Michael Meacher MP

Every time there is a lobbying abuse at Westminster, which is a regular occurrence, the government immediately announces they will introduce a charter to stamp out abusive practices and spread transparency.   Nothing then happens until the next shameful incident which forces the government to act (or rather not act) immediately again.   The last time round this arose, in 2011, the government promised a regulatory charter, but it would be voluntary (i.e. it applies only if you want it to).   As it turned out, as soon as the press sensation had died down, the matter was once again swept under the carpet.   This time round, something might acrually happen, but I wouldn’t hold your breath.   And even before a bill is prepared, let alone agreed within the coalition and consulted on publicly, the Tories have already within hours diverted it for extraneous purposes to pursue their favourite pastime – bash the unions. (more…)

Ed Balls didn’t have to say it.   It will save a piffling amount of money relative to the size of the budget deficit which is still plateaued at £122bn.   Inasmuch as it’s a Tory-style policy, it’s doing the Tories’ dirty work for them.   And it’s another nail (admittedly not the first or the only one) in the coffin of universalism.   So why did Balls do it?   The Blairites at the PLP commended it on the grounds that it showed that Labour was quite capable of taking ‘tough’ decisions!   As though trying to out-tory the Tories will bring the voters flocking in, or as though pre-empting what the Tories were probably going to do anyway (since it’s already been talked about extensively in Tory circles) is really smart politics.   The honest truth is it just confirms that the toxic New Labour brand is still there in the Labour Party and that the view already widely held, that there’s really not much difference between the two parties, is right. (more…)

According to the Boston Consulting Group, Britain now has just over 1,000 ‘ultra-high net worth households’, i.e. those with more than $100m (£65m) in private financial wealth, excluding property.   Much of this will be stored in tax havens, and most of it will have been filleted by expensively-paid lawyers and accountants to ensure that next to no tax is paid on it.   When according to the Sunday Times Rich List this same group of 1,000 persons, just 0.003% of the population,  have increased their wealth by no less than £190bn since the 2008-9 crash while the inflation-adjusted incomes of almost everyone else has shrunk, why are these ultra-rich not being made to contribute their (substantial) share of the tax burden to reduce the budget deficit?   An NAO report published last November offers a lot of the answer. (more…)

By busting the EU embargo on arms to Syria and insisting on shipping arms into the warzone if the Syria talks fail later this month, William Hague is at risk of triggering a process of retailiation and counter-retaliation which could explode into yet another regional Middle East war.   If Russia responds by arming Assad with the latest S-300 missiles, if the Israelis then retaliate by bombing the S-300 rocket launchers (almost certainly killing many Russian trainers in the process), and if Assad then further retaliates by opening an Arab front against Israel on the Golan, the scene is set for a huge enlargement of the bloodletting with total uncertainty as to the outcome.   It’s as if, like the Bourbons, the UK has learnt nothing and forgotten nothing from the disasters of Iraq and Afghanistan.   Against that record there should be no despatch of arms to Syria without a debate and vote in Parliament. (more…)

Bilderberg is coming to Britain next week to plot the next steps for a desperately failing global capitalism.   The Bilderberg conference is the regular get-together of the Western financial elite and top business corporates at which amid intensive mutual lobbying they try to coordinate their plans to maximise their interests over the coming period.   It is attended by top bankers, leading corporate bosses, the heads of the key UN institutions (IMF, World Bank, WTO), EU Commissioners,and a smuttering of politicians from the US, Canada, UK and Europe seeking to understand better what are the next steps that the masters of the market are demanding.   It is shrouded in deepest secrecy (no doubt that’s why Watford was chosen for the venue rather than London), secured by local policing paid for by funding washed through their very own charity, the Bilderberg Association.   And it will be attended by George Osborne and Kenneth Clarke.  (more…)

