Wednesday, February 26, 2014

Future News (Robin Hood Tax)

Check out this great video "The Robin Hood Tax campaign takes a cheeky look at what the world might be like in 2024, with a tax which tackles extreme poverty, climate change and cuts to public services. Starring Andrew Lincoln (The Walking Dead), Bill Nighy (Love Actually), Clémence Poésy (Harry Potter), Heike Makatsch (The Book Thief) and Javier Cámara (Bad Education)"

Below is part of a speech I made recently in support of a "Robin Hood (or Tobin) Tax".

"The basic idea behind the Robin Hood tax is very, very simple. It is proposed that an extremely small tax or levy is placed on each share bought or sold of 0.1% - or for a derivative transaction 0.01% of its value.

In a similar way that stamp duty is already put on buying shares in the UK. The primary reason that many people support such a Robin Hood tax is that it could raise billions of pounds from the banks and financial services industry, to help repair the damage caused by them in 2007.

A form of poetic justice on those who at best were reckless - and at worse - fraudulent – and who very nearly destroyed our economy.

This is why it is called the Robin Hood Tax "To take from the rich to give to the poor".

There is one other important reason. To add to the confusion over names, this idea of a very small levy on such transactions was actually originally proposed before the financial crisis - not as a way to provide much needed revenue but as a means to discourage unstable speculative high volume trading on the financial markets by the Nobel prize winner for Economics, James Tobin. 

A tax no matter how small would have damped down such damaging trading. Ironically if we had a Tobin tax before the crash in 2007 it may well have prevented it happening in the first place or at least had made it much less worse.

Don't believe for a nano second the propaganda being put out that this will in some way weaken our financial services and will make them want to leave London for some unstable and corrupt dictatorship abroad.

I was pleased that Ed Balls, our shadow chancellor, announced at Labour Party Conference his support and that of the Party.

So please support the Robin Hood tax  and send a message to the financial markets that not only should they help clear up the message they created in the first place but also what our pension funds, our life insurance and our saving plans want is their money to be invested in long term sustainable growth, not short term risky speculation by spivs and charlatans".

No comments: