It is bizarre that the Labour Party, or at least Ed Balls, is now tying himself up in such contortions to avoid renationalisation of the railways at any cost when the polls constantly show 70-80% of the electorate, which must include a very large number of Tories, is demanding just that. Is the Labour Party, […]
Posts under ‘Environment’
Investors beware unburnable carbon
Jun 20th, 2014 by Michael Meacher.An LSE report ‘Unburnable Carbon 2013′ has produced some startling conclusions – for investors, not just climate change policy-makers. What they show is that burning known reserves of fossil fuels is incompatible with the climate change targets which governments have committed themselves to meet, so that investors would be wise to discount both the value […]
Share:
Support the French rail strikers
Jun 17th, 2014 by Tom Gill.The French rail strike – now in its sixth day — is a pain. Nobody likes seeing their train cancelled. High school exams are being disrupted too. But why are the railway workers on strike? They are protesting against the railway reforms of the Government of President Francois Hollande and PM Manuel Valls. The Government claims […]
Share:
Why the Tories want Fracking
Jun 6th, 2014 by Phil Burton-Cartledge.While the bulk of the commentariat have picked up on the recall plans in yesterday’s Queen’s speech, the government’s single-minded pursuit of fracking has caused less excitement. Philip Pearson of the TUC sums it up: Removing the responsibility for companies to notify individual landowners of their intention to frack. Underground access: proposing changes to trespass laws […]
Share:
The sharks are circling Scottish Water
Jun 4th, 2014 by Dave Watson.Scottish Water is a public corporation that delivers a publicly owned water and sewerage service to the people of Scotland, unlike the privatised service in the rest of the UK. It’s a model that has served Scotland well, delivering clean fresh Scottish water to homes and businesses and removing sewage along some 60,000 miles of […]
Share:
Fracking may be coming to somewhere near you – without your permission
May 22nd, 2014 by Michael Meacher.It is scarcely credible that the government is including in the Queen’s Speech on 4 June the right for the shale industry to drill on your land without your consent. Such a gross infringement of the rights of private property would be unthinkable, especially for a Tory government, were it not to secure a bonanza […]
Share:
Nuclear gets a glowing review
May 16th, 2014 by Michael Meacher.One major reason why UK governments fail to advance the drive towards renewables, with which Britain is uniquely endowed, is the colossal burden of the nuclear legacy. The nuclear clean-up now swallows up about tw0-thirds of the entire DECC budget. Sellafield alone costs £1.7bn a year, almost as much as the nearly £2bn spend supporting […]
Share:
State ownership of rail is only the start
May 6th, 2014 by Michael Meacher.As the 31 Labour parliamentary candidates are demanding in their letter to Miliband, the case for returning rail to the public sector after the botched privatisation of 1996 is overwhelming. Private ownership has produced for the UK the highest fares in Europe, extensive overcrowding on commuter lines because of giving priority to dividends for shareholders over […]
Share:
Public ownership: the solution to rail misery
May 4th, 2014 by Newsdesk.The following letter appeared in the Observer today calling for public ownership of the railways. It has been signed by 31 Labour candidates in target seats who represent a broad spectrum of political views across the party. We reproduce it in full here. Rail fares in Britain are contributing to the cost-of-living crisis, with season […]
Share:
The dreams peddled by the oil and gas industries turn out to be fantasies
May 3rd, 2014 by Michael Meacher.The one thing Osborne loves to tell us, constantly, is that the future of energy production lies in fracking and that he will do everything in his power to maximise shale drilling in Britain, even to the extent of allowing drilling to be carried out on private land without permission. However this oasis of future […]