Progress is being made bit by bit in the fight against tax avoidance/evasion, as revealed today in the decision of the Swiss government to loosen its tight bank secrecy laws so that its banks can under US pressure, which forced one Swiss bank to close, reach settlements with the US regarding their involvement in enabling US citizens avoid/evade tax.   However, these and similar agreements are limited measures which are specific and localised in their effects, and often still hedged around with conditional qualifications.   The best weapon to name and shame tax cheats is transparency, and the most widespread and effective means of achieving transparency is by establishing the principle of published tax returns.   Nor is this such a radical policy as it may initially sound since UK wills are already public documents and Norway, Finland, and Sweden among others already operate this principle. (more…)

There are two kinds of referenda – those that are for the benefit of the political class and those that are for the benefit of the public.   They are quite different.   When referenda are mooted, it is invariably the former kind.   Political leaders only consent to holding a referendum when they are almost certain to win it, and even then only to try to resolve a political problem largely confined to themselves.   Europe is the classic example of this.   Wilson held a referendum on the EU in 1975 in order to settle the argument then raging in the Labour Party about leaving the Common Market (as it then was) and he won it, but 8 years later Labour then went to the country in the 1983 election pledged to exit once again.   Plus ca change.   Now the Tory party is going through one of its hissy fits over the EU and Cameron is forced to offer a referendum as the only way to calm down the hysterics.   It is doubtful if it will ever be held, but even if it is and is lost (as is most likely), one can sure that the Tory Right after the minimum decent interval will be back again with the same demand.   Politically driven referenda solve nothing, but electorate-driven referenda could have real value. (more…)

The EU is not exactly the most popular institution currently in Britain, but it has demonstrated its mettle in taking on the Big Oil corporates when successive UK regulators have equally demonstrated their utter uselessness.   In moves ominously reminiscent of the banks’ Libor rigging scandal, the EU’s leading anti-trust authority has raided the oil majors Shell, BP and the Norwegian Statoil to investigate the setting of oil prices, and the gas prices normally linked to them.   This proble into oil benchmarks, which acutely affects the cost of living in petrol prices and home heating, has also ensnared Platt’s, the world’s leading price-reporting agency, which the European Commission has also ordered to be raided.   It is not as though this was a sudden discovery.   It has long been known that oil and gas prices were fixed, and several months ago one of Europe’s largest energy trading groups, Total Oil Trading SA, warned that crude and oil products were ‘inaccurately priced’.   The whole issue has been high on the UK political agenda for months.   So why was nothing done by UK regulators? (more…)

Whilst the City of London, the Stock Exchange and super-rich investors strive continually to assure us that growth is returning and that we can all soon return to business-as-usual as though the biggest financial crash for a century was just an unfortuante blip rather than integral to the core system, they never ask the really key question: do we actually want to go back to that system even if we could (which we can’t)?   After the privations of the last decade and probably of the decade to come, the great majority of the 99% would undoubtedly say No.   But, they would also probably say, is there a serious alternative which is not just utopian?   Well, actually, there is and it’s operating rather well and certainly much better than US-UK on almost every count. (more…)

Even the IMF is now insisting that growth must have priority over continuing austerity, but neither the growth-sayers nor the austerians have yet recognised that the fundamental problem for post-crash capitalism is lack of economic demand.   Equity markets have surged in recent weeks, not because the real economy is recovering, but because central banks – the US Federal Reserve, the Bank of England, and now the Bank of Japan – have flooded the global economy with cash, to the point where markets have now become addicted to it.   As soon however as the junkie is removed, as now seems likely with the Fed withdrawing from its $85bn a month QE because the US debt is now coming down much faster than expected, the market surge collapses especially when it is combined with weak business news from China. (more…)

