Michael Meacher - Labour's Future

Extract from my contribution [scroll down to 3.09pm] to the Queen’s Speech debate, 14 November 2007

I believe the Government urgently needs some commanding themes by which its distinctive vision can be clearly understood. I want to propose three.

The first is democratisation which the PM himself adumbrated in his first statement to Parliament. But it has to stretch a great deal further than simply giving Parliament a vote before the country goes to war. Parliament needs real new powers on a much broader front – electing Select Committee members, ratifying (or not) Cabinet nominations made by the PM, approving (or not) the membership and terms of reference of Committees of Inquiry proposed by the PM, and setting up our own Parliamentary Commissions to investigate matters (like extraordinary rendition) when the Government itself refuses to do so.

But it isn’t just in Parliament where there’s a democratic deficit. A far bigger one now exists outside. Power has become so centralised over the last 30 years and the regulatory authorities so enfeebled that so far from regulating corporate power, the biggest businesses have increasingly co-opted the power of the State for themselves for their own commercial ends. The current loosening of controls over major power station, airport and incinerator developments, the failure to regulate unhealthy food advertising because of objections from the food industry despite the epidemic of obesity, the withdrawal of the SFO investigation into corruption allegations against BAE, and the relaxation of the gaming laws to permit a flood of gambling casinos are just a few recent examples.

Accountability today has all but vanished. Perhaps the most telling case is Northern Rock. It is now costing taxpayers £23bn in loans, plus a £2bn interest charge – almost equal to the entire annual defence budget – yet nobody is held responsible. The Bank of England, the Financial Services Authority and the Treasury are all blaming each other. What action is being taken, and by whom, to face up to the fundamental mistakes made that led up to this crisis, including the reckless lending practices of the chief executive of Northern Rock as well as the flawed structure of regulation put in place a decade ago? Why wasn’t Northern Rock temporarily taken into public ownership, as was done in the case of the secondary banking crisis in 1974, in order to avoid a run on the bank and to retain depositors’ confidence without this colossal haemorrhage of public funds? The answer to that of course is that the neo-liberal agenda of privatisation, de-regulation and unfettered markets is still, unaccountably, being imposed above everything else, even at phenomenal cost to the taxpayer so that public ownership, even temporarily, is ruled out.

And what action is the Government going to take over the mania for securitisation, collateralised debt obligations and all the other opaque and dodgy financial derivatives which have so dramatically and comprehensively destabilised the markets? Despite all its de-regulatory instincts, does the Government now acknowledge that stricter regulation of financial markets is now necessary if the frenzy for newfangled financial instruments, which are actually designed to be deceptive over risk and value, is to be curbed?

Equally, at the other end of society, the checks and balances against the arbitrary use of power have all but evaporated. Civil liberties have been drastically eroded, and the introduction of ID cards and 2-months detention without charge, both of which I deplore, are still being mooted. Workers who have been in their jobs less than two years can still be arbitrarily dismissed without any rights, and temporary and agency workers remain an exploited underclass – mainly at the behest of the CBI which this Government should be much stronger in resisting. Accountability, or indeed any redress, against alleged misdemeanours by the police, judges, banks, private utilities or big corporations is almost non-existent. Today powerlessness is widely felt to be endemic throughout society, and it will require an awful lot more than focus groups or citizens’ juries to put it right.

Continue reading "A real vision for Labour" »

Posted by Michael Meacher at 08:16 PM | Permalink

Some useful proposals – though the devil may lie in the detail, not yet revealed – but disappointing on the vision and no razzmatazz of new ideas for a new leader, largely because Gordon Brown has already been leading on the domestic policy agenda for the past ten years and now has nothing much new to say.

It’s good that after two decades of neglect of social housing amidst the triumphalist ideology of private ownership, the national scandal of housing need is now at least being noticed. Council waiting lists are now above 1 ½ million and there are over 100,000 homeless, yet only 100 Council homes were built last year (down from 13,000 a year at the end of the Thatcher era). The housing stock is only growing by some 185,000 a year at present, yet the number of new households being formed each year is about 220,000. We are still going backwards. Building an extra 40,000 homes a year, as the Government proposes, is clearly nowhere near enough to meet the yawning gap of housing need. And how many of the 40,000 will be social housing anyway? And why are local authorities still not being allowed to build more Council houses themselves if they wish, borrowing against the security of their own existing housing stock?

