We know there’s more joy in heaven about one sinner who repents than about 99 just persons, but William Hague lauding the government’s green record and calling on colleagues (in a leaked letter) to “avoid losing global leadership on the environment” takes the biscuit.   This is a government that seduced voters before the last election with the slogan ‘vote blue and go green’ and then claimed later with breathtaking hubris that it was ‘the grrenest government later’.   As it’s turned out, vote blue and it’s gone brown.   The Tory Right, nearly a third of the parliamentary party, has been persistently up in arms against everything environmental, and to their shame Cameron-Osborne have caved in at almost every point.   Here’s the 10-point record.

1  The wind energy industry, where Britain could be a world leader, has been thrown into disarray by a published letter to Cameron calling on him to withdraw subsidies to renewable sources of energy and stick with nuclear and fossil fuels,

2  Labour introduced feed-in-tariffs to encourage low carbon generation, but last October the Tories slashed FIT funding by 50% putting at risk 25,000 jobs in the industry and leaving 86% of households no longer eligible for solar subsidies,

3  After 1 year of this government the UK dropped out of the global top 10 for low carbon investment,

4  In February last year the government cut funding to the Carbon Trust by 40% so that the the R&D of many projects was haltedwhich the Trust estimated could have realised over £1bn in revenues for UK businesses by 2030,

5  In its so-called Plan for Growth the government U-turned on its commitment that all new homes would be sero carbon by 2016,

6  The government introduced the green investment bank with great fanfare, but then refused to fund it as a bank so that it couldn’t leverage funds from the private sector as any ordinary bank would,

7  The government’s grandly entitled Electricity Market Reform turned out to be a mechanism to deliver  a hidden subsidy for nuclear which they had given repeated assurances would never be provided from public funds,

8  Cameron allowed Conservative MEPs to vote against increasing the EU carbon reduction target from 20% to 30% by 2020, despite it being a key pledge in his own Coalition agreement,

9  Though in October 2009 Cameron pledged to introduce rules requiring new power stations to be as clean as a modern gas plant, he reneged on this in November 2010 by allowing new coal plants to pump almost double that level of carbon emissions,

10  In the face of the decline in North Sea oil and gas, the looming early likelihood of peak oil, and the UK’s growing dependence on volatile African and Middle Easter state for its fuel, the government has no sure plan to prevent the lights going out at the end of this decade.

With the smart money on an early Greek exit, the two main questions to arise are: what will happen to Greece, and what future then for the Eurozone?   Ig Greece leaves, the exchange rate will drop sharply from 340 drachmae to €1 at entry to the euro to perhaps 1,000 drachmae, a loss of value to the national currency of around 75% as happened to Argentina in a similar situation in 2002.   But though in the latter case savings were decimated and import prices trebled, Argentina, released from an untenable dollar-peso parity, recovered strongly.   So probably will Greece, given the introduction of capital controls and administrative controls to ensure vital supplies reach key enterprises.   Removing the pressure of unbearable debt, boosting competitiveness from the intial collapse of the currency, lifting austerity, and paving the way for a much needed industrial restructuring should, after a painful transition, see Greece through.   But what of the other 26?

The pressure will quickly switch to Spain where already 10-year bond yields have risen above 6.3%.   But a great deal will then depend on how significant, as opposed to the communique’ rhetoric, are the concessions on increased flexibility wrung out of the Germans at today’s Hollande-Merkel meeting.   It seems that they will give a bit on inflation and bigger pay rises in order to boost domestic demand and help to inject some life into the ailing eurozone economy.   They also seem willing to agree a bit more capital for the European Investment Bank to lend for some more infrastructure projects.   The Balls-Mandelson package is very similar.   But it’s all too little and too slow to materialise.

It also raises two big political questions.   Why go on with austerity at all when there’s no evidence it’s working, and why should Greece, Spain and France stick to these policies when the voters in Merkel’s own heartland of North-Rhine Westphalia have thrown them out?   Secondly, the real fundamental flaw of the Eurozone – that German industrial strength and competitiveness is incompatible with the relative economic weakness of the southern and eastern fringes of the EU - is still not being addressed at all.   It is a steamroller flattening one country after another, with all the counter-measures written out of the script.   The conclusion must be, if the Eurozone has a future at all, it is only one after substantial restructuring (far more than yet envisaged), not simply through dropping the weakest member.

