Michael Meacher - Labour's Future

Gordon Brown wants to reassure Bush at the Mansion House tonight that the ‘special relationship’ still lies at the heart of UK foreign policy. After a teeny-weeny bit of independence in beginning to withdraw British troops from Iraq, we have to genuflect again. The real question we should be asking is: are we seeking a closer relationship because we believe that US policies are broadly right or simply because that is where the power is?

There is of course no special relationship, almost by definition, since the essential tenet of the neo-con philosophy is unilateralism, Might is Right, and self-interest overrides everything whatever their ‘friends’ may say. We are no more likely to carry influence if we play the deferential courtier than if we play the critical friend. As we found out painfully throughout the Blair years, playing to the American tune unremittingly on every occasion gained not a singly demonstrable concession.

So are American policies right? Of course there is a considerable US-European consensus across a broad spectrum of policy which nobody seriously doubts. But there are some very important areas of discord where we have a responsibility to make our voice heard.

Iraq is a prime example, though far from the only one. It is becoming clear that the US intend a permanent military presence in Iraq as long as Saudi, Iraqi and Iranian oil lasts, amounting in total to more than half global oil reserves. For this purpose the US is strong-arming an oil law through the Iraqi Government which is virtually expropriating all future Iraqi oil revenues which on some official US estimates could reach the stupendous level of £30 trillions, 12 times the UK GNP! The Americans are now building five colossal military bases across Iraq to enforce their will. We should be telling them this is a recipe for an endless insurgency which is not only flagrantly illegal, but an unwinnable quagmire which can only erode the West’s position to the benefit of Iran, China and Russia.

Second, the US won the Cold War in 1989, but then blew it by passing up a priceless opportunity to win over Russia as a long-term ally. Russia let the Berlin Wall be torn down, pulled the Red Army back inside its border, removed the Communist Party from absolute control, and embraced American-style capitalism. Putin went out of his way to aid American forces after 9/11 and did not use his Security Council veto to block the US invasion of Iraq. What has been his reward? The US, exploiting Russian weakness at every turn, moved NATO into Eastern Europe and then into the former Soviet republics. The US bombed Serbia for 78 days in 1999 despite Russian protests, and is now placing a missile system in Poland and the Czech Republic as well as unilaterally abrogating the ABM Treaty which has produced stability for 30 years. Is it any surprise that Putin is now so suspicious and uncooperative towards the West? This is fundamentally the wrong policy, and we should be saying that loud and clear to the US before we alienate yet further one of the great powers that should be our ally.

Third, instead of continually fudging his options over Iran, Gordon Brown should be making clear that whilst we support economic and diplomatic pressures to deter an Iranian nuclear bomb, we do not and will not support a military attack on Iran. It would have catastrophic consequences – setting the whole Middle East alight, provoking intensified Iranian intervention in Iraq, seriously disrupting the world oil supply a quarter of which passes daily through the straits of Hormuz, unleashing murderous retaliation maybe as far as Western capitals, All without being able ultimately to prevent an Iranian bomb, and indeed generating a national unity behind the mullahs when otherwise an unpopular regime might steadily unravel because of economic failure.

It is our duty to make clear to the Americans now our strong opposition to their perverse and counter-productive military threats towards Iran. Otherwise, the Cold War will be succeeded by another long term geo-political conflict, only conducted at much higher temperature.

Graphic: Project Gutenberg

Posted by Michael Meacher at 06:39 PM | Permalink

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

The carefully choreographed distancing of UK foreign policy from the US – first announced, then denied, coded message now clearly received – will be received with palpable relief by the Labour Party and the overwhelming majority of British people. The umbilical cord by which Blair insisted on embedding himself in Bush was humiliating, demeaning and ultimately fruitless because it never produced a shred of reciprocity.

However, once again we should look very carefully at what actually happens, not just at a gesture waved in our direction. Two issues immediately stand out.

One is, what would happen if, in the 18 months left to Bush, the neocons in a last fling launched their long-planned strike against Iran, almost certainly bombing raids whether by the US itself or possibly Israel? Would Gordon Brown the next morning come down in favour of Bush or would he repudiate such madness and back the British people? At the one leadership hustings that took place in May, I asked him this question. He evaded it with several minutes of waffle – it won’t happen, diplomacy is winning through, multilateral alliance are being forged, etc. etc. Since he hadn’t answered the question, I immediately asked it again. I was treated to a repetition of the same waffle. It’s worrying he won’t tell us.

The second key issue is, will Brown withdraw British troops from Iraq when the British commander on the spot, Sir Richard Dannatt, says, as he has, that the presence of occupation troops is actually exacerbating, not helping, the security situation, or will he keep them there as long as the Americans insist on having a diplomatic fig-leaf to cover their own occupation? Clearly Bush, success or no success with his surge, is not intending any significant reduction in US forces in the year and a half before the end of his Presidency. It is all too likely that American troops will remain in Iraq, albeit with some limited cuts in numbers, far beyond that. After all, the reason they invaded Iraq has nothing to do with stopping Saddam’s brutalities or replacing him with democracy; they’re there because of the oil. As peak oil rapidly approaches and competition with China intensifies over the remaining repositories of oil left in the world, the US is not going to give up any time soon its priceless economic, political and military prize astride the three countries – Saudi, Iran and Iraq – with far and away the biggest global concentration of oilfields left.

So if Bush clicks his fingers and says No to a full British withdrawal within a 6-12 month period at most, will Gordon Brown defy him, or will our poodledom continue? We are entitled to know.

Posted by Michael Meacher at 03:49 PM | Permalink

If Labour is going to win the next general election, we need a fundamentally new direction of travel for the new Government after the election of a new Leader and Deputy Leader. We have lost 4 million votes since 1997 and more than half our membership. This is not just because of the Iraq War, it is also because we are widely perceived, both in the Party and the electorate, to be going down the wrong track over a range of policies. We are losing support too because the style of government – spin, manipulation, centralising power at the top and not listening to the people – is unacceptable. We need radical change on both counts.

We need more than corrections of where we have clearly gone badly wrong – over Iraq, Lebanon and subservience to Bush, over the centralisation and unaccountability of Government today, over the growing and unacceptable inequality between rich and poor, over the privatisation of our public services, over the decline of manufacturing
and the weakness of workplace rights, and over the continuing erosion of civil liberties. What we need above all is a vision of a new direction which can fire the imagination of today’s generation.

What is the biggest threat facing the world today? It isn’t the so-called war on terror, whatever Bush may think. It isn’t the risk of nuclear war, now that the Cold War is over and the Soviet Union disbanded. The overriding political issue today, the danger that could overwhelm much of the planet, much of the human race, if not in our lifetime but certainly in that of our children or grandchildren, is climate change.

It’s not just the dramatically increasing frequency and ferocity of hurricanes, unprecedented flooding, rising sea levels, shrinking glaciers, or melting permafrost. Nor is it just the inextinguishable forest fires, the drying out of millions of hectares of croplands which will no longer produce food, or the mega-dustbowls from Northern China to the American mid-West. What is really frightening is that climate change is not a linear process, but a dynamic and unstable one. Scientists say there are tipping points where a gradual process suddenly explodes out of all proportion, where positive feedback effects abruptly accelerate climate change in unpredictable and overpowering ways – like the dieback of the Amazon, the release of billions of tonnes of methane hydrates from the ocean floor, or the collapse of the Greenland and Antarctic ice-sheets. If any of those happened in the next 50-100 years, the impact on human civilisation would be incalculable. There is no precedent – we are entering uncharted territory.

Now some may say: but that won’t affect us here in the UK, or at least not in our lifetime. Both assumptions are wrong. The UN predicts 50 million environmental refugees by the end of this decade, and where will they come to if not the richer, more settled, northern regions like the UK? The WHO estimates that 9 out of the world’s 10 most dangerous vector-borne disease will increase their coverage worldwide. If the ocean pump fails, the Gulf Stream will collapse and the UK temperature will plummet to that of Siberia. And as to not in our lifetime, Jim Hansen, George Bush’s leading climate modeller – no less – said recently we have “at most 10 years” to make the drastic cuts in emissions that might head off climate catastrophe.

