Meacher: why Spectator readers should vote for me
A leadership election opens up, uniquely, the opportunity to debate and decide on the future course of a government. I am standing because I believe there are several areas of policy where a fundamental change of direction is now needed. And though Spectator readers may initially be sceptical about the relevance of my policies to them, I believe that if they read on with an open mind, they'll find much that they agree with. I'm sure they'll agree, for instance, that New Labour and Tory policies have become similar, almost overlapping, which means that politics has become increasingly fixated on personalities, as though a blanket consensus on policy had been achieved. This is ridiculous. Old-style Toryism was rejected in 1997, and now New Labour - the continuing moving-right show - has clearly faded. It's time, not for Old Labour either, but for a mainstream Labour approach - which may well represent majority opinion within the electorate but has been suppressed for over a decade - to be reasserted as a modern progressive politics with new solutions to today's profound problems.
(From the Independent)
Labour leadership contender answers your questions, such as 'Why not sell your flats to help fight against poverty?' & 'What's your guilty pleasure?'
Published: 05 March 2007
Are you a socialist? What does that mean today? MIKE WOODBRIDGE, Brighton
Yes, I am. A socialist believes that while the market has its proper place, the fundamental principles underpinning society should be equity, social justice, equality of opportunity, and democratic accountability. Even where the market is a dominant force, socialists believe it should be regulated to ensure high environmental, social and labour standards.
Why, as a socialist, do you own so many houses? GARY BROWNE, Glasgow
As I have regularly stated in the register of Members' interests, I own four flats. I have saved throughout my life, and put my savings into property. I don't think [that] is contrary to socialism.
Given your views on poverty, why not sell some of your houses and give the money to charity? Or are you just another hypocritical politician? V AHMAD, Birmingham
I already give a significant amount to charity . I agree there is an urgent need to build much more social, affordable housing but selling my flats which are already occupied would not contribute one iota to that.
Isn't it delusional of you to challenge Gordon Brown for the Labour leadership? MAURICE BURKE, Birmingham
No. There should be a contest because only an election enables us to debate the real policy issues. I also believe that members of the Labour Party should have the right to choose their own leaders. I believe, too, that as New Labour, of which Gordon Brown is perhaps the main architect, has moved continually ever further to the right, the mainstream majority of the party has been left disenfranchised and without a voice. It is not sensible to assume the results of any election before the electors have had a chance to deliver their opinion which may sometimes come as rather a shock to the chattering classes. Not too many people I guess expected David Cameron to come from behind and win the Tory Party leadership.
Don't you think Gordon offers Labour the best hope of winning the next election? VALERIE EVANS, Cardiff
Have you seen the last two polls? Both put the Tories 11 per cent ahead, and one poll found that if Gordon was leader, the Tories would be 13 per cent ahead.
I am a Labour supporter, but I despair that Gordon Brown has been such a coward over the war, talks nonsense on 'Britishness' and seems so in love with Rupert Murdoch that he will hand the next election to Cameron. Do you agree - and if not, which bits do you disagree with and why? DAVE FISCHER, Sheffield
Cameron has certainly, at this stage at least, improved the Tories' poll ratings, but not, I think, for the reasons you give.
A majority on the Labour left support John McDonnell and see your campaign as a spoiler which will only split the vote and stop a contest. Will you stand down if John has more nominations when Blair resigns? SUSAN PRESS, Calder Valley
There is no evidence whatever that a majority of people on the Labour Party left and the affiliated trade union movement support John McDonnell for leader. I have a great deal of respect for John, but I don't believe he can get the necessary 45 nominations, whereas I believe I can. I am not splitting the vote, but rather giving the centre-left the chance, to run a candidate who can pass the nominations threshold. But I do agree that whichever of the two of us has the larger number of nominations, the other should stand down when Tony Blair resigns.
Why not use that photo of you on Blackpool beach (very Daniel Craig) for your campaign posters? CONOR MURPHY, Reading
Good try. At least it shows I'm healthy.
Do you think Blair should stand down now?STEVE HARRISON, Bolton
The sooner he stands down, the better.
Why did you vote in favour of the invasion of Iraq?DEAN PALMER, Norwich
I made the biggest mistake of my political life when I supported the war, on the grounds that the Prime Minister repeatedly gave chapter and verse about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction and assured us that if only we knew all the intelligence available to him, we would have no doubts about the necessity for this action. I still find it deeply disturbing for democracy that a prime minister can so massage and fabricate the evidence in order to push through a preconceived war plan.
Do you think Blair lied to his MPs and lied to the country over Iraq?JEFF TERRY, Dundee
I think the highly selective manipulation of such evidence as there was, together with the highly prejudicial use to which it was put, was deeply dishonest.