It is almost incredible that after failure upon failure the monetarists have still not yet been run out of town.   Even after the decisive anti-austerity presidential election in France a week ago, the ejection of all austerity-accommodating parties in Greece, and now the drubbing of the German Conservatives in North-Rhine Westphalia, it seems the best we can hope for from the Hollande-Merkel clash is a growth pact to run alongside an un-renegotiated  fiscal austerity pact  – a classic EU fudge since the former is not possible without a substantial easing of the latter.   It almost defies belief that after every monetarist project has run into the ground - Fisher’s quantity theory of money, Friedman’s ‘natural’ rate of unemployment, Thatcher’s financial deregulation, Blair’s privatisation of services, Brown’s PFI, and now Osborne’s oxymoronic expansionary fiscal contraction – instead of being shamed by their successive humiliations, they still return to the charge with yet another canard.   This time it’s supply-side reforms, code for yet further cuts in labour rights.

The Treasury was at it again, following up the Queen’s Speech with the spin that it was about growth.   Yet the only item remotely relevant about supporting businesses was the proposal to make it easier for firms to get rid of employees.   In other words the monetarists’ latest wheeze for boosting growth comes down to cutting workers’ protections against unfair dismissal!   The sheer effrontery and inanity of such an idea takes some beating.   But instead of being hounded out with derision, the monetarists are still clinging on with arguments that are palpably ridiculous.

When is the Labour Party in the UK, and the Left throughout Europe, going to go on the offensive with a few central facts?   The huge goverment borrowing of the last 4 years has nothing to do with social-democratic spending sprees – the budget deficit was 3% of GDP in 2007 and only rose to 11.6% in 2010 for three reasons: the abrupt drop in tax receipts as a result of the sharp recession, the big rise in benefit payments from the large increase in unemployment, and of course the cost of the bank bailouts.  

The next facts are that only a boost in public capital spending (initially on infrastructure and housebuilding) will give the private sector the confidence in future growth to be willing to invest.   If it is left to the private sector alone to initiate the growth, they will only do it at knock-down, recession bombed-out prices that have cut a swathe through the asset values of British industry and commerce – a price that non-one in their right mind (except the monetarists) should be prepared to pay.   The Left has the answers and all the evidence behind them; the Right is utterly bereft and skint of ideas.   Wy don’t we go on the attack?

After the abundant evidence yesterday portraying Cameron as in the pocket of the Murdoch clan, the latest revelations show Osborne playing up a similar role.   The first person Cameron welcomed to No.10 after he was elected in May 2010 was Rupert Murdoch.   In June 2010 the news broke that Murdoch intended to take full control of BSkyB.   We now know that Cameron met James Murdoch 12 times between January 2006 and January 2010, and then between May 2010 and July 2011 there were no less than 60 meetings between Ministers and Rupert Murdoch, James Murdoch, Rebekah Brooks, and James Harding, editor of the Times.   That averages one a week, and there were more but they were not logged in this way by Downing Street.   Now we know also that Osborne had 4 meetings with Brooks during 2010, including 3 after the May general election.   Brooks also revealed that after discussing the BSkyB bid with Cameron at a dinner in December 2010, she had a more substantial conversation with Osborne at a restaurant that month.  

This array of evidence (and there may well be a lot more) is conclusive evidence of leaders of government consorting closely and at every stage with those who had launched the BSkyB bid when the public interest - the requirement that they handle this hugely significant bid with a semi-judicial integrity and detachment – dictated the opposite.   To say that this was unethical is grossly to under-state the case.   It stinks of corruption.   The issue for Leveson, and the country as a whole who have been let down and systemcatically deceived with assurances (above all from Hunt, but from the others too), is not only which heads should roll, but how to prevent such corruption ever happening again.

