Today’s big issues are private power and inequality. The Government must tackle both, says Michael Meacher

AS THE so-called vision thing raises its head again, it is ironic, that Britain’s political parties are jostling ever closer together. Over the past 30 years the contours of political space have been reconstructed, leaving the main parties fighting over the centre and tracts of the outer landscape isolated. A vision that matches our contemporary political needs will not be created until that deserted territory is convincingly reoccupied.

Modern Britain has three distinct classes. The first comprises those dependent on benefits, some 17 million people, plus the marginally employed scraping by on bottom-level wages, intermittent work ,or temporary part-time or agency jobs. They number approximately five million. This is a class characterised by chronic economic insecurity, with incomes fluctuating below £250 a week.

The second class encompasses the majority of the population clustered around the national average income of £420 a week, from skilled manual workers through technical, clerical, administrative grades to lower managerial and professional jobs. Their employment is generally secure, their incomes range from £250-800 a week and they add up to about 32 million people.

The third class contains the well-off and the rich. It includes senior managers, directors, top professionals and financiers. There are around six million people whose incomes average over £1,000 a week, with a lifestyle often demonstrating status, power and wealth. Within this small class is the key sub-set of the super-rich representing some 0.1 per cent of the population whose annual incomes are millions. This is where the real power is concentrated.

The main parties claim that they are focused on the centre ground, also referred to as Middle England. Yet their actions and policies suggest they are more fixated on the interests and concerns of the dominant class, leaving more than half the population effectively disenfranchised and unrepresented.

This lop-sided political framework is responsible for the meagreness of the vision that is such a depressing aspect our political culture. The dominant ideology is the neo-liberal economic agenda of current Western capitalism – privatisation, deregulation, globalisation, so-called flexible labour markets and unabashed inequality. These are the emblems and instruments of the super-rich class and, so long as our politicians assiduously court this basic philosophy, there can be no meaningful vision.

It is time to address the unmet needs and unrealised aspirations of the majority. That means championing causes that have become taboo or marginalised subjects. The first is the distribution of power, which is now held more unequally than at any time since the 1930s. Essentially, Britain is subject to private deals secretly undertaken between Number 10 Downing Street and business leaders in industry, finance and the media, with the security services playing a much larger role behind the scenes than is commonly recognised. The past three decades, in particular, have seen power increasingly concentrated in the hands of the largest corporations and the Prime Minister, leaving Parliament and the Cabinet increasingly sidelined. Far from being closely regulated in the public interest, big business has increasingly harnessed state power for its own commercial interests against those of the wider community. Recent examples of this include the failure to regulate unhealthy food advertising despite the dangerous growth of obesity, the halting of the investigation into corruption allegations against BAE and the relaxation of the gaming laws to permit a flood of gambling casinos.

The checks and balances against the arbitrary use of power have all but collapsed. Civil liberties have been drastically eroded. The introduction of national identity cards and increased detention without charge are still being mooted.

Workers who have been in their job less than two years can be arbitrarily dismissed without any rights, while temporary and agency workers remain an exploited underclass. Accountability or redress against alleged misdemeanours by police, judges, banks, private utilities and big corporations is almost non-existent.
Powerlessness is widely felt to be endemic throughout society. It will require an awful lot more than focus groups or citizens’ juries to change this.

The second scandal shaming our country is the inequality which has reached grotesque levels. People on the national minimum are now paid £200 a week. Someone at the top of the one the 100 FTSE companies receives £55,290 a week – that’s 276 times more.

With private equity excesses, capital and business taxation the lowest for a century, and direct and indirect taxation highly regressive, we are back to the income-polarised class system of the Edwardian era.
There will be no vision to excite political action unless the unfettered greed of private power is brought to heel. This might involve a pay commission established to set down guidelines, backed by tax sanctions, for what is a reasonable range of pay from top to bottom, with incentives consistently and fairly applied.

In all large and medium-sized organisations, representatives of all the main grades – from the boardroom to the cleaners – could, at an annual meeting, have to justify the pay claims they are making at the expense of potential pay increases for other grades. And if most people think this is right, implementing it could inspire a vision of real fairness unmatched by all the current rhetoric.

Third, in order to redress the slide into privatised power and money, we need to return to the high ideals of public service. Putting some of the largest healthcare corporations in the United States in charge of commissioning the bulk of services in the NHS and spreading privately-sponsored academies throughout the education system has much more to do with market dogma and business lobbying than with improving performance.

Equally, cutting council house-building to just 200 a year (it was 14,000 even in Margaret Thatcher’s last year in power), insisting on owner occupation as the keystone for action when a quarter of the population can never afford it, privatising the probation service and other parts of the criminal justice system, and outsourcing local government to private companies are all undermining the whole ideal of public service. Yet the accountability, equity, universality, professionalism and altruism of public service underpin the best of British society. Now is the time for a counter-revolution.

Class division is everywhere in Britain today. Achieving these three goals would address it. A fourth goal – making the world safe and sustainable for our children – is an overriding aim and would inspire just about everyone.

Unfortunately, once again the vested interests of the powerful have a dominant influence, which explains the preference given to tripling airport capacity, promoting a third runway at Heathrow, undermining the European Union’s renewable energy targets, cancelling a requirement on the top 1,000 companies to report annually on their carbon emissions and deferring household carbon allowances.

However, the fight against engulfing climate change is so imperative that we must rush to transform the global economy into a non-fossil fuels civilisation as far as we can. A government that displayed world leadership here, in action not just rhetoric, could have a positive and overwhelming political appeal. Are we ready to act?

Michael Meacher is Labour MP for Oldham West and Royton