It says a great deal about current human values, the grip of the economic elite over society, and the scarcely challenged dominance of free market capitalism that the concentration of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere passed 400 parts per million for the first time in 4.5 million years, yet it scarcely merited a mention in the news and certainly took any notice.   Of course the 400 ppm threshold is purely symbolic and a single figure actually conceals what is really disturbing – that the level of CO2 concentration has risen by almost a third in just 50 years which is scarcely a flicker of the eye in geological time or even in human terms (homo sapiens has been around for some 250,000 years).   Even more disturbing, per capita emissions of CO2 have more than doubled over the last 60 years and the rate of increase is gradually accelerating to the present rate of nearly 2ppm per year.   At that rate it could be 800 ppm by the end of this century (it had been stable for centuries at around 280ppm before the Industrial Revolution).   That could raise average global temperatures by between 4 and 6 degrees centigrade, more than twice what scientists regard as a safe level. (more…)

Three cheers for the courts and mental health activists, O for the politicians and the DWP.   Two days ago 3 judges ruled – as we all knew, but it required the courts to make it the law of the land – that the Government’s prescriptors, regulations and guidelines used to assess whether disabled people were eligible for ESA disadvantaged people with mental health problems, learning disabilities and autism.   What prompted this to happen?   Not a change of heart by Atos Healthcare – heaven forbid – but a judicial review brought by two anonymous claimants who were victims of mental ill-health.   The case revolved round how the notorious Work Capability Assessment (WCA) is undertaken to decide if someone is fit to work.   At present the judgement of a professional such as a GP or social worker is generally not taken into account unless provided by the persons being assessed themselves.   This means that assessments are usually based on a very short interview, often just 15 minutes, with a stranger who may have no mental health training at all and no knowledge of what your GP, psychiatrist or community psychiatric nurse might have to offer concerning your illness.   This is now going to have to change. (more…)

It was a shocking, abominable murder.   But the fear remains that this may not be the action of hatred-obsessed psychopaths, but the beginnings of a long-drawn-out saga of Muslim revenge.   The words that the murderer used have already gone round the world: “we will never stop fighting you.   The only reason we have done this is because Muslims are dying every day.   This British soldier is an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth”.   It is terrible that this happened on a British street, but that is precisely why this location was chosen.   One of the killers added: “in our land our women have to see the same.   You people will never be safe.   Remove your government.   They don’t care about you”.   It’s not only Iraq that he was probably referring to, where between 100,000 to a million died, overwhelmingly civilians, but also the on-going war in Afghanistan and the continuing escalation in drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen where Bush had launched 60 strikes but Obama already at least 350, where the ‘collateral damage’ in civilian deaths has been huge. (more…)

In the 1960s banking assets accounted for some 50% of GDP.   By the late 2000s they had risen to about 200% of GDP.   In the case of Britain with its grossly over-extended international banking sector, they had risen to 500% of GDP.   The reasons for this were partly to enable large companies to start doing business in ever more countries, but largely because of the de-regulation of banks and markets by Thatcher and Blair/Brown together with egregious financial innovation.   The latter were not only mortgage-backed securities drawing on sub-prime markets (the posh financial phrase for basing these securities on households with no hope or intention of repaying these loans), but also designed mainly to allow banks to circumvent regulation and take on more risk with (ultimately) taxpayers’ money to increase profits.   Basel 2 also purported to calculate precisely the capital reserve required to be held against the probability of loan defaults, but thus unwittingly categorised vast quantities of assets (e.g. exotic derivatives) as ‘risk-free’ which (predictably) turned out to be the opposite.   But what is most significant of all is the way the banks deliberately inflated the size of their own balance sheets to increase their own power and profits on a mega scale. (more…)

Everyone is saying that Labour now urgently needs two or three key themes which will resonate with the electorate and will be recognised by everyone as the party’s distinctive goals.   I believe those three key themes should be (i) reversing austerity by kickstarting the economy and putting a million or more unemployed back to work – which is also the most efficient way to cut the deficit, (ii) recreating a public NHS by repealing the Lansley bill and restoring the ethos of public service, and (iii) launching a major house-building programme to tackle the housing shortage scandal, generate jobs, offer genuinely affordable housing, and hold down house prices and rents.   The last of these has received far too little attention, but all of them pinpoint drastic government failure. (more…)