Who will call to account the person, the Prime Minister, who is meant to be the guardian of the nation’s welfare and to be himself the means to call to account serious wrongdoing at the heart of government?   A Prime Minister in hock to an aggressive law-breaking media organisation in ordder to keep the press on side and to curry votes for successive elections, clearly cannot do this.   Parliament needs a new mechanism for extreme circumstances such as these.   But maybe too there is a need for a constitutional innovation as the only effective means to check wrongdoing at the top of politics, and that is an elected, but non-party, President with the mandate to intervene, and where necessary publicise his/her interventions, where serious misdemeanours are becoming apparent.

The evidence revealing the inappropriately close relationship between Cameron and News International in the run-up to the BSkyB bid gathered pace in the last two days with the appearance of Coulson and Brooks before Leveson.   Cameron’s insouciance about hiring Coulson to No.10 without thorough checks on what he may have known about phone-hacking at the News of the World where he had been editor, even when the Guardian later indicated in 2009 that phone hacking at the tabloid was rife, suggests that the Prime Minister was so determined to get as close as possible to the Murdoch outfit that he was quite ready to gloss over any embarrassing details that might incriminate Coulson and never raised the subject with him more than once even while the hacking saga was steadily unfolding.   The further revelation that Coulson was given only low-level security vetting, unlike his predecessors, yet on his own admission may have been given unsupervised access to top-secret documents confirms that he was exempted from proper security checks which might well have disqualified him because Cameron was determined to take him on no matter what, in order to consolidate his closeness to a media empire which he helived could keep the Tories in power for a long time.

The Brooks evidence takes this relationship still closer.   It emerges that she typically texted Cameron once a week, doubling to twice a week during the 2010 election campaign, and that he signed off his texts to her with DC or sometimes LOL.   She also revealed that Frederic Michel, the News International lobbyist, had emailed her that “JH has asked me to advise him privately in the coming weeks and guide his and No.10′s positioning”.   Hunt has tried to pass off the entirely implausible story that all these incriminating emails referred purely to Adam Smith, his special adviser.   The much more interesting question is whether not only Hunt was engaging in this illicit back-channel to the bidder, but that he was also keeping Cameron informed of every step along the way of this saga as it approached a climax.

When this is also combined with the evidence now slowly being revealed about the frequency of meetings between Cameron and Brooks when the BSkyB bid was hotting up and the PM would be expected to keep his distance to dispel any suggestion of collusion,  a clear pattern of inappropriate familiarity is beginning to emerge.   Brooks admits she saw Cameron at least twice over Christmas 2010 in Oxfordshire, having already met him at least 5 times earlier in the year.   It’s not just Cameron’s judgement that is at risk, its his whole position that must now be questioned.

The report in today’s newspapers that a Labour shadow cabinet reshuffle may be in the offing is to be welcomed if at last it enables the party to get a grip on one of the essential components for electoral success – the Policy Review.   For 18 months now this has been stranded in the doldrums with little or nothing to show for it and no report, not even a poor one, waiting to be unveiled.   Liam Byrne has shown his disinterest in the project he was supposed to be heading by, in effect, resigning to contest the mayoralty of Birmingham.   Another person, this time with commitment and vision and ideas and vigour, should now be appointed to take over the task, with a clear mandate to present a report resonant and vibrant enough to enthuse potential Labour voters countryside, and to have it ready for Conference 2013. 

The central themes of this revised Policy Review are surely manifest.   They are, first and foremost, a real jobs and growth strategy to replace the now inadequate and unnecessarily feeble ‘cut less far and less fast’.   That should be funded by using the next round of quantitative easing (printing electronic money), probably £50bn, to invest directly in house-building and infrastructure (through a new National Infrastructure Bank) rather than frittering it away on the banks which have shown they lap up taxpayers’ money but then don’t increase lending to create jobs.

Second, the risky investment arm of banks should be cleanly split from the main retail activities so as to ensure that taxpayers are never landed with another bailout of (so far) £850bn.   Britain needs smaller and more specialist banks, and it needs too a major shift in the money supply away from financial engineering and in favour of a sustained manufacturing revival.   Under the present neoliberal capitalism Britain’s economy is steadily sinking, with annual deficits on traded goods of nearly £100bn, which is patently unsustainable.  

Third, with market fundamentalism widely perceived to have got out of control, there is an urgent need to rebalance the role of the State and the markets.   The State has a clear function to play in plugging gaps in an overall manufacturing strategy, strengthening lead industrial sectors against foreign competition, and countering widespread private sector failure – in house-building, pensions provision, legal services, active labour market schemes, etc.

Fourth, the obscene levels of inequality need urgently to be tackled.   That requires a series of inter-connected reforms including fair and proportionate taxation of the super-rich (including an annual wealth tax), a land value tax, a serious crackdown on tax avoidance (never attempted hitherto), inclusive whole-company pay bargaining, and a significantly higher living wage.

Apart from assuring us that the government’s main objective was economic stability – the stability of the graveyard it seems in this government’s case – the only other significant things in the Queen’s Speech were what it didn’t contain, not anything it did contain.   Nothing about housebuilding, an infrastructure bank, reviving manufacturing, boosting capital investment, QE to bolster youth employment rather than the banks, or anything that really needs doing.   And nothing about 1% versus the 99%.   The inequality in wealth in Britain today is on a staggering scale, and it’s not even mentioned.   So let’s start with the facts, grace of the Sunday Times Rich List rather than Treasury data – even the evidence of the distribution of wealth has been privatised.

The richest 100 people in Britain today own £231bn – nearly twice the size of the entire UK budget deficit.   Are they contributing to paying down any of that deficit (which many of them had a major role in causing)?   Nothing at all: there is no wealth tax, no land value tax, no mansion tax, no special capital gains levy to meet the current financial emergency, though there is a non-domiciliary tax loophole to let them off the hook.   This group includes 73 billionaires.   To be part of this top 100 financial elite, you need to possess wealth of at least £750m.    To get into the top 50, you need to own over £1.4bn.  

The usual argument against taxing these hyper-rich individuals is that they are the ‘movers and shakers’ on whom the nation’s prosperity rests, and they should therefore be given incentives and not subject to any discouragement like taxes which are confined to ordianry mortals.   It is instructive to look at the list of the fastest growing 20 fortunes which stretch from £12.3bn down to as low as £3.4bn.   Of these 20, 4 made their wealth from property, 3 from finance and hedge funds, 3 from oil and commodities, 3 from the internet, 2 from investment, and 2 from mining.   Only 3 made their wealth from industry.

In other words, nearly half of them made colossal fortunes out of property and financial manipulation which does not increase the wealth of the nation as a whole, and another quarter from extracting and distributing the Earth’s resources which they did not create.   Only a quarter of them actually ran businesses that made things.   The case for taxing them proportionately to make a fair contribution to rescuing the country from the dire straits into which some of them cast it, including by massive tax avoidance and evasion, is overwhelming.   So why does the political debate not say a single word about it?

You couldn’t invent it.   There’s really only one issue in Britain today that ultimately matters: how to get growth.   All the political parties recognise that, indeed proclaim it, but none of them put forward the policies that will actually deliver it.   The Queen’s Speechis an irrelevance, with a whopping big black hole in the middle of it.   It contains nothing about generating growth except the liberalisation of the unfair dismissal laws, i.e. making it easy for employers to throw their workers on the scrap heap without any rights at all – gratuitously vicious without having any growth-promoting potential at all.   It takes wilful blindness of a high order not to see that supply-side measures in Britain’s current slump are now inconsequential and that what cries out to be done is a major boost to demand via public investment in jobs that will start the virtuous spiral of growth.   Cameron and Clegg priding themselves on their wares at the last tractor-making factory in Britain (I wonder why that’s the case?) obviously still can’t hear the little boy at the back saying ‘But they’re not wearing anything’.

Nor is Her Majesty’s Opposition a hugely lot better.   Timid and cautious, steady as she goes, basking in the laurels of last week’s election triumph, but without a plan that will produce serious growth either.   And last week’s local elections weren’t exactly a triumph anyway – the Labour vote last year was 36% of a total overall national turnout of 39%, i.e. winning the support of 14% of the potential electorate; this year it was 38% of the overall turnout of 32%, i.e. winning just 12%.   The moral of that is that huge abstentions by Tory voters gave Labour a big part of the 823 gains, but the Labour vote is still depressed and even slightly slipping, and desperately needs to be enthused by a positive vision they can believe in.

Labour is now at last beginning to talk about jobs and growth, but not with enough detail or conviction that makes people believe they really mean it.   ‘Cutting less far, less fast’ must be dropped, and just restoring the Tory 2.5% VAT cut is simply not credible as a source of sustained growth.   Only a big public investment programme in house-building and infrastructure will do that.   Nor is funding a problem.   No need to frighten the markets.   Just impose a capital gains tax charge of 28% on the £155bn gains made by Britain’s richest 1,000 persons in the last 3 years, and that £43bn revenue could generate over 2 million jobs.

News that Merkel may well be about to exercise one of her skidding U-turns on growth doesn’t seem to have filtered through our George.   Even if he’s the last one in Europe after everyone else, including dominatrix Merkel herself, has accepted that austerity isn’t working and slumps require spending on jobs and growth, he’s not going to shift from his fixation with debt deflation.   Nor is he the boy standing alone on the burning deck: he has plenty of other takers.   Their local election drubbing seems to have redoubled the Tories’ ardour for ideological zealotry, with the Tory Right (and where they go, Cameron will soon follow) now hawking around their demands for even bigger public service and welfare cuts (when we haven’t even yet had 90% of the first tranche) which will reduce tax receipts still further and ratchet up the recession another notch.   And they want too to ditch the human rights convention, bring back selective grammar schools, and heighten job insecurity.   Bring it on!

Even in policy areas where Osborne’s boasted about his reforms, it’s all turned to dust.   He claimed that through the Merlin negotiations he was increasing bank lending to industry; it is still falling.   He claimed he was taking action to avoid another banking crash; but the new rules on capital ratios won’t come into operation till 2019.   He claimed he found tax avoidance ‘morally repugnant’; but he hasn’t staunched the flow into tax havens – BIS data show bank accounts in tax havens still held £1,700bn in 2011, much the same as in 2007.

He has notoriously said (till recently) that ’We’re all in it together’.   But last year average real UK incomes fell 1.6%, yet in the same year the wealth of the richest 1,000 Britons, according to the Sunday Times Rich List, rose £18bn – an average increase per person amounting to £346,155 a week!

He has declared that executive pay increases have been excessive, but apart from wringing his hands has done nothing to stop it; it’s only shareholders and investors who’ve taken the action.   He thought the 50p top tax rate cut would go down a blinder in Tory circles; even Tory voters according to the Mail on Sunday are now demanding its return.

This man has the touch of genius if the Tory aim is now, as it seems, to lose the next election.

There are several important implications in Hollande’s convincing victory over bling-bling Sarkozy.   It’s not just the first Socialist presidential win for 31 years, even more significantly it clearly marks a turning point in European politics, though a lot still depends on how forcefully and skilfully this wedge against the dominant Right is used.   But the signs of change are manifest.   Ten out of the 17 Eurozone Heads of State have now been unceremoniously ditched since the financial crisis began 4 years ago.   Merkel, the bulwark of the EU Right, is now more isolated than ever: her close ally, the fiscal disciplinarian Dutch PM Mark Rutte was ejected two weeks ago, now her most important ally Sarkozy, and in her German homeland her party has just been removed from office in the Schleswig-Holstein elections.   Coupled with that there is an outright rejection of ultra-austerity in Greece, Spain and Italy, and the Left has made big gains in Denmark and Slovakia and now of course in the UK.   It begins to look as though the fixed rigidity of Right-wing economics won’t hold.   But there are two other key implications too.

