The real root problem with regulating the banks is that the politicians are hand in glove with them. The Tories don’t even want to regulate the finance sector so long as it provides them with half their annual income year after year, not just the banks themselves, but the hedge fund billionaires as well. Worse […]
Osborne stirs up more shit in which to bury himself in
Oct 5th, 2015 by Michael Meacher.Quietly and surreptitiously Osborne is marking out his pitch for the leadership. The trouble is, it’s thoroughly bad pitch. By denigrating opponents of privatisation he has set his face against the 70% of the population who earnestly want rail re-nationalised, a proportion so large that it must include nearly half who’re Tories. Osborne must assume […]
Share:
Despite claims of a recovery, UK productivity is stagnant
Oct 2nd, 2015 by Michael Meacher.The basic reason why UK wage growth has been virtually flat for a decade, at a level still 6% below pre-2008-9 levels, is Osborne’s relentless squeeze on benefits, tax credits, low pay and public expenditure. But there are two other very important contributory causes. One is that the proportion of our national income which we […]
Share:
Osborne is beginning to make some serious mistakes
Sep 29th, 2015 by Michael Meacher.Osborne has always had an overweening arrogance as he plots his path to the premiership before 2020. But his calculation is beginning to desert him. It is extraordinary that he has spent a week sucking up to China, accompanied by six ministers in his retinue, when everyone else is fleeing the country as being in […]
Share:
Can Mandelson actively advocating ousting the new leader remain a Labour member?
Sep 28th, 2015 by Michael Meacher.It is one thing for those who opposed the election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader to make their concerns and objections known and to argue for them within the Big Tent which is the Labour Party. It is quite another thing, when a new leader has just been elected with 60% of the vote (higher […]
Share:
Labour should be cautious of adopting Osborne’s fiscal charter
Sep 27th, 2015 by Michael Meacher.There is now a strange air of unreality about the handling of the deficit. Osborne has made it centrepiece of his political narrative, although his prime motivation is not to reduce the deficit, but to shrink the State and the deficit gives him the pretext to do it. Even if it was his prime objective, […]
Share:
Corbyn strikes a rich vein with taxes on the very rich
Sep 20th, 2015 by Michael Meacher.Jeremy Corbyn’s latest move – to give reassurance that Labour will campaign to remain in Europe and then, if elected in 2020, reverse from the inside any diminution of workers’ rights which Cameron may have secured – is a smart move when it is linked with pushing through the £50bn financial transactions tax on almost […]
Share:
Labour’s policy on EU must force Cameron to address public aspirations and concerns
Sep 17th, 2015 by Michael Meacher.It is fairly clear, even among Europhiles who want to stay in, what most people object to about the current state of the EU and what they would like to see changed. The membership fee is uncomfortably large, some £11bn every year. Free movement of labour works well between countries of similar living standards, but […]
Share:
One of Jez’s first tasks must be to frame his project, and to de-frame Osborne’s
Sep 16th, 2015 by Michael Meacher.If there is one single reason why Labour lost the election, it’s that Osborne realised the critical importance of framing his project in a way that made it acceptable in the eyes of a majority of the electorate. The fact that it was a string of lies didn’t matter as long as people believed it. […]
Share:
Corbyn forces the Tories to take him seriously
Sep 14th, 2015 by Michael Meacher.After all the slurs about unelectability, the Tories have very quickly changed their tune and acknowledged that they are now facing a very real threat that they’ve not encountered for the last 30 years. At a meeting of the political cabinet last Tuesday they decided to focus on the idea that they offer a better […]