So what should be done? Labour has to become the Party that will lead the world in a fundamental change of direction. It requires a change in how we think about our economics, energy, water management, food security, transportation, international policies, and the nature of civilisation itself. We have to move from the peripheral and tinkering to the profound and visionary.

Tackling climate change is the overarching policy which should permeate every other policy in government – not just energy, but transport, industry, building, agriculture, public expenditure and taxation, and foreign policy. Put bluntly, we will never have food security, water security, or energy security in this country (or anywhere else) unless we give absolute priority to combating climate change.

So what specifically should a new Government do?

We should be shifting away from massive old-fashioned power stations to decentralised energy systems (wind and solar power, and micro-generation plants in people’s homes), together with much more ambitious investment in large-scale offshore wind farms.

We should require the airline industry (like every other industry) to reduce year by year their emissions which are the fastest growing source of global warming.

We should increase VED massively for gas-guzzling cars and use the proceeds to subsidise bus and rail, plus give a rebate to smaller-engine car owners.

We should require industry to measure and make public their environmental and climate change impacts, not only greenhouse gas emissions, but their energy efficiency, waste generation, water consumption, and transport impacts, and reduce them year by year.

We should incentivise local food production which would regenerate British agriculture, dramatically cut air miles, and protect security of supply.

We should tighten building standards so that all new construction at least meets the most energy efficient standards already met in Europe and Scandinavia.

We should give each family, according to its size, a carbon entitlement which then has to be reduced each year in such a way so as to reward the conscientious and penalise the wasteful.

And in order to meet the target set by scientists of at least 60% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 compared with 1990, Government should set a target of 3% annual reduction in overall UK emissions, set out the new mechanisms to achieve this, publish the results each year, and make whatever changes are necessary year by year to keep the UK on track.

Underpinned by this comprehensive policy, Britain should gain the moral and political authority to lead the way internationally in pressing all other countries, especially the US, China and India, to commit to an enhanced and extended new Climate Change Protocol beyond 2010.

Above all, we should eliminate the biggest political threat to world security today by leading the world out of dependence on fossil fuels, particularly oil and gas, the struggle for the dwindling supplies of which lies at the heart of the incessant murderous carnage in the Middle East. We do that by huge new investment in renewable sources of energy, in which Britain is unusually well endowed, and by a massive targeted programme in energy conservation. Britain, because of its offshore location, has more wind-power capacity than the rest of Europe put together, but we are using only a tiny fraction of it. At present only 4% of our electricity generation comes from renewables. In Germany, France, Italy and Spain it is 15-25%, and in Scandinavia 25-35% or more. And our waste of energy – in transport, construction, industry, agriculture, and private households – is prodigious.

This is a win-win-win-win scenario. It will bring about a huge step-change in the efficient use of energy, it will save very considerable sums of money both for industry and some of our poorest households, it will protect our society against sudden destabilising external shocks, and it will safeguard the environment from the apocalyptic nightmare of climate change. It is not a utopian vision. It is highly practical and resolutely necessary if the world is to survive in a sustainable form. It will excite the imagination and galvanise our Party by restoring our commitment to a greater and deeper collective cause which has always been our inspiration.

Posted by Michael Meacher at 09:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Michael Meacher courted much controversy with his 'difficult' questions about 9/11 and the war on terror, but, he tells Matthew Tempest, he is absolutely not a conspiracy theorist

Matthew Tempest
The Guardian

Since losing political office as Tony Blair's environment minister, Michael Meacher has been saying - and writing - some controversial things.

Not Robin Cook controversial ("the weapons inspectors should have been given more time"); not Clare Short controversial ("the post-war reconstruction was mishandled"); but really controversial: "why weren't F16 jets scrambled quicker on September 11? What is the truth about the mysterious MI6 unit Operation Rockingham which 'liaised' with UN weapons inspectors? What was the role of the Pakistani intelligence services in the murder of journalist Daniel Pearl?

These are not the sort of questions that are designed to aid one's ascent up the greasy pole of a political career. Quite the opposite. Not only are they difficult to answer, they burst the bubble of etiquette and respectability at Westminster and get one labelled with the career-suicide stamp of "conspiracy theorist".

Not surprisingly, this is the first thing the now backbench MP for Oldham West and Royston wants to get off his chest when I meet him in his south-London home.

"I am absolutely NOT a conspiracy theorist. I am anything but paranoid. I have an extremely rational belief in systematically collecting the evidence and seeing where the facts and the documents take you.

"However, conspiracies do occur, but that would be a last-resort explanation rather than a first. I am also a believer in the cock-up theory."

Since writing an article for the Guardian last September, detailing unanswered questions about the events of September 11 2001 and the predetermination of the US to go to war in Iraq, Meacher has faced a torrent of abuse and derision beyond that borne by most mainstream politicians.

The US embassy in London dismissed the article as "monstrously offensive" and Meacher as not being "serious or credible", while many journalists found his arguments unconvincing and even deranged.

Despite this, Meacher is unrepentant about airing his concerns. "That analysis has been confirmed. In the past nine months [his unanswered questions] have proved both logical and correct. I'm not aware of a word that has not been accepted.

"Indeed, some of it has been confirmed - for instance, Paul O'Neill's account of his time serving Bush, where he reveals that Iraq regime change was a priority from day one of the administration."

For the record, Meacher believes the biggest mysteries surrounding 9/11 were why more effort was not put into catching the hijackers beforehand, why fighter jets were not scrambled from US Andrews airforce base 10 miles from Washington until the Pentagon had already been hit, and why little or no effort was made to catch Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan.

The Senate's Kean commission into 9/11 finds a confused chain of command on the day, but confirms that while the Pentagon was hit at 9.38am, planes from nearby Andrews were only scrambled at 10.38am, a few minutes after the vice-president, Dick Cheney, had authorised shooting down hostile planes. Planes from Langley airbase were already in the air, but had not received orders to shoot down hostile aircraft.

Curiously, for a man who seems out on a limb in British politics, Meacher hasn't yet seen Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, which provides similar succour to his theories, especially concerning the US military's semi-detached efforts in and around Tora Bora, the al-Qaida stronghold in Afghanistan where Osama bin Laden was believed to be hiding.

"Oh I must see it!" he declares, when told that it backs him up on several counts.

Meacher says his postbag was "95% supportive" after his initial article in the Guardian. Probably as a result of its attendant publicity, he was asked to write the foreword to a new US book entitled: The New Pearl Harbour: Disturbing Questions about the Bush Administration and 9/11.

He's quick to intervene: "Writing a foreword does NOT mean I agree with everything in it. It is an unconventional book which says things which deserved to be listened to and have an airing.

The book suggests that there may have been explosives inside the World Trade Centre before the attacks - does he believe that?

"Well, I'm not a technical expert and I have no idea and I just don't know.

"But it's a worthwhile thing for the Kean commission to examine even if it's just to disprove it. After all, there were two previous bomb plots against the Twin Towers, and bombs would alter the whole concept of what happened on 9/11, but that should have been up to Kean to look at."

More recently, Meacher wrote another high-profile piece in the Guardian demanding to know the truth about Operation Rockingham, an intelligence cell mentioned to the intelligence and security committee by weapons expert Dr David Kelly the day before his death.

Meacher alleged, on the basis of the evidence of former weapons inspector Scott Ritter, that the previously unheard of unit was designed to spread misinformation about Iraqi WMD capabilities.

On page 90 of Lord Butler's inquiry into intelligence failures over Iraq is a five-paragraph explanation of Operation Rockingham, calling it a briefing and liaison unit for the Unscom inspections. Meacher believes the explanation is there as a result of his probing.

"It's a pedestrian few paragraphs, but I've seen it and I'm glad it's there and it shows that they've taken it [the article] on board. I believe it [Rockingham] had a key role in seeking to handle intelligence to provide the 'right' material for its political masters.

"Obviously that will be denied, and I'm not expecting Butler to prove it, but I suspect the reason that they felt the need to include it [the explanation] is because of the article."

In all of this, it's easy to forget that Meacher in fact voted for the war. As a minister at the time, the alternative would have been immediate resignation.

"I voted for it because I believed what the PM said. He reeled off weapons inventories, and I presumed that this must be reliable.

"In fact, I've long called for military interventions for humanitarian purposes [he wrote a pamphlet on the theme as far back as 1991], but there would have been no legal basis for that, and the 'humanitarian' reasons for the war have only been used retrospectively."

