Michael Meacher MP

The debate between the 3 parties on the environment was a showpiece of falsehood and dissembling:

Q1  Would a Tory Government build another runway in the South-East?   Tory answer: No.   The truth: They could still wriggle past this by expanding a smaller airport like Luton.

Q2  The pledge to cut electricity emissions cannot be met without new nuclear power stations.   The truth: the UK is required by a mandatory EU regulation to achieve at least 40% electricity generation from renewable sources of energy by 2020, and that would make the building of more nuclear stations superfluous.

Q3  The Tories state they will build new nuclear reactors without public subsidy.   The truth: None of the big electricity generators will build any more nuclear without some (large)  hidden or indirect subsidy from the taxpayer.

Q4  The Tories say they favour an expansion in renewables.   The truth: Dozens and dozens of applications for wind farms have been turned down by Tory Councils.

Q5   The Tories accept that climate change is caused by man-made emissions.   The truth: A majority of Tory Parliamentary candidates have made clear they do not accept this or that the Government needs to do anything urgently about tackling climate disaster.

A tory candidate said to me the other day that she had no idea what Cameron would actually do if the tories won.    I think we can help her.   Ignoring all the bucket-loads of political point-scoring, there are two unimpeachable sources of hard evidence.   One is what is now happening in Ireland where the Government is implementing a virtual carbon copy of tory economic policy.   Indeed the last Irish budget was hailed by the Daily Telegraph as a role model for the British Chancellor.

The former tory Scottish Secretary, Lord Forsyth, who is now chair of Cameron’s policy commission on tax, recently announced to the Conservative Intelligence (a bit of an oxymoron) conference that “It seems to me that we need to be able to reduce the overall level of public expenditure over a parliament by about £75bn (a year)”.   Now £75bn – just 1 year’s proposed cuts according to Forsyth – amounts to about 5% of the UK’s GDP.   That is exactly what the Irish have just delivered – 3 slash-and–burn budgets over the last 18 months which cut their GDP by 5%.   So what has happened?

The unemployment rate in the Irish Republic is now 12.5% and could well rise on the current trend to over 15% before the slump is over.   The rapid meltdown in the private sector has been exacerbated, not mitigated – not surprisingly when the prospects of profitability for private investment are so bleak, but contrary to current tory claims that rapid cutting of the deficit will produce a turnaround faster.   Mass mortgage defaults caused by unemployment and falling house prices are now forecast as the next stage of the Irish economic collapse.

All this is just in year 1.   Forsyth is recommending his tory Etonian friends to administer this poison per year for 5 years, which would cut UK public spending by a total of £375bn or 25% of GDP over the whole period.   That is almost unimaginable – it would amount to half of total current government spending at the present time!   But once again that is exactly what the Irish Government now intends to do, shrinking the Irish State by no less than 25% within less than half a decade.   Just think of what has happened in Ireland in the last year, multiply that by 5, and you will have some idea of what a Cameron Government is threatening to inflict on the UK. (more…)