Changes to the planning system, as is proposed, might seem sensible when some planning decisions have clearly taken far too long. The 8 years spent on the Heathrow Terminal 5 decision is usually quoted here (though much of that was accounted for by the time spent on Ministers’ desks after the planning report was submitted). But today’s proposals are motivated by very different criteria. National Policy Statements will be drawn up which will enable an array of major developments – nuclear power and nuclear waste facilities, coal-fired power stations, airport expansions, major road schemes, and large waste incinerators – to be put through without the public having a say on whether they are needed or safe, or where they are to be located. This rather conflicts with Brown’s stated wish to bring more democracy into public decisions.

A Climate Change Bill is very welcome, but again its contents leave a lot to be desired. It promises a review of progress in cutting carbon emissions every 5 years which is far too lax when the UK is way off track to meet the Government’s objectives. Clearly annual targets, published and enforceable, are urgently needed. Moreover, air travel and shipping emissions are omitted, even though they are the fastest rising sources of emissions. Nor are mere targets sufficient anyway when other Government policies, notably a tripling of airport capacity by 2030, are diametrically opposed.

Democratisation has also been one of Gordon’s ostensible goals, which is also desperately needed. But it has to stretch a great deal further than simply giving Parliament a vote before the country goes to war – a concession which after the Iraq debacle would probably be inevitable anyway. Parliament needs real new power on a much broader front – electing Select Committee members rather than letting the Whips use the patronage to gain a wider acquiescence, ratifying (or not) Cabinet nominations made by the PM, approving (or not) the membership and terms of reference of Committees of Inquiry proposed by the PM, and setting up their own Parliamentary Commissions to investigate controversial issues (e.g. extraordinary rendition) when the Government refuses to do so. Nor can the idea of greater democracy cut much ice when the Government is still intending to pursue the ID cards folly and, even worse, extend the 28-days detention without charge in defiance of the 800 year old habeas corpus.

And what is not in the Queen’s Speech is perhaps even more important than what is. There’s nothing about redressing the centralisation of power which is such an indictment of the current state of Britain. There’s nothing about redressing the grotesque inequality of income and wealth – nor was there is in the Pre-Budget Report a month ago. And there’s nothing about restoring the ethos of public service which has taken such a battering under Blair – indeed it’s taking a further hit currently with the huge cutbacks in BBC funding which threaten public service broadcasting. Et tu, Gordon?

Posted by Michael Meacher at 11:22 AM | Permalink

The biggest single underlying issue in British politics this summer is: how can the Government be made at least to take serious account of strongly held public opinion? Nearly 2 million people marched against the Iraq War, but the Prime Minister was not moved. We have had a national consultation on GM involving 675 meetings across the country with 37,000 questionnaires returned, 4-1 against GM, yet the Government decided to go ahead with GM crops in the UK. In the last two years the Labour Party Conference passed 2-1 majorities against PFI and foundation hospitals, but the Government immediately said it would ignore them.

With a majority in the Commons of 161, the Government won the top-up fees vote by only 5, yet immediately made clear it would disregard the depth of opposition. And now, in the face of the appalling local and Euro election results, the Prime Minister shows not a scintilla of readiness to change course over public sector reform, Europe or Iraq, or on any other issue for that matter. It is this malaise of powerlessness and resentment which is driving Labour’s misfortunes.

In the US, Government accountability is dealt with through checks and balances in the separation of powers between President and Congress. In the UK, where the Prime Minister’s writ runs from top to bottom of the Parliamentary system through strict whipping controls and patronage over appointments, can Parliamentary democracy be reinvigorated by amendment to existing powers? Clearly it can be, but it will require a sustained assertion of political will by Parliament to restore its traditional rights of accountability.