His high-profile and well-informed campaign against GM crops since being sacked from the environment post in 2003, as well as his difficult questions over 9/11 and the Bush administration have led some senior Green party officials to hope he could be persuaded to jump ship, and become the first ever Green MP in Britain.

"Never, never, never, never, never," he chides. "I respect the Greens. In fact, I respect the Lib Dems and I respect Respect, but there is no question of me switching.

"I've always been a mainstream politician, and I shall die Labour."

There doesn't, thankfully, seem much prospect of that yet, as Meacher boasts of having lost weight since losing office, and "feeling fitter and more energised than I have ever done".

No chance of this 64-year old quitting parliament at the next election, then?

"Not only shall I fight the next election, I could go on for another 10 years yet!"

Posted by Michael Meacher at 06:39 PM | Permalink

Article from The Times

The seismic shift in British attitudes to the European Union inevitably draws our relationship with the United States into focus too. There are two reasons for continuing to hug America close. One is the belief, that Tony Blair shares, that European and British politics is downstream of Washington, so the best way to influence events is to keep as close as possible to whoever is president.

Second we are so dependent on the Americans for our strategic defence capability that we have no alternative but to stay close. It is widely believed that we cannot fire cruise missiles or use our nuclear weapons or even operate our ballistic missile submarines without US permission. Both claims need to be re-evaluated.

On the first, any cost-benefit examination of the “special relationship” exposes how one-sided it has always been. In 1982, the State Department declined to support Britain over the Falklands until President Reagan intervened, and successive US governments turned a blind eye to IRA fundraising. As a counter to the blind adherence to the US line over Afghanistan and Iraq, it is claimed that Mr Blair persuaded the US to return to the UN for a second resolution over Iraq, but that was only because American troop formations were not yet ready.

As for the second claim, do we need access to US technical military sophistication and strategic thinking? The problem here is that Britain’s dependence can only intensify as the US funnels mega sums into reinforcing its military dominance. The choice is between accepting that subservience indefinitely or paying a short-term, albeit significant, price to secure greater independence. The long-term balance of advantage strongly favours the latter.

The aim of US foreign and military policy is to preserve and strengthen unilateral American hegemony, while the aim of British foreign policy must be a stronger role for the United Nations in support of multilateralism and the rule of international law. Those goals clearly do not coincide, as we have recently seen most starkly over Iraq. Where they differ our bottom line must be British interests, not Washington interests. That requires that we keep open the option of supporting

UN or EU operations even if it conflicts with American goals, and therefore slowly but systematically develop a more independent technological base.

We should insist on significantly greater reciprocity. Despite Britain providing valued international support for the US in Iraq, the enormous contracts for rebuilding the economy have gone overwhelmingly to American companies, notably Halliburton. British territory is currently used exclusively for US purposes, whether at Fairford for the B52s or Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, but without any obvious quid pro quo. British intelligence data, primarily from GCHQ at Cheltenham, is made fully available to the US communications intelligence agencies, but with limited traffic the other way. The CIA often sits on the UK Joint Intelligence Committee, but MI6 does not sit on its top intelligence body. The Fylingdales radar station in Yorkshire remains an integral outpost of the Star Wars early warning system, and may well be upgraded to US specifications with little or no benefit to the UK. Most recently, Britain has agreed, shamefully, to extradite Britons to the US without even prima-facie evidence of guilt, yet the US refuses to extradite their citizens on that basis.

While negotiating the European constitution, Britain repeatedly, and rightly, asserted “red lines”. We should do the same in negotiating with the US over foreign and defence policy. We should be prepared to criticise the US more openly. That includes recent occasions when the US reneged on the Kyoto protocol, boycotted the International Criminal Court, refused to sign a nuclear test ban treaty, withdrew from the international bioweapons treaty and broke its promise at the Doha World Trade Organisation meeting to provide cheap drugs to counter epidemics in developing countries.

And we should determine the earliest point at which UK troops can be safely withdrawn from Iraq, not tamely accept US pressure to stay on to help to provide cover for the US occupation.

