I worked as a specialist researcher for Michael Meacher
in the nine months running up to the 1997 General Election landslide win for labour,
preparing policy papers as Michael advanced the g cause of sustainability as
shadow environmental protection secretary. As you rightly record Tony Blair
chose to break Labour Party rules in denying Michael his rightful place as a Cabinet minister.
Nonetheless, as one of several junior minister sin John Prescott’s super-ministry
covering Environment, Transport and regional government, Michael de facto led the
environmental brief for several years until Margaret Beckett was appointed
as full Environment Secretary.
He spent un unusually long time- six years – as a junior
minister in the same post, and gradually grew tired of both ministers and
departmental officials and advisory panels undermining true environmental policies, as
Blair’s Number 10 interfered over policies on genetic modification and nuclear energy,
on which he was extremely skeptical.
Indeed, barely days
after the world’s greatest terrorist event, the attacks on 9/11 in the US, he had a
stand up fight in the Environment
Department with Mrs Beckett, who was pushing through the Blair-backed plan to
trade globally with nuclear explosives
in opening a plutonium-fuels
fabrication plant at Sellafield, costing several billion pounds. Blair won, but
Meacher was right, as the plant has proved a technical failure and economic
disaster.
After that, Michael decided his own advisors could not be
trusted as objective (as his friend and political fellow traveller on the left,Tony
Benn had done in the late1970s), again over dodgy nuclear advice), and he created
shadow advice panel on radioactive waste, including myself, which did its best
to present him with more objective evidence-based advice than his own
departmental officials were presenting
him.
Time has proved our independent advice significantly more
accurate, as the nuclear waste disposal strategy finally collapsed too.
Time will show Michael Meacher the best Environment Secretary
we never had.
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