You claim you were misled that Saddam had a WMD programme. Yet you say the West has no right to tell Iran not to develop nuclear weapons. Aren't you being rather inconsistent over Iraq and Iran?JIM ROLAND, London NW11
No, these are two quite separate arguments. Yes, we were certainly misled over Saddam's alleged WMD programme. While we should try to prevent Iranian nuclear weapons by negotiation and UN sanctions, we cannot say that nuclear weapons are indispensable for our own security, and then say Iran does not need them for their own security, especially when Iran (unlike the West) is surrounded by seven states which are nuclear-armed and some very hostile.
Do you truly believe that the US government knew about 9/11 but failed to prevent it?CHRIS QUIGLEY, by email
Clearly the US government did not know the precise time and location of the al-Qa'ida attack, but equally clearly there was a great deal of intelligence beforehand which, for whatever reason, it seems that they did not follow up.
You have suggested that the US government knew about the 9/11 attacks (which is pretty obvious I reckon, but fair play to you nonetheless). How complicit do you believe the UK Government was in 7/7? PAUL HUGHES, by email
Not at all.
Do you also believe that the FBI shot John F Kennedy, that Princess Diana was murdered and the US government has covered up the landing of aliens?BEN TROTTER, Cirencester
No. Such allegations are cheap and rather silly.
What steps will you propose to counter global warming? DR GEORGE BLAIR, by email
We should rapidly increase our use of renewable sources of energy (windpower, solar, and micro-generation in people's homes). We should require the airline industry, like every other industry, to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions each year. We should increase vehicle excise duty sharply for gas-guzzling cars and use the proceeds to subsidise bus and rail, and smaller-engine cars. We should give each family a carbon entitlement which then has to be reduced each year.
How often have you flown in the past 12 months? FIONA MILLS, Edinburgh
Not at all.
You criticise the 'Westminster bubble' but said you spent the last two months talking to MPs about your campaign. Does this not show you have the same disrespect for people's views as the rest of the Westminster bubble? MARSHA JANE THOMPSON, by email
I said that when people around the country come to vote, they may well take a quite different view of things from the inward-looking Westminster scene, and should be listened to. But I also extensively canvassed my colleagues in the Parliamentary Labour Party because they alone are the ones who make the nominations.
Why did it take you so long to announce your intention to stand for the Labour leadership when John McDonnell has been campaigning up and down the country for months?MAX MITCHELL, by email
I have been told that John McDonnell announced his candidature without consulting his colleagues. I thought it right first to consult extensively to confirm that my candidature would have the necessary range of support.
What are your guilty pleasures (apart from homeowning)?ALICE SHERWOOD, Tadworth
Wouldn't you like to know! Dropping childish comments in the waste paper basket is one of them.
You always look a bit boring. Are you? ROB JACKSON, by email
No. Why? Are you?
On July 6 1988, a serious incident occurred that is still sending shockwaves through medical, administrative and political circles. Although the conclusions from the saga are still, 18 years on, not yet complete, it is a microcosm of how badly public authorities can react when confronted with something that has gone seriously wrong. It offers a textbook example of lessons that need to be learned if trust is to be regained in public life.
It is becoming increasingly clear that the model being imposed on the health service is the wrong one. The strategy isn't working. NHS trust deficits have reached nearly £1bn and hospital treatments are being deliberately postponed for several months to save money. These are just early signs of the effects of the rapidly emerging healthcare market. And as Patricia Hewitt and David Cameron vied last week over who will provide the bigger role for the private sector in the NHS, the Audit Commission has warned that trusts' financial volatility will continue as the volume of private-sector provision increases and payment by results is applied more widely.
Continue reading "Going private can seriously damage your health service" »
From The Guardian
The publication this week of the report of the Cerrie committee - the committee examining radiation risks from internal emitters - is a public scandal. It deletes the arguments put forward by a minority on the committee, which suggest that the numbers of people who die each year from cancer caused by nuclear radiation may be at least 100 to 300 times more than official estimates.
The point at issue is that the standard model used by the nuclear industry to calculate the effects of radiation on human health is based on estimates of the external blast impact from the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bomb explosions in 1945. But the model largely excludes the impact of radiation from a wholly different source, when radionuclides are inadvertently inhaled from, say, a nearby nuclear reactor.
The impact of radiation from an external bomb blast is assumed in the standard model to be averaged out across the whole body. But when a radionuclide is swallowed, it attaches itself to particular tissue within the body which it then continually bombards with radioactivity as it gradually decays. To illustrate the point, there is a big difference, when one is cold on a winter's night, between warming oneself in front of a coal fire and popping a red-hot coal into one's mouth.
