Michael Meacher MP

The latest media take on this election is that some major subterranean disturbance has occurred deep below the political surface, only nobody will be sure what it is until too late.   It really isn’t that difficult, if only our over-paid and often rather lazy media would look in the right direction and not avert their eyes from what is painfully obvious.   Sadly they won’t do that because it challenges their, as well as the politicians’, comfort zone.

It isn’t of course one mysterious thing that’s gone wrong, but a steady build-up in disillusionments.   And it’s pretty clear what they are: (more…)

     ‘A future fair for all’ promised Gordon Brown as an election winner.   What he neglected to say was that this is impossible, given the tilt in our underlying social, economic and legal systems, as recent events have clearly revealed:

*  If you’re an ordinary person and borrow far more than you can repay, you’re bankrupted and left, if not penniless, severely straitened.   If you’re a banker, you’re fully bailed-out by the State (everyone else) and neither you not a single other colleague penalised.

*  If you steal £1,000 of other people’s cash, you wind up in prison.   If you’re a financier and steal £1,000,000 of other people’s savings, you may still wind up in the Lords.

*  If you burgle someone else’s house, you will be prosecuted.   If you burgle a company’s assets through insider dealing, the chances of prosecution are minute – though the FSA did announce a fortnight ago that it had adopted a new strategy of ‘credible deterrence’ (meaning presumably that hitherto it had pursued a strategy of non-credible deterrence).  

*  Under the 2001 Financial Services and Markets Act the FSA ”must consider the international mobility of the financial business” before enforcing the laws, i.e. put the interests of the City and of UK competitiveness before the requirements of the law.   Imagine the furore if the police were told to consider the mobility of tourists and the loss of the tourist trade before they arrested drunken foreigners outside a nightclub.  

     Before we ever get near a future fair for all, some fundamental heavy-lifting will have to be done first to stop the laws cracking down hard on the mere peccadillos of ordinary citizens while blandly disregarding the massive depredations of the bankers, financiers and the City.

The election ought to be a heaven-sent opportunity to expose the rottenness of the system we have and to demand of the political parties what they plan to do to end the fundamental injustice in the way our society and economy work.  at present.   Of course it won’t even be mentioned, but it ought to be centre-stage.

Take strike 1.   The BA walk-out was prompted by an arbitrary decision taken without consultation by the chief executive to cut all cabin crews by at least one member.   The union offered to make alternative cuts yielding the same savings, but he unilaterally rejected it.   BA staff are then vilified as as bringing back another ‘winter of discontent’.   Similarly the signalmen and maintenance workers on the railways who protest that sacking 1500 will endanger safety are told they are ‘holding the nation to ransom’.   The Government condemned the strike as unnecessary and damaging.

Then take strike 2.   Having behaved with mind-boggling greed, arrogance and recklessness which threatened to capsize the economy and nearly caused a global breakdown, the bankers downed tools, froze the credit markets, refused to lend to businesses, and without a shred of shame demanded that the Government put at their disposal to save themselves and all their ill-gotten toxic assets a sum equal to the country’s entire GDP.     And the Government surrendered, gave them everything they wanted, and didn’t even insist on any reforms to prevent this enormous crime against society ever happening again.

Yet it’s even worse than that.   Workers have been forced by de-industrialisation ( a million jobs lost in manufacturing in the last decade), globalisation (the threat of industry moving overseas) and Thatcherite labour laws (unrepealed by New Labour) now to accept wage freezes, pay cuts or job losses.   Banks on the other hand, having had handed out to them unlimited loans at zero interest, have made a meteoric recovery.   The result is that while incomes (including the middle class) have risen £2bn over the last year, profits have spiralled 12 times faster to an increase of £24bn.

A capitalist system as pungently unjust as this should be the central election issue.   But that requires a new party – how about a Labour Party?