Posted by Michael Meacher at 06:32 PM | Permalink

This article originally appeared in The Financial Times

Four months ago Britain's oil imports exceeded exports, heralding the decline in North Sea oil already well under way. North Sea oil output peaked at about 2.9 million bpd (barrels per day) in 1999, and has been predicted to nearly halve to only 1.6 million bpd by 2007. Even the latest discovery of the new Buzzard field, the biggest British oil find in a decade with a total of 0.4 million barrels recoverable, won't alter much the overall picture.

This prospect might not be so bleak were it not that similar trends are now becoming manifest across the world. The three main oil-producing regions are OPEC, the former Soviet Union, and the rest of the world. Modelling OPEC's future production is open to some question, but it is expected to peak in 2020 at about 40-45 million bpd. The under-production in the former Soviet Union in the 1990s following the Soviet collapse is now leading to a new surge in East Siberia and Sakhalin and new discoveries in the Caspian, which will yield a peak of about 10 million bpd in 2010. For the remaining 40 or more major oil-producing countries around the world as a whole, the broad overall pattern is similar, with some local variations.

Combining the three crude oil models for OPEC, the former Soviet Union and the rest of the world puts ultimate world oil recovery at some 2,200 billion barrels, with a peak at about 80 million bpd between 2010 and 2020. To this may be added non-conventional oil and other liquids brought into commercial production by the rising oil price as oil scarcity tightens. This includes oil from coal and shale, bitumen and derived synthetics, heavy and extra heavy oil, deep-water oil, polar oil and liquids from gas fields and gas plants. These sources, though at very much greater cost, could provide an ultimate recovery of about 800 billion barrels, and might peak in 2050 at around 20 million bpd. The combined model for all sources suggests a peak of about 90 million bpd around 2015.

Continue reading "Plan now for a world without oil" »

Posted by Michael Meacher at 03:35 AM | Permalink

This article first appeared in The Guardian.

Only a world environment court can curb capitalism's excesses

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

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

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

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

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

Posted by Michael Meacher at 03:22 AM | Permalink

This article was first published in The Guardian.

The 9/11 attacks gave the US an ideal pretext to use force to secure its global domination

Massive attention has now been given - and rightly so - to the reasons why Britain went to war against Iraq. But far too little attention has focused on why the US went to war, and that throws light on British motives too. The conventional explanation is that after the Twin Towers were hit, retaliation against al-Qaida bases in Afghanistan was a natural first step in launching a global war against terrorism. Then, because Saddam Hussein was alleged by the US and UK governments to retain weapons of mass destruction, the war could be extended to Iraq as well. However this theory does not fit all the facts. The truth may be a great deal murkier.

We now know that a blueprint for the creation of a global Pax Americana was drawn up for Dick Cheney (now vice-president), Donald Rumsfeld (defence secretary), Paul Wolfowitz (Rumsfeld's deputy), Jeb Bush (George Bush's younger brother) and Lewis Libby (Cheney's chief of staff). The document, entitled Rebuilding America's Defences, was written in September 2000 by the neoconservative think tank, Project for the New American Century (PNAC).

The plan shows Bush's cabinet intended to take military control of the Gulf region whether or not Saddam Hussein was in power. It says "while the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein."

The PNAC blueprint supports an earlier document attributed to Wolfowitz and Libby which said the US must "discourage advanced industrial nations from challenging our leadership or even aspiring to a larger regional or global role". It refers to key allies such as the UK as "the most effective and efficient means of exercising American global leadership". It describes peacekeeping missions as "demanding American political leadership rather than that of the UN". It says "even should Saddam pass from the scene", US bases in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait will remain permanently... as "Iran may well prove as large a threat to US interests as Iraq has". It spotlights China for "regime change", saying "it is time to increase the presence of American forces in SE Asia".

The document also calls for the creation of "US space forces" to dominate space, and the total control of cyberspace to prevent "enemies" using the internet against the US. It also hints that the US may consider developing biological weapons "that can target specific genotypes [and] may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool".

Finally - written a year before 9/11 - it pinpoints North Korea, Syria and Iran as dangerous regimes, and says their existence justifies the creation of a "worldwide command and control system". This is a blueprint for US world domination. But before it is dismissed as an agenda for rightwing fantasists, it is clear it provides a much better explanation of what actually happened before, during and after 9/11 than the global war on terrorism thesis. This can be seen in several ways.

