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Michael Meacher identifies four global fronts on which Labour should go to the country in 2010

THE next general election should not be fought on the basis of Gordon Brown versus David Cameron – different personalities, similar policies. Nor should the election be about who is best placed to navigate us back to the pre-credit crunch days and a cycle of unlimited growth. Those days have gone for good. Unfortunately, what the 2010 election be about is unlikely to attract the attention of either main party.

There isn’t just one crisis – the global financial meltdown. There are three others, too – all converging at roughly the same time.

Global oil production, on which the whole world economy depends, is reaching its peak. However, the fall in demand precipitated by the global recession will provide a few years’ relief from the coming squeeze.

Profound consequences of global warming look likely within a generation. As the scientific summit in Copenhagen warned recently, global warming is on the point of overstepping the threshold which could unleash irreversible climate change. Yet the world’s governments continue to respond with glacial slowness.

Meanwhile, global stagnation will only end if new worldwide sources of demand, other than the recent speculative financial bubbles, can be found to absorb the growing surplus which capitalist productivity generates. The most likely source is a redistribution of demand towards the developing world. This would require fundamental shifts in geopolitics and economic power.

None of these four challenges look like being met – or even addressed – any time soon.

The G20 meeting in London may have agreed some useful generalities, but it is no 2009 equivalent of 1944’s Bretton Woods. That required three years’ preparation. And the differences exposed between the United States and the European Union, and within the EU between France, Germany and Britain, made substantive policy conclusions difficult. It is unrealistic to expect an improved international financial architecture cobbled up over weeks to deal effectively with the depth of malfeasance revealed over securitisation, financial exotica, off-shoring and mega asset bubbles.

What is needed is far more fundamental. Investment banks must be split off from traditional commercial banks. Capital ratios and reserve requirements are needed for the banks to keep credit creation within the bounds of public policy. Financial derivatives should be prohibited unless specifically sanctioned by a revamped and much more robust regulatory authority. Light-touch City regulation, which cast a blind eye over so many of the excesses of the past three decades, must end. Credit-rating agencies need to be made statutorily independent. The damaging bonus culture should be stopped and the trans-national traffic in the exploitation of tax havens stamped out. On the latter, even without a new international architecture, Britain should be taking the lead over the Channel Islands, Isle of Man, Cayman Islands and other overseas territories.

A package such as this is needed to prevent a repetition of financial collapse. It should be the centrepiece of Labour’s next manifesto, although the present silence on the matter does not bode well.

Nor is peak oil – the point at which the world achieves maximum annual production before it declines – ever discussed publicly by governments. Yet it is widely believed by oil industry experts that this will be reached within the next five years, if it hasn’t happened already. Since oil over the past 150 years has underpinned a six-fold increase in the population of the world and is mainly responsible for the enormous industrial and technological productivity of the modern age, its virtual disappearance within the next few decades is sure to mean a dramatic alteration of the parameters of the international economy and human civilisation itself.

The struggle for the remaining repositories of oil – in the Caspian basin and West Africa, as well as the Middle East – has dominated geopolitics and particularly US policy over the past decade, not least in prompting the invasion of Iraq. What should now be concentrating minds in the run-up to the general election in Britain is how we can best escape the coming energy crunch. Neither unconventional oil from the Canadian tar sands (which is over-costly to develop and a turbo-warming nightmare for the climate), nor gas imports (vulnerable to unreliable sources of supply), nor nuclear power (which will be restricted by shortages of high-grade ore if there is a global nuclear renaissance) offer a way out of the

cul-de-sac.

Only a massive worldwide development of renewable sources of energy can offer energy security and climate stability. Yet both the main parties in Britain are too tied into the fossil fuel and nuclear lobbies to blaze the trail for which the world is crying out.

The climate change crunch is not that far away. Continuing global deforestation, the increasingly rapid melting of the Antarctic and Greenland ice-sheets and the Siberian permafrost, the growing acidification and warming of the oceans which could, in time, release the billions of tonnes of methane hydrates onto the seabed, and the falter in the Gulf Stream all portend, not a gradual linear upward trend in global warming, but the risk of a sudden and drastic change which may be unstoppable.

All the political parties recognise the threat of overpowering climate change. But Britain cannot exert the leadership it seeks in climate change negotiations if its record does not match its aspirations. Tripling airport capacity including the third runway at Heathrow, building new coal power stations without carbon capture and storage, trailing at the bottom of the EU renewables league, and going slow on the introduction of household carbon allowances cannot possibly send out the message that this country is a world leader.

Since this is arguably the biggest issue of all, it should be high on the political agenda for the election – if not at the top. The Government is right to stress that a low-carbon, clean-energy economy is a major way to fight the recession, with a capacity to increase green jobs from 800,000 to 1.2 million. But we need to see the evidence – at least the first signs of it – if the policy is to mobilise widespread public backing.

All three of these challenges are massive enough. But there remains a fourth. What is to be the new engine of global growth when the current meltdown finally burns itself out?

After the Second World War, the colossal reconstruction fully absorbed capital’s investment-seeking surplus. But the faltering of net private fixed investment in the early 1970s marked the end of this era.

Three factors were then brought into play to counter the process of relative stagnation. One was the introduction of new technologies, although the widespread use of computers and the internet did not have the same transformative influence of the car in a previous era. The second factor has been soaring military spending. In the case of the US, this exceeded $1 trillion a year in 2008. A third factor in the past decade has been the “financialisation” of the economy – the ballooning of an artificial financially-driven bubble to maintain the level of demand needed, driven by excessively high returns from the trade in financial derivatives.

So what now? This, too, should be a central topic for electoral debate. The obvious means of generating a level of demand necessary to pull the world out of deep recession is a global redistribution of spending power from the industrialised to the developing nations. That requires a new world order, as do the other three challenges. Perhaps there are other ideas. If so, we need to hear about them now.

Michael Meacher is Labour MP for Oldham West and Royton