Michael Meacher MP

This election has really been a disaster for the Tories.   If they can’t win an election in the event of a financial meltdown and deep economic recession, a highly unpopular Prime Minister, the MPs’ expenses scandal, and a widespread feeling that New Labour had run out of steam, they never will.   Cameron should now be hung out to dry in his own party, and probably will be.

They needed 324 seats (since Sinn Fein won’t take up at Westminster the 4 seats they won) to gain an overall majority.   They got only 306, and with the 9 DUP they can must 315 – 9 short.   Of course the Tories will do their utmost to try to get a deal from the LibDems, but it is very difficult to see how they can manage it.

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One month to go, and the main issues so far seem to be safeguarding the economic recovery, immigration, and whether exempting half or more of employees from the 1% rise in insurance contributions at a cost of some £7bn is a good idea or not.   Yet that is not what the real arguments should be about.

Neither party is addressing the central issue of whether deep cuts (‘deeper than under Margaret Thatcher’) are needed at all to bring down the deficit if the rich (the top 10% and particularly the top 3%) are made to pay their way through increased taxes, reduced allowances and tax breaks, and the stopping of artificial tax avoidance, and if economic growth picks up anywhere near as fast as the Government is predicting.

Neither party is offering policies to tackle directly the economic disaster of 2.5 million jobless through a public sector-led job creation programme rather than a range of minor tax incentives to business which will leave unemployment far higher for far longer.

Neither party will face up to the banks, whose bail-out and the recession it generated has increased Britain’s national debt to over £73obn so far and who have used the money overwhelmingly to stuff their own balances, by forcing them instead to lend to businesses and homeowners starved of credit and thus to cut unemployment and strengthen the recovery.

Neither party is mentioning the biggest social indictment in Britain today, – the collapse of house-building to its lowest level since 1922 and the failure over the last decade to build more than 300 Council houses a year (half a house per constituency) when there are 1.8 million households on Council waiting lists.

Neither party is offering any prospect of serious banking reform which will prevent a recurrence of the worst financial crisis for 80 years, namely the splitting off of casino investment banks from retail banks, the prohibition or tight regulation of toxic derivatives, and the downsizing of gargantuan banks that are ‘too big to fail’.

Neither party is offering any policies to eliminate unacceptable inequality which is now greater than at any time in the last century and which now leaves top executives with incomes 100 times higher than the average worker, and will not even introduce a High Pay Commission to regulate the grotesque excesses at the top of the income scale.

If all the big issues are being sidestepped, what’s the point of an election?