First it should assert its right to ratify top appointments. Senior Ministers, ambassadors, advisory committee chairmen, service regulators, and top policemen and military are currently appointed by the Prime Minister, and senior judges by the Lord Chancellor. Parliament should insist that all such appointees, as with Congressional hearings in the US, cannot take up office until their proposed appointment has been ratified by the appropriate Select Committee of the Commons. That would demonstrate their joint accountability, not only to the Executive, but also to the legislature. Equally, all such top appointees should be subject to the option of recall, cross-examination and report by the Select Committee where their performance and track record was seriously called into question.

That then raises how the Select Committees are constituted. At present the members are nominated by the party managers, who will want to ensure that the Government’s position is as well protected as possible. A more balanced spread of membership would be secured by applicants being voted on by secret ballot of the whole parliamentary party. There are precedents for the use of the secret ballot by the PLP in elections for the NATO Parliamentary Assembly and the Council of Europe, as well as for the Shadow Cabinet in Opposition.

Parliament also needs Select Committees with stronger powers and much increased expert research support. They should be empowered to subpoena Ministers and top officials, and to require disclosure of all necessary documents – the Attorney-General’s legal advice on the justification for the Iraq war being a recent case in point – subject to genuine national security requirements as independently assessed by the Information Commissioner. At present Parliament itself has no Legal Counsel nor the right to commission its own legal opinion That should be changed.

As the whole recent row over the use of intelligence has indicated, Parliament also needs to set up its own oversight committee on the intelligence services, reporting back direct to Parliament. And major decisions about holding the Government to account over issues of overriding national importance – for example whether to set up an independent judicial committee on the Iraq war, its membership and terms of reference – should be taken by a High-Level Parliamentary Committee selected by secret ballot of both the Commons and the Lords and perhaps including senior members of the judiciary. That should avoid any future whitewashings by the likes of Hutton or (we await to see) Butler.

Should political parties, now reduced to little more than vote-gathering and money-donating machines, have a role in policy-making? Should they, and members of the public, be able to participate between elections? I believe they unquestionably should, because the idea that democracy constitutes a single vote every 4 or 5 years, in elections where the politicians themselves try to control the agenda and where many key issues emerge for urgent decision between elections, is patently absurd. Nor is parliamentary democracy, in its present form at least, an adequate substitute when it is so dominated by patronage and whips’ discipline. Filling that void is the role for referenda.

That opens up several difficult, but manageable, questions. Who would decide when a referendum should be held? Would it be binding? What if you got an answer you didn’t like (on capital punishment, say)? What would be the interval before another referendum could be called to reverse it? Clearly the criteria for holding a referendum would have to be tightly drawn so that they were relatively rare, dependent perhaps on a petition demanding it from a given percentage of the electorate. The result would not automatically be binding, but a Government (or Prime Minister) that lost a major referendum would unquestionably have to change course to survive.

For all these reasons we now urgently need a high-powered Commission on Democracy to make detailed recommendations to open up our stifled political culture to the winds of reform and rescue it from its current asphyxiation.

Posted by Michael Meacher at 06:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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" »

Posted by Michael Meacher at 03:58 AM | Permalink

From The Guardian

Given the widespread disquiet at what is perceived as Hutton’s extraordinary lack of balance, a wider question immediately arises: how was he chosen at the outset, and on what criteria? The key requirements after all should have been rigorous independence and strict impartiality. And now will these requirements be fully met by the appointment of Lord Butler’s committee, with its rather convoluted terms of reference and its meetings been held in secret? Perhaps we should pay rather more attention to how these committees of inquiry are set up in the first place because the process by which they’re formed may (subconsciously, as Hutton would have put it) influence a good deal of the final report.

Both Lords Hutton and Butler were of course chosen by the Prime Minister acting on the advice of senior officials. In my experience in Whitehall, most Departments of State, and also No. 10, keep a voluminous catalogue of names in reserve for every kind of high-level appointment, both the so-called ‘great and the good’ as well as very many others, selected mainly by senior aides and officials and occasionally by Ministers. A brief characterisation of the qualities and experience of each name is also appended in most cases. There may or may not be comments added on the reliability of the person for particular government tasks. From this reservoir a range of potential names is selected where a key role needs to be filled, whether the chair of an important advisory body, an ambassadorial or top civil service appointment, or top posts in standing commissions. Once a short list is agreed within the Prime Minister’s inner circle, advice and recommendations are then put to him, and he makes the final selection.