One is the message for Labour.    This is that the mantra ‘the Tories are cutting too far, too fast’ simp[ly won’t do any more.   The answer to stagnation in the UK is not cutting less and cutting less quickly, it’s a full-hearted jobs and growth strategy.   Nor is it plausible to suggest that the Ed Balls’ 5 points adequately represent the momentum required.   They are certainly better than nothing, but nowhere near enough to turn around a double-dip recession, a collapse of business and consumer confidence, unemployment rising steadily to 3 million, or the most drastic hacking back of public expenditure for a century.   Instead it requires a National Infrastructure Bank to launch a big increase in capital investment including for house-building, a revival of the role of the State in reversing the vicious spiral of economic decline, and a major rebalancing of the economy from an over-cossetted banking system to a lean and hungry manufacturing industry.

The other implication of Hollande is how will economic expansion be paid for without leading to a strike in the bond markets and will it cause an irreparable rift with Germany over the EU fiscal pact signed just two months ago?   On the latter, an accommondation over including a clause on growth should not be beyond reach.   On the former, any more printing of money by the ECB, over and above the €1 trillion it has already handed out to consolidate bank balance sheets, must now be channelled directly to industry, and the super-rich tax evaders in France and Greece (as well as the UK) must be made to pay their fair share after their colossal gains over the last 20 years.

However all that still doesn’t answer the fundamental EU dilemma that the southern rim and East European States cannot, and never will under the current policy framework, be able to compete sustainably against the German industrial machine within a single currency…..

The economic news this last week has been all agog at this sudden surge of shareholders in revolt.   The insurer Aviva’s CEO, Andrew Moss, had his proposed remuneration package rejected by 54% of the shareholders, as had RBS, Shell & GlaxoSmithKline in recent years.   The Aviva shareholders certainly had enough to complain about.   Since Moss took over in 2007, revenues fell by 19% and profits by 16%, the dividend slumped 21% and the share price by no less than 62%.   Yet total executive pay over the same period ballooned by 90%.   Shareholders were therefore outraged at the proposal to award him another £46,000 plus a £2.2m ‘golden hello’ package for another board member joining from another company.  So what effect did this majority revolt against pay excess have?   Zilch, because when New Labour introduced the shareholder vote a decade ago, they made it voluntary, not binding.

This farce has been played out in other companies too.   This year shareholders complained vigorously against pay and bonus excesses at Barclays, Inmarsat, and Capital Shopping Centres (as well as notably at Citigroup and UBS abroad), all to no effect whatever.   Diamond, CEO at Barclays, still got his £17m intact and Alison Carnwath, chair of the Barclays remuneration committee, though heavily criticised, was still re-appointed.   Both of them, after all the empty hullaballoo, must have been laughing all the way to the bank.

So what should be done to replace this pointless facade?   Cable is said to want to give shareholders a binding vote on pay and to raise to 75% the threshold for approval of corporate pay policies.   However Osborne and the Tory Right will probably force him to water that down.   Anyway it still leaves out the group that is more committed to the company than the shareholders who can easily shift their money elsewhere or even sell up the whole company if they’re offered a good price.  

What the TUC  propose for the employees is one seat on the executive remuneration committee.   But that is pure tokenism.   Anything short of a 50-50 sharing between shareholder and employee representatives, as on German supervisory boards, will be purely show and not command confidence.

But even that does not get to the real heart of the problem.   Instead of trying to check eye-watering excesses for one tiny elite group, what is really required is to bring the whole issue of company awards on to a single level playing field.   Instead of executive pay being fix

ed by cronies selected by the chairman himself, staff pay by individual personal contracts, and manual pay by collective bargaining, what is needed is whole company pay bargaining involving representatives from all grades within the company, including the board, meeting together to determine pay awards across the organisation.

