Former Labour minister Michael Meacher, pictured in 2012. Dr David Lowry remembers him as a champion of green policies, frustrated by a system that undermined them. Photograph: Murdo Macleod for the Guardian
Your obituary of Michael Meacher (22 October) underplays his significant contribution to the promotion of genuinely green policies.
I worked as a specialist researcher for Michael in the nine months running up to the 1997 general election landslide win for Labour, preparing policy papers as he advanced the cause of sustainability as shadow environmental protection secretary.
Tony Blair chose to break Labour party rules in denying Michael his rightful place as a cabinet minister. Nonetheless, as one of several junior ministers in 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 the full environment secretary.
He spent an unusually long time – six years – as a junior minister in the same post, and gradually grew tired of ministers, departmental officials and advisory panels undermining true environmental policies, as Blair’s No 10 interfered over policies on genetic modification and nuclear energy, on which he was extremely sceptical.
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 of taxpayers’ money. Blair won, but Meacher was right, as the plant has proved a technical failure and economic disaster.
After that, Michael decided his own advisers could not be trusted as objective (as his friend and political fellow traveller on the left, Tony Benn, had done in the late 1970s when energy secretary, again over dodgy nuclear advice), and he created a 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 providing him. Time has proved our independent advice significantly more accurate, as the nuclear waste disposal strategy finally collapsed too. Time will show Michael Meacher was the best environment secretary we never had.
Dr David Lowry
Cambridge
• Your obituary on Michael Meacher and news report on the tributes paid to him failed to mention his many contributions to the letters page: always sharp, often controversial, but invariably worth reading.
Dr Peter B Baker
Prestwood, Buckinghamshire
• Is it not supremely ironic that Michael Meacher (who 30 years ago played himself as a campaigning environmentalist in Troy Kennedy Martin’s much admired BBC drama Edge of Darkness) should die on the day when Her Majesty’s government announced it would rekindle the UK’s commitment to nuclear power by doing a deal with a country that has a dubious commitment to human rights and a serious track record in international cybercrime?
Ian Kenway
Cwmdu, Powys
• Join the debate – email guardian.letters@theguardian.com