Continue reading "This war on terrorism is bogus" »

Posted by Michael Meacher at 03:02 AM | Permalink

From The Times

World peace and the future of the planet are threatened by the overwhelming power of an "aggressive and unilateralist America" run by a right-wing President with close connections to the oil industry.

Such is the view of Michael Meacher, who until being sacked, or "liberated" as he put it, in last week's reshuffle had spent six years as Environment Minister. During his period in office he was described as Tony Blair's green fig leaf, a lone voice supporting environmental policies or even the last Bennite in government.

In an interview with The Times, Mr Meacher insisted that none of this was really true. He is his own man and a supporter of the Prime Minister and of a Government that has worked as a team since coming to power to "embed a fresh approach to sustainable development".

His charity does not, however, extend across the Atlantic to George Bush, with whom Mr Blair has forged a close alliance in the war against terrorism. Mr Meacher's departure from the Government comes as the Kyoto Protocol for tackling climate change is "on the cusp" of international ratification, despite the US President's opposition.

He said that America's stated reasons for refusing to sign up are "ridiculous and wrong-headed". The cost of adhering to the protocol, he said, would be between 0.1 and 1 per cent of the extra growth predicted for America by 2010. "They say, what about the rest of the world like China and India? But those coutries will only come on board if the rich nations show they mean business."

Instead, he suggested that a more sinister motive may lie behind Washington's decision as he highlighted the new US investments in oil production in Africa and South America. "Everyone knows that George Bush is a Texas oil man, his family have long-term connections, nearly all his senior advisers and closest aides have connections to a very, very powerful oil industry," he said. "I think that is a relevant consideration. They believe in the oil business and the traditional way of generating power and if they gain personally that is a bonus."

Mr Meacher said that these interests played their part in the decision to go to war in Iraq: "America is pursuing future oil supplies with extreme vigour, so it is difficult, when you look at Iraq, which has the second biggest oil reserves in the world, not to think it was a factor."

He did not, contrary to reports at the time, oppose military action. "What persuaded me was the idea that getting rid of a murderous, barbarous, genocidal regime responsible for millons of deaths overrode anything else," he said. "It was a justification for military action." He added: "It was not the reason why we went to war. My view is that we went to war because America wanted to establish a political and military platform in the Middle East, it saw a need for oil and of course it wished to support Israel. Weapons of mass destruction, if they existed, even on the most threatening predictions, were certainly not going to put Europe or the US at risk. But Tony Blair took the view that if you are a close ally you have more influence than if you are a protagonist. That is a view which still prevails. The problem is that Bush is not Clinton."

Mr Meacher is deeply concerned about the US "occupation" of Iraq and the sidelining of the UN, suggesting that Mr Blair should start puting some distance between himself and Washington. "The biggest political problem in the world today is the overwhelming power of the US. That is very serious for the world order. How you deal with an aggressive unilateralist like America is a problem for us all, but there are no easy answers."

Mr Meacher denied that Britain had been too soft on America on Kyoto, saying that Mr Blair had been taken by surprise by Mr Bush's decision to oppose ratification and had since tried to bring the US "on board" for a programme to reduce fossil-fuel emissions through technological change.

Since being sacked last week, however, he has focused his efforts on the looming government decision on allowing commericial production of genetically modified crops. Mr Meacher said that the GM food lobby had already won its battle in America, partly because of the links between the Washington Adminstration and firms like Monsanto.

Mr Meacher talked about the "happy days" spent negotiating with his EU counterparts on the environment, suggesting that Europe, which has risked a trade war with the US by opposing GM food, could be a bulwark against Washington. He promised to be a "sympathetic but critical friend" of the Government, saying it had done much good for the NHS and education but should pay more attention to a traditional Labour agenda of tackling poverty and improving equality.

From his new position on the backbenches, however, he will have already discovered that his views about Mr Bush chime with those of many of his colleagues. "My view is that we should not get too close to America. It is an important friend and ally, but in the end we should make our judgments about where the public interest lies and we should take note of public opinion in that as well."

Posted by Michael Meacher at 05:58 PM | Permalink