What is so extraordinary about the fallout from these local elections is how far the wider Tory leadership is in denial.   The Tory Right immediately goes on the rampage demanding a harder line on crime, immigration and Europe, as though the loss of jobs, falling incomes and absence of growth were nothing to do with it.   The Daily Mail front page headline today “Now stick up for Tory values”, as though privatisation of all public services, liquidation of the Welfare State, and the social cleansing of inner cities via housing benefit cuts were not enough.   Grant Shapps claims on the radio that if the government hadn’t pursued its economic course, we would now be in the state that Greece is in.   Boris Johnson advises Cameron that the secret is ‘to remain bone dry on the economy accompanied by compassionate Conservatism’: it’s difficult to know which is worse, since the only people Johnson seems compassionate towards are his bankers in the City.   Cameron, we are told, is going to argue alongside Clegg on Tuesday that ‘the fight to rebalance the economy remains the glue that keeps the two parties together in government’; well theat’s certainly news since there’s no rebalancing of the economy and any glue left is set to come apart.

Labour gains of 823 seats are obviously a triumph that makes the party not only dominant in local government but on track to regain government in 2015 (or sooner when the glue finally cracks open).   But an overall turnout of less than a third shows that too large a part of this came from Tory abstentions and too little from the inspiration of an alternative Labour vision.   Labour’s policy review remains stranded on a beach somewhere and thed gaping political void which is Tory economic policy has not been filled by a Labour strategy for jobs and growth which cries out to be heard.  

Labour too needs to state loud and clear the overriding need for a new activist role for the State against the excesses and abuses of market fundamentalism, nailing in particular endless austerity, colossal deficits in traded goods that make the British standard of living unsustainable, over-reliance on still growing mountains of private debt, and grotesque levels of inequality.   We urgently a plan to shift the bankers from their preoccupation with property, overseas speculation and tax avoidance, and make finance the servant of industry as the driving force for a major revival of British manufacturing.

Nobody knows exactly what happened to cause Gareth Williams’ body to be found padlocked in a holdall.   But it does look increasingly suspicious that a third party was responsible and the involvement of MI6 officers, and in particular officers in the Met’s counter-terrorism branch SO15, cannot be ruled out.   Unaccountably, they failed to report him missing for 7 days which is extraordinary for someone engaged in sensitive work at GCHQ, and the explanation given by his line manager lacked all credibility according to the coroner.   SO15 failed to inform the senior investigating officer about 9 memory sticks and a black holdall found at his MI6 office until 2days before the end of the inquest.   No formal statements were taken by SO15 offivers who interviewed Williams’ colleagues.   And the family reported that he had complained of ‘friction’ at MI6 at the time of his death.   None of this points directly to SIS involvement in his death, but it does fit into a pattern that is beginning to emerge of MI6 acting as a law unto itself.

Significantly the Intelligence Services Act 1994 provided immunity to MI6 officers for acts abroad which if committed in the UK would be in breach of the criminal law (shades of James Bond).   That protection from legal accountability abroad may readily have induced a culture that they were similarly free from normal constraints at home as well.   Secrecy may well be necessary in parts of MI6′s work, but it is highly corrosive of the operation of the regular mechanisms of accountability.  

It may be part of this culture of being above the law that allowed MI6 to render Libyan dissidents to the torture chambers of Gadaffi, with the MI6 officer Sir Mark Allen able to write cringeingly to the Libyan tyrant about this affair that “the delivery of this cargo (sic) was the least that we could do for you”.   Similarly there is now mounting evidence of the involvement of MI6 officers in the questioning of victims whose torture was secured by their removal to countries known to regularly resort to such practices.

What all this reveals is the weakness of the management controls in respect of MI6, at both the administrative and ministerial levels.   It is also clear that the Intelligence Services Committee, made up of senior MPs appointed by and reporting to the Prime Minister, is a wholly inadequate supervisory body which needs to be replaced by a body reporting directly to Parliament and equipped with radically greater powers of analysis and intervention.

The condemnation of Rupert Murdoch as “not a fit person” to run a big international company by the Commons DCMS select committee is stunning, but not of course the end of the matter.   The determining decision has to be taken by Ofcom, and if as expected the regulator confirms the committee’s view, the government should see it through.   But if they decline, for example on the grounds that the select committee’s judgement was a partisan one, with MPs splitting on party lines, what then?    First, it wasn’t partisan when the reasons given by the Tory MPs were either circular (Davies) or procrastinatory (wait for Ofcom, Mensch) or in denial (Coffey).   Second, the one MP outside the two main parties, the fiercely independent LibDem Adrian Sanders, didn’t abstain, procrastinate or close his eyes in denial – he backed the judgement on Murdoch as ‘not a fit person’.   Third, there’s another way through this.

