is to restore the principle of collective, accountable, and representative leadership.

I was once told when I was a young MP that the way to judge politicians is to ask yourself: do I know the two or three things that this candidate would go to the stake for?   It’s a criterion well worth reviving now.

The most remarkable, and disturbing, aspect about the simultaneous release today of 92,000 internal records of US military actions in Afghanistan to the Guardian, Der Spiegel and the New York Times is how blind, complacent, negligent or sycophantic the US (and other Western) media have been over a 6-year period (Jan 2004-Dec 2009) in getting anywhere near the truth about the war in that country.   Or, putting it another way, how come the US establishment military and political have been able so comprehensively and for so long to conceal the truth?   That in itself, apart from the facts which are horrifying enough, deserves detailed investigation and a full-scale inquiry into news management in war situations.

Many of the hideous facts of the Vietnam war were only revealed by the leaking of the Pentagon Papers by Daniel Ellsberg.   We only learnt of the out-of-control shooting-up of civilians in a Baghdad street in 2007 by US Apache helicopters when it was leaked by a young US army intelligency analyst named Bradley Manning and posted on Wikileaks.   The Pentagon had said it couldn’t find the video when Reuters asked for it under FOIA.   And now Wikileaks after this first single revelation is claiming it has several million files which may include US embassy cables concerning arms deals, trade talks, secret meetings, and uncensored criticism from other governments.

How could the media have failed so badly to get at the real truth?   There are several explanations.   One if that the US media (with honourable exceptions like Seymour Hersch) have repeatedly been exposed as extraordinarily subservient – one reason why Bush got away with so much after 9/11.   News was what the establishment deemed to be news.   Even when a journalist breaks through the barrier, as Michael Hastings did in his revelations about General Stanley McCrystal in Rolling Stone magazine, it was he who was excoriated for breaking the unspoken rules rather than the US military for giving wholly misleading accounts about the progress of the war.

Why then haven’t the US media asked more probing questions or followed up with more searching exposures when diverted by evasive or mendacious replies?   As in the UK context, journalists have grown lazy in accepting official explanations, especially if ‘embedded’ with the military in wartime.   They may also be threatened with being cut out of future intelligence if they print  stories inconvenient or embarrassing to the authorities.   But that is exactly what they’re there for.

Given the weakness of so much of the media the internet, blogs, Wikileaks, hacking are finally confronting the culture of spin and the dominance over presentation controlled by the powers-that-be whether politicians, corporations, military or police.   But the monopoly over information in the hands of the powerful (and used with such devastating effect to portray a false reality to serve their interests, as this latest Wikileaks episodes illustrates) has to be broken, not just from outside the system, but within the system itself.

A compass survey has found that Britain tofay has the highest levels of personal debt in the world – a staggering £1,460bn, equal to the entire economic worth of all the products and services that Britain produces in a year.    But the levels of indebtedness become so high that debtors accept, or are forced into, any deal with private loan sharks that will roll over their debts for a few weeks or months, even though this will only make things much worse within a very short time.   When the Bank of England base rate is at the rock-bottom rate of 0.5%, loan and credit companies have been found exploiting victims with rates as high as 2500%!   So what should be done? To stave off bankruptcy, repossession of their home, of financial collapse in whatever form, some 3 million people in Britain today use ultra high-cost door-to-door loans which often charge interest and collection charges of £83 for every £100 borrowed.   Having caused the worst financial meltdown for nearly a century, financial institutions are now making huge profits from the most vulnerable and unprotected sections of society.

Government action so far does not begin to meet the horror of legalised impoverishment now being rolled out across Britain today.   The Growth Fund was set up as the official mechanism to increase affordable credit to very poor households, but its budget is just £100m.   The OFT however indicates that this is just a drop in the ocean when it estimates that the private loan sharking sector is worth some £35bn a year, 350 times larger.

What is urgently needed is a 2-prong attack to stop this.   A lending rate cap should be put on all forms of consumer credit, and at the same time more affordable, more responsible sources of credit should be made much more widely available.   The idea of a People’s Bank, which has already been much talked about, should now be rapidly introduced using the Post Office network.   In addition there should now be a big push in favour of local credit unions, CDFIs, co-operatives, and mutuals.   And all banks should now be required to provide a universal banking service.