This process often works satisfactorily, but occasionally it does not. An obvious example is the Widgery inquiry into the Black Sunday killings in Northern Ireland in 1972, the conclusions of which were so strongly disputed for a quarter of a century that another inquiry had to be set up, under Lord Saville, to reassess the evidence further. Similarly, Lord Denning’s judgement in the Profumo affair in 1963 that people of great eminence could not misbehave so badly appears now (and then) rather antiquated and other-worldly. But such cases of concern are not confined to learned judges conducting solo inquiries. In the grey interface between the realm of politics and the scientific expertise demanded by an increasingly technological society, very considerable effort is put in Whitehall into choosing chairpersons who, their undoubted academic and technical merit notwithstanding, can be relied upon to deliver ‘sound’ or ‘safe’ verdicts which will not embarrass the government in highly sensitive areas of policy. Their capability and integrity is not at issue; what is called into question is the rigour of their independence from Establishment influence.

Continue reading "Selecting the Selectors" »

Posted by Michael Meacher at 03:46 AM | Permalink

This article originally appeared in The Guardian

Do we have any influence over those who govern us? After two million marched against the war, the issue that has brought this to a head is of course Iraq. But it is far more pervasive than that. When Britain's sovereignty vis-à-vis Europe may be affected by the new EU constitution, should we be denied a vote on whether we assent to a potentially fundamental change? When there is overwhelming hostility among the public (and probably, on a free vote, in Parliament too) to top-up fees and foundation hospitals, how can the Government be made to re-think major policies so widely opposed?

How can the Government be prevented from going ahead with commercialisation of GM crops even though the Government's own consultation has shown public opinion decisively opposed and scientific tests have shown it would be environmentally harmful? If the Hutton Inquiry report leaves several unanswered questions about how Britain was led into the Iraq War in defiance of the available evidence, should the Prime Minister be entitled to block a wider judicial inquiry when it is his own actions that are under scrutiny? And there are many more such questions.

All these have become issues of contention because of one central fact. The centralisation of power, which has been gradually gathering pace for decades, is now more concentrated at the top than at any time for a century or more. Richard Crossman famously said 40 years ago that “the power of the prime minister has been increasing, is still increasing, and should be cut back”. It wasn't, and the process has now steadily been taken further, to the point where the big issue in Britain now is a widely held and deeply resented sense of powerlessness.

Continue reading "Why we need a new political governance" »

Posted by Michael Meacher at 03:43 AM | Permalink

The Observer

Lord Hutton will report shortly on the 'circumstances surrounding the death of Dr David Kelly', but is likely to regard as beyond his remit such key questions as how the September 2002 dossier appears to include several dishonest claims and whether the country was falsely led into war. It is crucial, if Lord Hutton feels unable to tackle these central issues, that a separate judicial inquiry is now set up to establish beyond doubt what the truth really is and what the implications are for Britain's governance.

On 10 February last year, five weeks before the war started, the Government's Joint Intelligence Committee gave its assessment that there was no evidence that Iraq had provided chemical or biological weapons to al-Qaeda, though in the event of an imminent regime collapse 'there would be a risk of transfer of such material'; in other words an attack on Iraq would increase the risk of terrorism. Tony Blair did not disclose this briefing before the war, and it only became known when the parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee released it on 11 September.

It is quite clear that throughout 2002 both Washington and London were actively seeking, contrary to intelligence assessments, evidence to justify the case for war. Four key items were deployed for this purpose. One was almost immediately exposed as plagiarised from a student thesis more than 10 years old. The other three were documents purporting to show that Iraq had been trying to buy uranium for nuclear bombs from Niger, the claim that Iraq was able to deploy WMDs within 45 minutes, and 'evidence' from a top-level Iraqi defector that Iraq had produced several tons of the deadly nerve agent VX.

Each of these raise worrying questions of credibility which require systematic investigation by an independent inquiry. However, enough of the facts are now known to draw some important conclusions.

Continue reading "The truth about WMD lies beyond Hutton" »

Posted by Michael Meacher at 04:03 AM | Permalink