All parties are in favour of rebalancing the deeply lop-sided and grossly imbalanced British economy, but it isn’t happening. It’s true that Jaguar Land Rover achieved a 14% year-on-year increase in sales in the first half of this year and that the company (owned by the Indian conglomerate Tata) is one of the UK’s largest […]
Posts under ‘Industry’
Rebalancing the economy will never happen without dedicated government input
Aug 5th, 2014 by Michael Meacher.
Fall in construction output shows Osborne “recovery” has lost momentum
Jul 15th, 2014 by Michael Meacher.The latest economic figures revealing a shock fall in construction output of more than 1% between April and May this year are alarming, but might be brushed off as an isolated quirk if all the other evidence pointed the other way. But it doesn’t. The construction slowdown is matched by an unexpected slump in factory […]
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Training and the ‘forgotten 50%’
Jul 14th, 2014 by Grahame Morris.For too long there has been an assumption that the best path to success for young people is via the conventional academic route. That kind of thinking is now out of date. For a 14 year old following the traditional academic route there is a clear route through GCSEs to A’ levels and on to […]
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Capital strike: global corporations hoard cash and refuse to invest
Jul 9th, 2014 by Michael Burke.The world’s largest companies are hoarding cash and cutting productive investment at the same time. The Financial Times reports a survey from one leading ratings’ agency, Standard & Poor’s, which shows that the 2,000 largest private firms globally are sitting on a cash mountain of $4.5 trillion, which is approximately double the size of Britain’s annual GDP. […]
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Why media conglomerates should be broken up
Jul 8th, 2014 by Michael Meacher.The hacking trials aren’t even half the issue. The hard, unavoidable fact remains that the power of the Murdoch press – the real unspoken stain behind the Brooks-Coulson trials – is undiminished and has still not been broken. It is best illustrated by the run-up of events to the long-planned Murdoch campaign to take over […]
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The poor in Britain are among worst-off in Western Europe
Jun 17th, 2014 by Michael Meacher.Osborne’s austerity is not only unnecessary and gratuitously cruel in punishing the poor for the sins of ultra-rich bankers, but it has now emerged has hit the poorest in Britain far harder than in any comparable state in the European Union. hat has now been revealed from OECD data is that poor people in the […]
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A royal whimper when we need to supplant 35 years of Tory and pseudo-Tory rule
Jun 6th, 2014 by Michael Meacher.The Queen’s Speech, drafted in deathlessly trite prose by civil servants and special advisers, should – and occasionally does – rise to the challenge of setting the national agenda. This one was flat all the way through. There was nothing about countering austerity, allowing hard-working people to share in the recovery with a proper wage […]
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Do we want a society based on work and innovation or on rent?
Jun 2nd, 2014 by Michael Meacher.The Office of National Statistics data published last month found that the richest 1%in the UK owned as much wealth as the poorest 55%. Oxfam, even more poignantly, calculated that 5 billionaire families controlled the same level of wealth as 20% of the population (i.e. 13 million people). In fact these figures almost certainly greatly […]
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UK Uncut targets Vodaphone in new wave of tax dodging protests
May 16th, 2014 by Jon Lansman.The announcement that anti-austerity direct action group UK Uncut is to target Vodaphone in a new wave of protests follows wide anger at news of Gary Barlow’s tax dodge. The campaign expects hundreds to take action against the mobile phone company in a “national day of action” on 14 June in protest against their tax dodging activities. UK Uncut, backed by […]
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Might AstraZeneca break the capitalist drug that money always wins?
May 13th, 2014 by Michael Meacher.Dare one say it, but the tide is slowly but perceptibly moving in AstraZeneca’s direction. A week ago, despite Pfizer being untrustworthy with flimsy pledges on jobs and R&D which could be ‘adjusted’ if ‘circumstances significantly change’ and despite the deal being more about US tax arbitrage than the British national interest, it looked a […]