Britain is one of very few countries worldwide that does not have a lending cap, and its current banking provision is skewed grossly in favour of the middle classes and the rich.   Reforming this would be one of the most popular goals for a Labour Party revival.

There are two groups in Britain who are above the law – the bankers and the police.   Members of both groups have, in very different ways, done immense damage to the economic and social fabric of this country in recent years, and not one has been held to account.   Leading bankers in all the main banks have acted with almost unbelievable folly and recklessness which has now cost taxpayers over $650bn, a sum that will rise by 2014 to £1.4 trillion (equal to Britain’s whole GDP), yet not one banker has been prosecuted, imprisoned, demoted, sacked or permanently (or even temporarily) barred from any involvement in the financial sector they virtually destroyed.   Now the Tomlinson affair shows that the police are equally immune from public accountability, and can even kill citizens with impunity.   For this is not an isolated episode, but comes on top of a long list of similar incidents.

There was the killing by police of Jean-Charles de Menezes on the wrong assumption, without proper checks, that he was a terrorist.   There was the killing by police of a man walking home with a chair leg which was assumed, without confirmation, that it was a gun.   There was the killing by a polic Tactical Support Unit of Blair Peach at a demonstration when he was unarmed and posed no threat.   There have been repeated deaths in custody where prosecutions for manslaughter are rare – Mikey Powell in the West Midlands in 2003, Christopher Alder in a Hull police station in 2002, James Ashley shot dead by police at his home in Sussex in 1998, Richard O’Brien dying while being restrained by police in London in 1994, and David Edwin killed by police in London in 1995 – and many, many others.

And now Ian Tomlinson dying in the G20 demonstration after being bitten by a police dog, hit with a baton and then pushed so violently in the back by PC Simon Harwood that he fell heavily to the floor.   Almost all of these cases where police have been involved in a violent death have been dismissed because of technicalities, flawed evidence, or huge delays (often 3-4 years) leading to loss of vital material.   In the case of Tomlinson the failures of due process are execrable:

*  The pathologist who conducted the first crucial post-mortem with no other medical expert present, Dr. Mohammed Saeed Sulema Patel, and who concluded that Tomlinson died of natural causes, had repeatedly had his professional conduct questioned in at least 4 other cases, and has been summoned before a GMC disciplinary hearing over these cases.   Why then was he chosen by the City of London coroner?   Did the police recommend him?

*  Patel failed to examine or retain 3 litres of fluid found inside Tomlinson’s body.   Yet this was vital evidence because if it was mainly blood, it would have indicated that the cause of death was bleeding as a result of an internal rupture.

*  The second autopsy, commissioned by the IPCC, found that death was more likely to be caused by abdominal bleeding as a result of blunt force trauma, consistent with a fall or assault.   The third autopsy, conducted on behalf of the police officer himself, agreed with the findings of the second post-mortem.   So why were these two autopsy findings not given decisive weight when Patel’s original post-mortem examination, carried out alone and without independent check, was so obviously blatantly flawed?

Just when you thought that things can’t get worse, the screw is turned further.   According to the official National Housing Federation, the cuts in housing benefit which slasher Osborne announced in his Budget and which DWP are now about to launch will force over 750,000 people out of their homes, increasing 5-fold the 140,000 persons currently classified as homeless in Britain.   What is going to happen to soaring hundreds of thousands of additional rough sleepers when local authorities, facing 25-30% cuts like central Departments, only have a statutory duty to house people in ‘priority need’? The Tory rationale for the unprecedented £1.8bn cut in housing benefit is that it will force claimants to transfer to smaller homes and will help to bring down rents.   This is the most draconian Tory measure yet, picking on the literally homeless and poorest to pay for the reckless destructiveness of the economy by the bankers and the richest – a greater upending of justice one could ever find.

By deciding that housing benefit should be pegged to the bottom third of rents in any borough, the Tories almost by definition are making homelessness inveitable.   Moreover, by fixing a cap on housing benefit in London for a 4-bedroom property at £400 a week and £250 a week for a 2-bedroom house, Osborne will make it very difficult, if not impossible, to find homes that the poorest can afford.   To make matters worse, Osborne is also now uprating housing benefit each year in line with retail prices rather than by the average rental increases in the neighbourhood.   And the unemployed will be particularly targeted since JSA claimants will see their housing benefit fall by 10% if they’re out of work for more than a year.

