The sound and fury that attended the launch last week of the Robin Hood Tax campaign – the near obligatory Richard Curtis video, Goldman Sachs’ clumsy attempt at vote rigging – shouldn’t obscure the very serious intent of the campaign.
We face a stark choice. Not just in Britain, but globally.
On the one hand, there is global warming, global poverty and the prospect of massive, rightwing-driven cuts to public services resulting in a ‘double dip’ recession.
On its own, maintaining public spending isn’t the answer to all of these problems. But part of the alternative is the application of innovative financing arrangements such as a financial transactions tax. And this is what the Robin Hood Tax represents.
The climate change talks in Copenhagen faced many problems. But one of the most intractable was the unmet need for climate change funding. Gordon Brown’s proposal of an immediate emergency fund was the most concrete and positive intervention the developed world had to offer and we know we must do more to meet the needs of developing and emerging economies. Sums of up to $100 billion a year have been identified, and if we do not put more money on the table for adaptation and mitigation, we will not rescue the climate change talks this year either.
The picture on global poverty is no better. This year the UN will hold a major summit to review progress towards the Millennium Development Goals. We have just five more years to reach the targets set ten years ago, and we are way off track on many of the eight goals such as getting all children into school, ending maternal and child mortality and combating HIV/AIDS, malaria and TB.
My colleague Douglas Alexander has proposed that the UN and the developed world adopt a clear programme of action to meet the MDGs. Without substantial increases in overseas aid, that action programme won’t be realised and millions of women and children will die, hundreds of thousands will slip further into poverty and another generation will miss out on the schooling they need. The richest countries in the world, the G8, need to find at least $50 billion a year just to match the commitments they made at the 2005 Gleneagles summit when the Make Poverty History campaign was at its peak.
And here at home – not that climate change or even global poverty don’t affect us too – we face the aftermath of the global recession. The courageous and successful action that Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling took to reboot the economy and bail out the banks minimised the pain of the recession and have returned us to growth. That’s little comfort if you’ve lost your job or your house, and face the prospect of a wage freeze, further job losses or huge cuts in the public services on which so many depend. We must not abandon the gains the Labour government has achieved in terms of more health workers, more teachers and more police.
Some of the gap in the public finances will only be bridged by returning growth, which is why George Osborne’s proposals for immediate and swingeing cuts in public services would be economic suicide. But as Alistair Darling points out, we do need to take some action to restore the health of the public finances.
Gordon Brown has rightly called on his fellow G20 leaders – who did so much to get the world out of recession over the last 12 months – to address the causes of the crisis as well as its consequences. Global agreement on regulation of bank bonuses, hedge funds and other risk-taking, and taxing speculative trading in currency and shares – as well as the more exotic financial products – is vital to make sure we don’t go back to business as usual.
So we come at last to the solution proposed by the huge alliance of trade unions, environmental groups, churches and charities that is the Robin Hood Tax campaign. A small tax on wholesale financial transactions that could produce real change for everyone.
Leading economists have backed the idea. Today, the TUC, Christian Aid and several tax justice campaigns publish their evidence to the IMF study on the issue. It is a realistic, hard-headed solution to the question progressives are always asked: where will the money come from?
Given the need, given the elegant simplicity of the proposed solution, and given the popular feeling that speculation in the finance sector caused the crisis but has done nothing to end it, it is perhaps not surprising how broad the Robin Hood Tax campaign is. Despite the attempts of rightwing commentators and bloggers to label the campaign as ‘the usual suspects’, the charge is difficult to sustain.
The TUC, Oxfam and Greenpeace are of course involved – it would be news if they weren’t. But the support of the Salvation Army and the RSPB suggests that this is a policy with huge and broad popular support.
Global poverty, climate change and public services need our urgent attention. Robin Hood might be about to do one final service to global social justice.
Peter Hain is secretary of state for Wales