Michael Meacher MP

There could not be a clearer signal that the ultimate goal of this Tory government (forget the Coalition myth) is the full-scale commercialisation of all Britain’s public services than the latest plan to bring in the credit-rating agencies to monitor and control NHS hospitals.   This is taking the country back to pre-1948 when finance, not health, ruled the roost.   Monitor, the NHS regulator, is replacing assessment based on clinical quality with a purely financial regime, calling in the credit-rating agencies to assess the financial strength of hospitals.   For the first time for 70 years the key requirement will not be whether the hospital is delivering high-quality healthcare to those who need it, but simply whether it’s safely making a profit.   There are several reasons why this is profoundly wrong.

First, whilst of course financial viability has to be secured in all organisations, the prime purpose of a hospital is to restore ill people to health, one of the most fundamental of human needs, and a civilised society will ensure that that takes precedence both in terms of the allocation of national budgets and of individual treatment being optimised irrespective of income.   The credit-rating plan will reverse this priority, even to the point of forcing hospital trusts or private companies that fail to get ‘investment grade’ ratings to cease to operate.  

Second, even in terms of their narrow remit to judge financial strength, credit-rating agencies have an appalling record.   The provided triple A rating to many financial derivatives during the 2000s which caused the global crash when it turned out they were next to worthless.   The US Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission concluded that the 3 big credit-rating agencies (Standard & Poor’s, Moody’s, and Fitch) “key enablers of the financial meltdown”.  

Third, many of the hospitals currently in financial difficulties are not badly managed but rather saddled, through no fault of their own, with enormous PFI liabilities that were forced on them against their will.   The credit-rating plan will mean that, not only is public expenditure for those hospitals top-sliced to give priority to paying off PFI debts to private consortia, but the range and quality of healthcare provided will be significantly diminished to fit with whatever funding is left over.

Fourth, and most profoundly of all, the fundamental values on which British society has been built since the Second World War are being overturned.   The IDS so-called Welfare Reform bill will put a funding cap on the abolition of poverty, the Gove proposals for ‘free schools’ and academies aim to make education a profit-yielding enterprise, social housing is being all but squeezed out, and now NHS hospitals will be subjected to the unalloyed dictates of the financial market.

I’m not sure what is the correct collective noun for a pack of editors whingeing, but they were certainly in full cry yesterday at the Leveson inquiry.   It’s a pity it didn’t reflect the extraordinarily candid, and accurate, admission in The Times yesterday that News International was “unable or unwilling to police itself” and that it was “a disgrace” that it had failed to do so.   Amen to that.   But inveighing against State control as a means of heading off any regulation at all simply won’t wash.   Should any one person or organisation control more than one daily and one Sunday paper?    I thnk not.   Should the law restricting monopolistic cross-media ownership between the broadcast and print media, which Thatcher swept to one side in the 1980s to start Murdoch on his way to power, be consolidated and strengthened?   Surely it should.   Should a right of reply be instituted as elsewhere, giving space and prominence equal to that of the offending article?   Surely yes.   How best can new entrants to the media market be encouraged to increase diversity and improve balance in the press?   Not by licensing, but by finding new ways to stimulate such diversity and better balance.   Nearly all of this will require new legislation. (more…)

There is no doubt this is a defining moment for the Labour Party.   No-one questions that Ed Balls cannot, with 3 years or more to go to the next election, promise to reverse this or that particular cut, because nobody can anticipate in this exceptionally fluid and febrile situation what will be the state of the economy so far ahead.   But it is a totally different matter to say, as Ed Balls did at the weekend: “the starting point….is we’re going to have to keep all these cuts”.   It is also a totally different matter to say that Labour is signing up wholesale to the government’s present pay freeze and future pay cuts.   So why has he done it?   Not a single argument has been used to justify it except “Labour must be seen to be making tough choices”, which is simply a parroted mantra, not an explanation. (more…)

Osborne loves to regale us with his achievement at keeping Britain a safe haven so that the costs of borrowing are cheapest second only to Germany.   His latest boast is that UK bond yields (the interest rate that has to be paid) isn’t just very low, but actually negative, i.e. investors are actually paying to lend the British Government money.   That happened last week when £700m of bonds were auctioned by the UK Treasury at the negative rate of -0.116%.   This means that the Government is actually being paid to take money from fund managers and banks.   Is this the ultimate success of the Osborne strategy?   It most certainly is not.   The US, whose economy is not exactly a prize success, has also been paid to take out short-term loans.   No, the explanation for Britain’s super-low interest rates is quite different. (more…)

Ed Balls’ statement this weekend that he endorses Osborne’s public sector wage freeze until the end of this Parliament – possibly 3.5 years away – and accepts all the government’s spending cuts finally crosses a red line.   It is wholly unacceptable for several reasons.   First, at a time when the central economic problem is febrile growth because of lack of demand, it would gratuitously weaken demand even further when low-paid public sector workers have a higher propensity to spend – exactly what the economy now needs – than better-off sections of the population.   Second, it is grossly unfair to inflict a wage freeze for this year and next year, and then a flat 1% rise in the next two years (still a wage cut in real terms because inflation is expected to be rising at 2% a year), when 1% for a female local government worker represents less than £3 a week while for a doctor it represents £19 a week.   And third, it lets the rich and particularly the ultra-rich off the hook completely, continuing to get gargantuan pay packets and bonuses hardly touched. (more…)