All told, this is a monumental disaster when house-building is now this year at its lowest ebb since 1923.   The small increase in affordable housing budgeted for at the tail-end of the Labour Government has now been scrubbed out, and we are back to the derisory levels of Council housebuilding that shamed the latter part of the Blairite era – just 100-300 a year (when even Thatcher in her last year in 1989-90 produced 13,000).

And what makes this inexcusably short-sighted and brutal is that house-building offers the most beneficial triple whammy imaginable in a recession.   It provides houses or flats which people desperately need when there are nearly 2 millions on Council waiting lists.   It keeps building workers, and all the associated trades, at work paying taxes rather than out of work and dependent on benefits.   And it improves economic efficiency by increasing flexibility in the labour market.   Only the ideological rigidity of the politicians – in favour exclusively of the private sector and of home ownership rather than renting – stands in the way.

It would be unfair to call Cameron’s Big Society a “total bollocks”, as one senior Conservative did during the election campaign because it was too vague to mean anything.   Cameron himself would have us believe it is a project, to be launched in November, to harness the power of online social networking via a new Your Square Mile website to turn sceptical citizens into enthusiastic community organisers.   After the Thatcher decade lionised individuals and rolled back the State, the Big Society provides the positive counterfoil of joining individuals together to take community action.   Or does it? What will it actually do?   The only concrete answers to emerge so far are that it will include the practical like a babysitting network or helping a neighbour struggling with groceries, and the administrative like providing cheap insurance (but who pays?) or streamlined criminal record checks for local events!   Shades of John Major’s Cones Hotline.

Of course it’s easy to see the Big Society as a farcical figleaf to cover up the gaps left by huge spending cuts.   But the concept is more insidious than that.   It is fundamentally a shift away from the whole idea of collective action and shared responsibility that underpins social democracy.    Recruiting goodwill among small oases of civil society wherever they happens to spring up (however estimable within those localities) is no antidote to the rampant poverty and powerlessness thrown up by a market economy with a highly centralised power structure.

There’s also the small matter of expertise, aptitude and time.   People on low wages (say less than £18,000 a year) often have long hours and physically draining activities at work to contend with, and particularly if they have large family responsibilities don’t have either the inclination or the time for social networking.

There can be no doubt – as Eric Pickles admitted “this is about getting more services for less money” – that this is partly about replacing paid labour by unpaid labour.   But there is no way that the fundamental conditions of a fair and opportunity-for-all social democratic society – housing support, sports and recreation, child care, out-of-work income support, high-quality healthcare, and free and potential-unlocking education – can be guaranteed by voluntary local networks.   At best they can offer a marginal supplement to the foundation of good public services.

The ‘Big Society’ idea may sometimes provide a useful helping hand in some local communities where it takes root, where it should be welcomed rather than scorned, but the idea that it offers a new ideology or dominant social template to deal with the deep social and economic problems of an extremely unequal market economy is risible.   Not only will it scarcely brush the surface of  healing the social injustices and profound inequalities of modern society, it will actually exacerbate them.   For if the State is pruned back so drastically that it is not big enough or strong enough to deal with people’s basic needs,  it will produce an attenuated society, not a bigger one.

Listening to William Hague yesterday in Kabul at the ninth international conference on the future of Afghanistan illustrated political doublespeak at its lowest ebb.   All local analysts recognise that the military balance is moving steadily away from Nato forces towards the Taliban.   Sangin, Musa Qala and Marjah cannot be secured and are constantly taken and retaken like some barren hill in Vietnam to deny it to the enemy.   The British casualty rate (322 soldiers killed to date) is now twice as high proportionately as the US rate and as high as the Soviet forces endured in the 1980s, and will certainly not be politically sustainable in the UK for long.   So where now?

All the arguments for staying put are going down like a lead balloon.   We are fighting in Afghanistan to protect the streets of London: this potty idea is believed by nobody when virtually all terrorist acts in the UK have been home-grown and indeed have mostly occurred precisely because foreign troops are occupying their country.   We need more time (after 9 years) to get Afghan forces to the point where they can adequately secure the country: nobody on the ground believes that this will happen in less than several decades, if then.   President Karzai must be given timescales to root out corruption: there is no evidence he either can or ever will do so.   The Petraeus strategy in Iraq of winning over (and bribing) ‘moderate’ insurgents must be given time to work: but Afghanistan is totally different from Iraq, and the exceedingly belligerent and conservative Pashtun Taliban will never play along with such collaboration.