There is already strong evidence that the standard model is flawed because it cannot explain the facts which have been uncovered in the past two decades. It assumes, for example, that cancer risk is strictly proportional to dose. But the mounting evidence from studies in Germany, Belgium, Greece, Scotland and Wales, and from dozens of studies in Russia, which have examined the sharp increase in leukaemia among babies in Europe in the two years after Chernobyl, indicates that this is wrong.
The nuclear industry explains that the increase would be expected on the basis of the radiation those babies received while their mothers were pregnant, and they take as the benchmark an increase in risk of up to 40% where the dose from obstetric x-rays is 10,000 microsieverts. However, babies in Greece received only 200 microsieverts from the Chernobyl fallout, yet infant leukaemia there jumped by 160%. Babies in Germany received only 100 microsieverts, yet the increase was 48%. Clearly the standard model used by the nuclear industry and regulators is faulty.
I therefore set up Cerrie, with balanced representation from all sides of the argument, to examine how the model should be modified to take account of this new evidence and how precautionary action needs to be tightened to safeguard the nation's health.
I insisted that the final conclusions must fairly include the views of all sides to the committee, preferably within a single report, but if that was still not possible then in the form of majority and minority reports. The chairman had already given an undertaking that minority reports would be allowed, and indeed in May this year in the final stages of drawing up the report the committee agreed on a 10-1 vote to admit minority reports if that should prove necessary.
However, just one month later, it was suddenly proposed at the end of the final meeting by some members of the committee, without prior notice and without any discussion being allowed, that no dissenting statement from the mainreport would be allowed, and it was passed on a 5-2 vote.
Why have these shenanigans been used to gag a critical debate about public health? Maybe it is because if these arguments suggesting far higher fatalities than officially admitted from radiation-induced leukaemias and other cancers were included in a government report, it could well lead to a legal challenge to the regulatory approvals granted to nuclear power stations - without which the nuclear industry could not function. But whatever the reason, any data of critical relevance to the nation's health should under no circumstances be suppressed.
Public health warning: our leaders' seduction by science is dangerous
This article originally apeared in The Times
We have reached an extraordinarily odd situation in the saga of genetic modification. The public continues to reject it, the supermarkets will not stock it, the industry itself has pulled out of GM cultivation, but the Government is still keen to go ahead. Why? Tony Blair said recently: “It is important for the whole debate (on GM) to be conducted on the basis of scientific evidence, not on the basis of prejudice.” But being mesmerised by science is at best short-sighted and at worst disingenuous.
Science quite often gets things wrong. Biologists initially refused to accept that power stations could kill fish or trees hundreds of miles away in Scandinavia; later the idea was universally accepted. Scientists did not originally agree that chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) were destroying the ozone layer; but when the industry — ICI and DuPont — abruptly changed sides in 1987, ministers and scientists soon lined up with them. The Lawther working party roundly rejected that health-damaging levels of lead in the blood came mainly from vehicle exhausts, only to find that blood-lead levels fell 70 per cent after lead-free petrol was introduced. The Southwood committee of BSE scientists insisted in 1989 that scrapie in cattle could not cross the species barrier, only to find by 1996 that it did just that.
Much more subtle, and more serious, is the manipulation of science for wider political or commercial purposes. Scientific conclusions don’t usually emerge innocently as an individual’s inspired discovery, but out of a process dependent on financial pressures.
Continue reading "Public health warning: our leaders' seduction by science is dangerous" »
Six years ago when I was appointed Minister for the Environment, I had never heard of genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Today it has come close to taking over my life and some argue has already cost me my job as Minister.
I first became interested in this as the sheer magnitude of what the GM project meant for the nation's food supply gradually dawned on me. At first we were assured by officials in MAFF (before it became DEFRA as it now is) that this was an interesting and important new technology which would solve some of agriculture's challenges by reducing the use of herbicides (chemical weedkillers) and helping to feed the world.
However, several problems began to emerge. First, when the issue started hitting the headlines in 1998, the public was clearly deeply sceptical, even hostile, and for very good reason. They remembered BSE. The Government, the scientists and officialdom all assured them in 1990 that it could never cross the species barrier and infect humans. Then in 1994 it was found that it had done exactly that, and several dozen people have now died very unpleasantly of new variant CJD. Before that there were other food scares too - salmonella and e-coli. And more recently of course we have been through the trauma of foot and mouth.
The net effect of all this was to leave the Government with a huge credibility problem, and I felt drawn to try to get to the bottom of what appeared to be an unfolding environmental crisis. Were GM foods a genuine breakthrough or a 'frankenstein foods' nightmare?