All power to the Lords, led by the Baronesses Lister and Hollis!   They orchestrated a well-deserved defeat for the Government on three fronts yesterday.   They blocked the means-testing of ESA payments for disable people after one year, the time-limiting of ESA  for cancer patients, and the restriction of access to ESA for disabled or ill young people – all utterly shameful initiatives of the IDS so-called Welfare Reform Bill, but which without the rebellion in the Lords by Labour and independent peers would have gone through because the Whip in the Commons is so tribal that any deprivation for the poor and vulnerable, however unjust or repellent, would have been automatically carried by the Tory majority (even if they hadn’t bothered to find out what they were voting for).   But picking on the disabled and on cancer patients is going to cause big trouble for the Coalition.

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Another Iranian nuclear scientist was assassinated yesterday by a magnetic bomb placed on his car, the fifth such incident in the last 2 years.   This part of a covert war with Iran now under way including cyber warfare (the Stuxnet virus that shut down a fifth of Iran’s nuclear centrifuges), the killing of the pioneer of the Iranian missile programme in an explosion at a Revolutionary Guards base near Teheran 2 months ago, and the promise of more ‘unnatural events’ 2 days ago from the Israeli IDF chief of staff.   The rationale for all this is that Iran has to be stopped at any cost from building an atomic bomb.   Iran has repeatedly denied it is doing so, and insists on its inalienable right to obtaining nuclear energy under the NPT.   More significantly there is still no conclusive proof that Iran is actually building a nuclear bomb: the IAEA says that inspectors still “verify the non-diversion of declared nuclear material at Iran’s nuclear facilities”.   So why this relentless demonising of Iran by the West? (more…)

With public debt still stuck at £126bn, the government gives the go-ahead for a £33bn high-speed rail project which will achieve the benefit for rich businessmen of cutting the journey time from London to Birmingham by 23 minutes.   That is a cost of £1.4bn per minute saved.   It will not help to stop unemployment hitting 3 million because construction won’t start till 2017 at the earliest.   It will price many standard rail travellers out of the market because fares will have to rise by some 27% to make the project viable.   The benefit/cost ratio has sunk from 3.24 to 1.6 which is so marginal that colossal expenditure of this kind can’t be justified.   It is not, as the Tories originally promised, an alternative to the third runway at Heathrow, since HS2 goes nowhere near the airport.   It is not going to provide the revitalised national rail network linking Scotland, the north of England, Wales and the Channel since it’s confined to the 108 mile stretch from Euston to Birmingham.   So why is it going ahead? (more…)

The daily barrage from the Guardian, which began on Boxing Day and has continued non-stop for a fortnight, is still continuing.   Who’s behind it?   Clearly there has been briefing from members of the Shadow Cabinet, perhaps orchestrated by the person whose Policy Network pamphlet set it off, Peter Mandelson.   There is also a Blairite majority in the PLP some of whom may well have contributed too.   This is not fundamentally about policy: it’s about trying to weaken the leadership.   The idea that it’s necessary to spell out the big cuts that Labour would make is absurd – like getting aboard the Osborne austerity train when it’s about to hit the buffers.   Or that it’s necessary to display fiscal masochism in order to regain credibility, rather than point out the crucial fact that Labour never did over-spend; just before the bankers’crash the budget deficit was just 3% of GDP, an average-to-low position in the EU ordering, and it only rose to 11.6% because of the bankers’ bailouts. (more…)

It is astonishing that sado-masochism, so beloved of the English upper classes in their sexual antics, is so infectious in the Labour Party, albeit in a very different context.   There seems to be an obsession in some sections of the party that once the Tories go down the route of self-destructive austerity, we must at least match them or even preferably out-austerity them – self-flagellation in true Lutheran style – in order to prove our ‘credibility’ or to display ‘realism’.    The Guardian, or at least the Blairite wing of its political journalists, is intent on pursuing this line for all they’re worth, whilst giving no coverage whatever to the alternative view which makes much more sense.   Now we’re told that Gavin Kelly, chief exec of the reputable Resolution Foundation, is saying Labour must face the facts on future spending.   To that I say, bring it on.   Let’s start by looking at the true picture. (more…)

First Cameron’s grandstanding: “We need to try give people a sense that we have a vision at the end of this of a fairer, better economy”.   Then the idea: stop top people handing out hugely inflated salaries+bonuses+incentives+shares+share options to each other.   Then the awareness that what has prompted this sudden gush of concern is small businesses “furious with these rewards at the top for people who aren’t taking the sort of risks they’re having to take”, not the anger of the population at large who throughout the last two decades have been furious at a grossly unjust system.   And then the realisation that this is largely a PR stunt because the proposal – giving shareholders a vote on top pay packages – isn’t new (they have this power already if they care to exercise it) and won’t be effective (shareholdings are dominated by institutional holders who nearly always go along with the board even in the most egregious cases of excess).

What is fundamentally wrong with this idea is that only shareholders have any right to decide what the bosses get.   For Cameron, and for the Tory party he leads, capitalism is simply about maximising value for shareholders, management’s role is to produce this, and the workforce is merely the residual variable necessary to bring this about.   This is the rampant pre-war version of capitalism, which the Tories would earnestly wish to re-create, but it is wholly out-dated today.   Shareholders are largely dormant and remote, management uses the rhetoric of shareholder value to hide their own drive for power and wealth, and the workforce which is crucial to the overall success of the enterprise is nevertheless denied any access to real decision-making and kept subordinate by anti-union laws.  

If the pay system at the top is ever going to be remotely fair, the workforce, not just the shareholders, must have a major say in determining it.   They are a much bigger part of the teamwork of production than the shareholders, and have a hugely greater knowledge of exactly what is going on in the place of work and who deserves what.   Putting a representative of the workforce on the top earners’ remuneration committee would be a start, but such a person could easily be ignored or outvoted by the other members of the committee.   What is really needed is that top pay should have to be agreed by the workforce as a whole at an annual meeting of representatives of all the main occupational grades within the organisation. (more…)

Ed Miliband’s defence of his position in today’s Guardian is pretty robust – unflustered, reasonable, clear-headed, above all keeping his eye on the key objectives and not getting distracted.   Edward Heath had the effective habit of laconic comment to flick off his detractors like irritating or irrelevant flies.   Ed has the same capacity, though less tersely and more thoughtfully, but the effect is much the same.   He certainly put paid to all the media hubbub about no strategy.   De-throning Murdoch (which no other politician would ever have dared to do, let alone succed in doing), confronting the failures of capitalism, pinpointing the effect of the cuts on the squeezed middle, emphasising the abandonment of the young and the next generation, attacking rail fares and energy prices going through the roof, demanding responsibility at both the top and bottom of society – quite a list in one year.   And what did we get from Cameron in his first year as Opposition Leader?   Huskies in the Arctic, windmills on houses, hugging hoodies – all deliberately deceptive PR which he dropped like hot bricks as soon as he had the power to do something about it. (more…)

It’s becoming quite a pattern.   The Blairites wait in the wings, biding their time till there’s a slippage in the polls for Labour (caused, bizarrely, this time by Cameron’s Eurozone veto) and then use the opportunity to snipe at the leadership and push their view yet again that Labour should indulge in an orgy of cuts to show it can be just as macho in slashing public expenditure as Osborne.   That was always Blair’s way: anticipate what the Tories were going to do , get in there first, and go even further to out-tory the Tories.   In other words, just when almost all commentators admit the Osborne strategy has failed and made likely a double-dip slump this year, we should jump on board. (more…)

Gove’s fulminating today against opponents of academies as ‘ideologues happy with failure’ is a bluster that will come back to haunt him.   If anyone was happy to play with children’s lives and prospects for ideological reasons, it’s him.   What makes him think that merely structural change like enforcing independence from local authorities, as opposed to high-quality and committed teachers, will make any difference to children’s performance in the poorest areas?   Where is the evidence for his dogmatism?   And in the absence of evidence, what right does he have to impose academies against the wishes of teachers and parents?   If he’s so sure he’s right, why doesn’t he make major change of this kind conditional on winning the consent of those most closely involved, the teachers and the parents, through a properly conducted ballot?  

Gove attacks his opponents as ‘ideologues of central control’.   So who is taking more power to himself than any previous Education Secretary of State?   Who is ensuring that all funding for academies is being removed from local authorities (I thought this government was advocating localism) and handed out directly from central government?   Who in his Education Bill has made sure that in the even of disputes, of which there will be many, he himself remains the ultimate arbiter?   After railing against central control, he is its greatest enforcer.

He isn’t even honest.   This whole programme isn’t about raising educational standards – that’s not borne out by the evidence – it’s part of the anti-State obsession of this government which itself shields the real driving force behind it, which is the corporate takeover of the whole eduation system.   Schools are being handed over to almost anyone, with no local accountability, and it’s no wonder that senior officials are abandoning the Eduation Department, to be eagerly replaced no doubt by “ideologues” (sorry, special advisers) with little or no knowledge of education but who are fully signed up to their boss’s ‘ideology’ (sorry, principles). (more…)

The two convictions for Stephen Lawrence’s murder are far from closing this infamous chapter in British policing and criminal justice.   As Stephen’s father has said, only 2 of the 5 killers have so far been brought to justice.   The police who initially dealt with the evidence so tardily and unprofessionally have yet to be held to account.   It is sobering that this final conviction was brought about only by the relentless persistence of Stephens’s parents, not by police diligence until the very last stage, helped by advances in forensic investigation and changes to the double jeopardy rule.    The inveterate lying of the friends and families of the two convicted killers which delayed justice for 18 years has yet to be dealt with.   The question of police complacency about race remains an open one. (more…)