So why are we in Afghanistan at all?   For much the same reason that we have been 7 years in Iraq – because the Americans/Bush wanted us there to provide a minor support role and diplomatic cover, and Blair was only too anxious to stand ‘shoulder to shoulder’.   This was the time of John Reid’s infamous sending 3,000 British troops to Helmand to ‘establish the pre-conditions for nation-building’ and ‘without a shot being fired’.   The political doublespeak knows no bounds.

As with Iraq the ostensible rationale keeps changing – first WMD, then Saddam’s monstrous suppression of human rights, then democratisation in the Middle East (but never the real reason -oil).   In Afghanistan first it was going after al Qaeda post-9/11, then it was the War on Terror, then it was nation-building and female emancipation (but never the real reson – geo-strategic control of the southern under-belly of the former Soviet empire, and now fear of military defeat).

Clearly all hope of victory has been abandoned.   The only way out now is a deal between the Taliban, the Pakistanis, and the corrupt clan around Karzai – as inauspicious a brew as one can find, though talking about it openly and advertising one’s relative impotence is counter-productive.   There will be serious loss of face, though that is a lot better than continuing serious loss of life.   If there is a lesson from this catastrophe, it’s that Parliament was far too quiescent and complacent, when Reid first made his announcement,  in not demanding far more rigorous conditions, objectives and timescales before sanctioning any British involvement at all.

The chances of a double-dip recession are growing every day, and are now more than 50-50 likely.   The ONS has just announced that the 2008-9 meltdown drained £22bn out of the economy, forced up unemployment by hundreds of thousands, and with a 6.4% slump in UK output was far worse than 5.3% in the Eurozone and 3.8% in the US.   The 2.6% pre-budget growth forecast for 2011 was cut post-budget by the OBR to 2.3%, and now has been lowered further still by the IMF to just 2.1%.   The faltering rise in UK output in the spring seems to have halted, and the rise in house prices has petered out or even fallen.   The key engines of growth – household spending (even before the rise in VAT) and exports – are both down.   So what is Osborne’s response?

On top of all this, net bank lending continues to be negative.   Alistair Darling lent hundreds of billions of pounds to the banks so that they could onward lend to private businesses at the level, as Gordon Brown said at the time, before the 2007 downturn (i.e. an M4 money supply rate growing at 20% a year).   That lending is now at the lowest rate since records began, and clearly shows the banks are pulling down the hatches ready for a renewed and deeper recession whilst pocketing the enormous public subsidies (thank you, taxpayer) to tide them over the worst.

The Tories are now hoist on their own petard.   They and their quisling OBR have been asserting that the space created by the vanishing public sector jobs will be more than filled by an upsurge in private sector job creation.   Don’t they get the basic Keynesian insight that business doesn’t invest unless the level of demand indicates the prospect of profitability?   It is a deep irony that with the private sector flat or falling back, the Tories are now determined to decimate the one element of relative buoyancy in the economy on which the private sector depends for 40% of its contracts.   The public sector is about to be hit not only by a big rise in VAT, but also by a 25% cut in the Government’s £650bn a year public expenditure, with possible cuts in some cases up to 40%.   If this isn’t cutting off your nose to spite your face, I don’t know what is.

So what is plan B?   Slasher Osborne doesn’t have one because he thinks it’s unnecessary.   But simply concentrating on an imagined supply side revival whilst at the same time hammering the demand side in both the public and private sectors is not a recipe for recovery, but a sure sign of a double dip.

The Academies Bill today in the Commons is a particularly brash example of Govian arrogance – the unprecedentedly telescoped parliamentary proceedings for scrutiny of the Bill, the bypassing of constitutional and democratic processes (which on Radio 4 he dismissed as over-concern for processology), the lack of consultation, and the rolling-out nationwide of an inadequately tested and highly contentious system.