Last July Ed Miliband pulled off arguably the biggest coup of any Leader in Opposition since the war.   He manoeuvred the government into resignedly having to accept a Labour motion that Murdoch should back off from his BSkyB bid.    After the enormity of the hacking scandal Cameron was humiliated into resiling on all the commitments to support the bid which we now know from the Hunt emails were offered to Murdoch in abundance.   Now that exercise of a pincer movement can be repeated against the government by Labour’s tabling a motion in the new parliamentary session starting in a week’s time calling for Murdoch’s broadcasting licence (including his 39% stake in BSkyB) to be withdrawn from him.

That would really put the Tories in a bind.   The 5 Tory MPs on the DCMS committee have already portrayed themselves as defenders of the Murdoch empire, repeatedly resisting any comment criticising a corporate culture that was ‘wilfully blind’, ‘negligent’ or had openly colluded with wrongdoing.   In addition Cameron has now been revealed to wear the same mantle of Murdoch subservience through his 15 private meetings with Murdoch Sr since he became Prime Minister, his refusal to refer the Hunt scandal to the independent adviser on the Ministerial Code, and his pre-Christmas dinner with Murdoch at Rebekah Brooks’ home which he is so coy about.

Having painted themselves into a corner so firmly on the wrong side of public opinion, Cameron can be judged unlikely to go to the stake to the defence of Murdoch’s remaining Broadcast licence when a select committee has condemned him for ‘wilful blindness’ about wrongdoing, the US Department of Justice may well soon be taking action against him over bribery of foreign officials, and Leveson will no doubt be releasing many more incriminating emails between News International and Team Cameron.   Gotcha!

Too much attention has focused on Murdoch’s cussed personality, not enough on what kind of press we want to see in this country.   At present there is no nationality requirement for ownership.   There is no limit on the share of any media market controleed by any one proprietor.   There is no constraint on owners’ power to take over parts of other media domains.   There is no control to prevent market dominance.   There is no right of reply.   There is no provision to increase diversity and improve balance in the press.   Self-regulation has patently failed, but there are no measures to ensure that, consistent with freedom of the press, newspapers do not abuse their role in the manner highlighted by, but no confined to, the phone-hacking scandal.   All of these need to be corrected.

First, press ownership should be limited to UK citizens and subject to a fit-for-purpose test.   Both counts would exclude Murdoch – an Australian who adopted US citizenship in order to control large chunks of the US press, and clearly not fit-for-purpose in the light of the massive hacking scandal involving both phones and computers, the illicit derailing of his ONdigital rival, and the extensive bribery of the police.

Second, News Corporation’s 37% control of the UK newspaper market is far too great a concentration of power, especially in such a sensitive area as agenda-setting in a democracy and when that power has been used to intimidate individuals and pressurise governments to conform to his will.   To counter this, there should be a mandatory restriction on any one person or organisation controlling more than one daily and one Sunday paper.   In addition, plurality should be secured by limiting the share of all media revenues (i.e. TV, radio, press, book publishing and computer games) held by one company to 15%.   And the law restricting monopolistic cross-media ownership between broadcast and print media, which Thatcher swept away to secure Murdoch’s partisan support, should be reinstated and strengthened.

Third, the secret power structure intertwining both the press and police with No.10 must be broken up and regulated to ensure it is never resurrected.   What is needed is a new body with much greater powers to check abuse and investigate evidence which may point to corruption, similar to the role of the SEC in the financial arean.   And to make sure the relevant evidence of wrongdoing, where it exists, is forthcoming, there must be statutory protection for whistleblowers.

Fourth, there must be a right of reply instituted in the UK as already exists in many other countries.   And the feeble and toothless Press Complaints Commission must be replaced, perhaps on the co-regulation model currently operated in Denmark where a broadly self-regulating media is balance by a regulatory council that can go to law when it needs to enforce its judgements.