Not only that, serious unaswered questions remain about the funding of Academies, their expansion to primary and special and grammar schools, admissions policy (will banding arrangements introduce selection by the back door?), and the lack of due governance and adequate accountability.   To push ahead so precipitately with such an untried system where the limited results so far are at best highly ambivalent is a real abuse of power.   What results can be expected?

Under Labour, Academies at lease had the ostensible aim to replace ‘failing’ schools mainly in poorer areas.   Now Gove has told all schools judged ‘outstanding’ by Ofsted that they are pre-approved for Academy status, in which case why interfere with them?   Under the Tories Academies are being used to confer extra benefits on some of most socially exclusive schools in the country.

Analysis of schools judged ‘outstanding’ by Ofsted has found that they take 40% fewer poor pupils than the national average.   Some schools in the most deprived communities have as many as half of their pupils eligible for free meals.   Academies will be amplifying the success of the already successful schools at the expense of the rest since it will be very difficult for Government (even if it wished to) to enforce the admissions code without local authority checks.

Hitherto Academies had to be all-ability, but that will change drastically when the Bill allows grammar schools to become Academies.   They have very low levels of free school meals pupils, often 1-2%.   Whereas the whole principle of a New Labour Academy was that it was a comprehensive school, that is now about to be breached wholesale.   In the Tories’ new educational market we shall see exclusivity and selection return with a vengeance, taking the country back to the two-tier or multi-tier market-orientated system that generated such divisiveness and angst before it was abolished in the 1960s.

Mrs. Thatcher csrried through a huge programme of privatisation of industries, Blair attempted the same (though with only limited success) in respect of services, and now the Tories are hell-bent on achieving what Blair failed to do, but using a different route – the austerity drive.   By shrinking the State on the ostensible pretext that the budget deficit makes this ‘unavoidable’, the Tories have the perfect excuse to complete the ideological anti-State revolution to reverse once-and-for-all the post-1945 hegemony of social democracy.   They are certainly approaching the task with relish on tghe evidence of just 2 months of coalition government.

Lansley, the Minister for junk food and privatisation of the NHS, made clear that by abolishing the PCTs (the main pillars for the public allocation of funding within the NHS) and transferring the commissioning role to GPs who have neither the expertise nor the inclination to take on this function, he was opening up huge new opportunities for the private sector.   When I pressed him in the House if this would enable US organisations like UnitedHealth and UK organisation like BUPA and Virgin, on whom GPs would be forced to rely, to hand out large chunks of health care to the private sector, he flatly denied it – which of course is Tory-speak that that’s absolutely right, but you won’t catch us ever admitting it.

Gove has decided to force through his legislation in favour of academies and so-called ‘free schools’ (i.e. both independent of the State and firmly in the private sector) in double-quick time – an unprecedentedly short 8 days -  revealing not only a contempt for Parliament, but a determination to de-nationalise British education with indecent haste.

Then there is the outsourcing of local givernment functions across the whole spectrum.   Capita,  Mouchel and Serco, the main outsourcing firms, are all expecting a bonanza from the squeeze on local authority budgets – though why privatising functions plus the profit element should be cheaper is not clear.   In any case, even if the private sector were cheaper or more efficient (for which, contrary to the conventional wisdom, there is no evidence and in most cases is certainly not the case) , shouln’t the taxpayer rather than the shareholder benefit?

But the really big shift to a private market State and the attrition of public services almost to invisibility will come with the curiously ill-named Public Spending Reviewin October.   Cutbacks of 25-40% in Departmental budgets , if carried through, will be the tipping point away from anything validly recognisable as a Welfare State.   The private sector will have the opportunity without precedent to take over even some of the most central and intimate roles of the State.   Neo-liberalism in economics is dead, long live neo-liberalism in society.

The Gulf of Mexico saga which may – or may not – be now coming to an end has more compelling implications than has been realised.   It’s not just that BP has suffered a catastrophic accident, has already paid out £2.5bn in clean-up costs, is facing even bigger compensation claims for years ahead, and has experienced the biggest reputational nosedive in modern history from third largest corporation in the US to public enemy no1.   It’s the way its record in so many other respects has been crawled over and found abysmally wanting.

It’s not even just that the Gulf of Mexico disaster comes on top of the worst US industrial disaster of the last decade, also laid at the door of BP, when its Texan oil refinery blew up in 2005 killing 15 workers.   It’s the fact that these were not just one-off episodes, but rather typical of a  safety and environment-lax, no-holds-barred, gung-ho profits culture which arrogantly accepted no checks on its industrial and financial dominance.   As the evidence now coming to light reveals, the abuse of power runs right through the whole BP record.   So how should we now respond? US Congressional hearings have shown that BP committed more that 700  safety and environmental violations in the US over the last 5 years, compared with less than 10 for the other main oil companies.   Along Alaska’s North Slope BP’s  badly maintained pipeline had earlier belched out 200,000 gallons of oil, even before the Gulf of Mexico’s 60,000 gallons a day.   BP has also been accused  (it was once known as Blair Petroleum)of corruptly lobbying for the release of the (alleged) Lockerbie bomber in order to get a prime slice of the Libyan oil-fields as well as to extract juicy multi-billion contracts from the Azerbaijani dictatorship.

BP behaved like a statelet, just like the eighteenth century East India Company acted as a branch of British foreign policy, and with equal impudence.   The question then is: do we wait for the next disaster before the media/politicians train their sights on succeeding BP commercial debacles, or should UK Select Committees (like regular US Congressional hearings) now take upon themselves the duty routinely to audit and scrutinise the record of top companies in each of the main industrial sectors?

Given their power and their level of resources, well in excess of many States within the UN, shouldn’t Parliament focus on where the power really lies, not the Departments of State which they formally shadow, but rather the biggest industrial and financial players who are already implicitly (though covertly) part of the State framework and who have the power to make or break governments?   Holding the top echelons of the private sector to account is now more important than orchestrated exchanges with Ministers or their minions.   We need to start acting on that basis.

Vince Cable is to be credited with coming up with new and more radical solutions for resolving the two key dilemmas in higher education – the growing elitism in Britain’s top universities and the unfairness of tuition fees especially if they were to be significantly raised (as the top universities are clamouring for).   But his proposals don’t go far enough to break through the class barrier and also contain some notable downsides. Access to the 20 Russell Group elite universities/colleges mirrors what has been happening to the distribution of income over the last two decades.   Just as the wages of the less well-off have flatlined over this period whilst the rewards and wealth of the super-elite have soared, so the dividing line between poor and rich in access to the top universities has hardened further.   Last year only 2.6% of the 2,800 intake to Oxford came from disadvantaged areas, 3.5% in the case of Cambridge, and 5% in the case of Bristol, LSE, UCL, King’s College, London, and Imperial College.    15 years ago bright children from the richest homes were 6 times more likely to get a place in the top third of universities; now they are 7 times more likely to do so.

Measured against that index of discrimination, Cable’s proposal of quotas for State school pupils to break the private school stranglehold on Oxbridge is a welcome and brave one.   It would also have the merit of spreading pupils from richer households more widely across the State sector, thus diminishing the class exclusiveness of the private schools, since fee-paying would then no longer semi-monopolise access to the top universities.   But the quotas need to be spelt out and wide-ranging if they are not to be merely token concessions.   The aim, with a timetable to match, has to be real equality of opportunity irrespective of class or background.

Cable’s other main initiative – a progressive as opposed to a flat-rate graduate tax to replace the extremely contentious rise in tuition fees – is also worthwhile.   Again the progressivity needs to be made plain, not merely proportionately more being contributed by the higher-paid according to earnings, but a higher rate for each main higher band of earnings.

That does however leave several practicalities unanswered.   How will universities be funded in the next two transitional decades before the graduate tax is fully functional?   One suggestion might be that previous recipients of a degree should make some small regular contribution over this period to pay back some of the benefits they have received.   Then there is the real risk that the insertion into an otherwise quite radical speech of encouraging private university provision – no doubt under Tory pressure – may open up a US-style higher education market in which the rich can once again buy privilege and exclusivity.

So BP lobbied the British Government for the release of Abdel Basset  al-Megrahi, the alleged Lockerbie bomber, in order to get prior access to Libyan oil – or so say 4 US Senators.   Al-Megrahi was almost cetainly not the culprit;  the bombing was much more likely to have been carried out by the Iranian-backed Ahmed Gibril’s revolutionary Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – but that’s another story.     The deal that was hatched whereby Libya would give up its nuclear ambitions (which showed no sign of materialising anyway), Al-Megrahi would be released on compassionate grounds that he was in the final stages of a terminal illness (which we now know he wasn’t), and Britain would graciously respond to these magnanimous gestures of goodwill from Libya by opening up its markets to Libyan goods (i.e. grabbing the oil).

Jack Straw, earlier Foreign Secretary, openly admitted as much.   He said last year: “We wanted to bring Libya back into the fold.   And yes, that included trade…and subsequently there was the BP deal”.   No country oozes high-mindedness to cloak its base commercial interests like the UK.   Indeed this motif has been played out repeatedly.

Britain supported the US unprovoked and illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003, not because of WMD (there weren’t any, as US and UK leaders knew well at the time), but because of the oil, as showed conclusively in my Guardian article of 6 September 2003.   In 1998 Blair welcomed President Aliyev of Azerbaijan, one of the most corrupt and brutal dictatorships in the world, to Downing Street and made arrangements for him to stay at Buckingham Palace, not out of regard for a former KGB-style Communist boss, but to sign up oil contracts worth £5bn for BP.   The Foreign Office recalled in 2004 and sacked its ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, not because the President of that country boiled his political opponents to death, but because Murray’s loud denunciation of this practice risked the UK losing access to vast Uzbek oilfields.

Britain still resists Argentinian overtures for the Falklands 8,000 miles away from the UK, not out of concern for British sheep farmers, but because of the oil it has started to drill for there.   In the teeth of international opposition, Britain has quietly annexed three-quarters of a million square miles of the Southern Ocean off Antarctica because of large-scale oil deposits believed to be there.   And Britain is still giving covert backing for UK involvement in the exploitation of the Canadian tar sands in Alberta, where extraction will generate a turbo-charged explosion in carbon and greenhouse gas emissions in utter disregard of Britain’s ostensible climate change policy.

Oil is the elephant in the room, unremarked upon and apparently invisible. But it lies at the bottom of almost every nasty and seemingly incomprehensible deal that the British Foreign Office (and No.10) make.   The switch to renewables would not only hugely benefit the environment, it would also greatly lift the image of British foreign policy across the world.

Not another personal memoir, surely.   Apart from the obvious motive of trying to retain a drop of fast-fading publicity, this latest wallowing in an orgy of self-importance in Mandelson’s diaries is yet another painful reminder of the personality-obsessed, policy-vacuous utter lack of ideology, direction and vision of the New Labour years.   It’s almost as though the waste of more than a decade was merely a paver for a largely trite, always self-centred, stream of personal reminiscences.   O Crossman and Crosland, where art thou today?   Why have we descended so far to the pygmies?

It seems inexplicable that the vast movement in the the culture of globalised capitalism, ushered in by Thatcher-Reagan and consolidated in the dominant model of the Washington Consensus, passes almost unmentioned.   There’s not even a post-mortem even though the 2008-10 financial crash and recession marked its very clear demise.   The memoirs are all about how we handled the breakdown and how brilliant we were, but nothing serious about its deep-rooted causes, its meaning, and its replacement by an alternative economic model.

In the turbulent 1970s there were passionate debates about the soul of the Labour Movement, now there is the silence of the graveyard pierced only by these tedious backward-looking self-promotions.     It is extraordinary that today the political landscape is so devoid of ideas, yet the need for a thorough re-thinking of both the democratic and economic fundamentals can scarcely ever have been greater.   We have three main political parties with a largely unanimous narrative, one that is both inadequate and shallow, yet around half the electorate in effect unrepresented by parties clinging to a defunct fundamentalist market agenda with no apparent thoughts on ideological renewal.

What is needed more than anything else today is a clear positive systematic statement of what should replace neoliberalism.   The 1980s counter-revolution against the State has itself been derailed by the excesses of the market in the 2000s.   What is now required is a rebalancing of the role between markets and the State, a reweighting between finance and manufacturing within the UK economy, a recalibration between ‘light-touch’ deregulation/privatisation and excessive intervention within markets, a robust strategy for advancing the new green digital economy, a crackdown on indefensible inequality, and a restoration of the values and ethos of social justice, public service and genuine accountability.

Watch this space for my new book on ‘Power Change: the Road from Neoliberal Capitalism’ at the end of the year.