In less than three weeks, the UN will hold a review summit on the Millennium Development Goals (set in 2000, they are due to be achieved in 2015 so we ought to be two thirds of the way there – and we aren’t). Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg and International Development Secretary of State Andrew Mitchell will be attending the event for the UK – and the TUC has joined with many NGOs to call on them to support a concrete plan of action to reach the MDGs. One key issue is how to pay for the measures necessary to reach those goals, and financial transactions taxes (FTTs) would make a big difference. But it won’t just be unions and NGOs calling for a Robin Hood Tax in New York. The Leading Group – 60 nations including the UK – are calling for a currency transaction levy (a compenent part of an FTT) at the UN summit. French foreign minister Bernard Kouchner, Japanese foreign minister Katsuya Okada and Belgian international development minister Charles Michel are leading the charge.

   Filed under: International development, Transactions tax | No Comments »

Peter Boone has a paper in the Summer issue of CentrePiece which argues for restricting or redirecting aid to programmes such as education or health which can guarantee outputs. In part, he is arguing in line with the stated objective of the current DFID Secretary of State, Andrew Mitchell – to change DFID’s expenditure pattern so that it focuses less on inputs (eg the amount spent on teacher training) and more on outputs (eg the number of children educated to a certain level). Read more »

   Filed under: International development | 1 Comment »

One of the aspects of the coalition agreement that the TUC unambiguously welcomed was the plan to increase overseas aid spending to the UN target of 0.7% of GNI, and to put that commitment into law.

It wasn’t a surprising commitment because it had been the policy of both the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats during the election (and Labour, for that matter). But it was welcome nonetheless because of the right-wing arguments against the commitment, which, it has to be admitted, leaves DFID as the only Government department not just with a ring-fenced budget but one which is guaranteed to grow.

However, despite pre-legislative scrutiny in the dying months of the last Parliament, there was no reference to such legislation in the Queen’s Speech, just a continued commitment to expenditure. Some in the development community smelled a rat. Read more »

   Filed under: International development, Public spending | 1 Comment »

At the International AIDS Conference in Vienna this week, Michel Sidibe, Executive Director of UNAIDS, the joint UN programme on HIV/AIDS, has called for a Robin Hood Tax to raise money for causes like the eradication of HIV/AIDS. He said:

“The financial crisis should not be an excuse to flat-line or scale back. In fact, it is an opportunity for new sources of funding, like a levy on global financial transactions – a Robin Hood tax.”

   Filed under: International development, Transactions tax | 1 Comment »

David Cameron went to Toronto last weekend promising an end to Gordon Brown style new initiatives at every G20 summit, and in a feat of post-modernist irony, chose to mark this with a new initiative of his own: he demanded that the G20 should follow up on past decisions and make sure they got implemented. Au contraire, as they say in nearby Quebec. What the Canadian G20 came up with was the most vacuous, indecisive and unfocused G20 declaration in the body’s short two year history. The Washington Post’s Harold Schneider summed up the different positions adopted by governments on their way to the meeting. Read more »

   Filed under: Environment, G20, International development, Transactions tax | 3 Comments »

Workplace violence is, rightly, a big issue for trade unionists. And at Nautilus International, the union for maritime professionals, we are having to deal with one of the most extreme forms of workplace violence – piracy.

It seems incredible that in the 21^st century our members are exposed on a daily basis to a crime that most people think was consigned to the history books in the 17^th century. But the sad reality is that last year saw a total of 410 officially recorded attacks on merchant ships in piracy incidents and more than 1,100 incidents of violent attacks against their crews – including the use of guns, knives and even rocket-propelled grenades. Read more »

   Filed under: Human rights, International development, Transport | 2 Comments »

The appalling loss of life on the Gaza aid flotilla yesterday (TUC statement here) raises many questions. Like Amnesty International and Oxfam, the TUC, ETUC and ITUC have condemned the assault launched by the Israeli military, and called for an enquiry. But the bigger question is: what can the international community do about the Gaza blockade? Is it time for a Berlin-style airlift? Read more »

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The decision of President Mutharika of Malawi to pardon Tiwonge Chimbalanga and Steven Monjeza, convicted of gross indecency after celebrating their engagement in December, is a welcome step forward. Hopefully, it was, as he claimed, because he believed it was the right thing to do. That would be better than the other possible explanation, which was that he caved in to pressure from outside Malawi.

Not that I’m against such pressure – the TUC supported the picket outside the Malawian High Commission today, and we were glad to see the British Government make its position clear before and after the pardon (although it would have been better to respect Tiwonge’s transgender status more by not referring to her as “Mr”). But it would be nice to believe that this decision was a turn in the direction of human rights and equality in a world where LGBT communities face oppression, hostility and worse – from Iran to Jamaica, as well as in Africa. Read more »

   Filed under: Equality, International development | Comments Off

Immigration has been addressed rather worryingly in the early stages of Labour’s leadership debate. It seems that the contestants are in danger of repeating or worse exaggerating the errors of New Labour’s capitulation to right-wing ideas on migration - being tough on migration rather than tough on the reasons that migration causes problems, like workplace exploitation and the scarcity of decent, cheap housing.

So it’s not surprising that the liberally-minded should claim that IPPR’s new research on global migration – Development on the Move – proves that tougher immigration controls won’t be effective in reducing migration (a claim which is only a minor point in IPPR’s own press release, but which has been the main finding to be promoted). I have only been able to access the summary so far, but it seems to me that, while it proves how useful migration is for migrants’ living standards (wealth, health and education – all good things in themselves), it doesn’t prove that tougher immigration controls will fail to control the scale of migration because it doesn’t distinguish between what is generally referred to as legal and illegal migration (albeit this is a rather crude distinction). Read more »

   Filed under: International development, Migration | 2 Comments »

They’re at it again. No sooner has Conservative Andrew Mitchell taken up his post as International Development Secretary than right wingers are urging him to cut funding to unions. A right wing think-tanker, welcoming his decision to stop spending money on promoting awareness and understanding of international development in the UK, used two really sensible union projects as examples of why this sort of expenditure was ripe for cutting. Read more »

   Filed under: International development | 1 Comment »

There is a great deal on Europe in the agreement reached by the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, suggesting that Europe still has the power to work a toxic effect on the Tories. And what the coalition agreement says is pretty much a Conservative walkover. Joining the Euro in this Parliament is ruled out in the document not once, but twice. And most of the rest is about refusing to let more powers be transferred to Europe, although there is no reference to repatriation of powers, which may be the one bit of ‘old liberalism’ in the Europe section.

But there is a bizarre commitment to limit the application of the Working Time Directive in the UK, which is presumably mere window dressing – any reduction in what we have now (which is no more than the Directive demands) would almost certainly leave the Government open to infraction proceedings for failing to implement the Directive sufficiently. The only provision that exceeds the irreducible legal minimum is Labour’s extension of annual leave from the 4 weeks in the Directive to 5.6 weeks so that anyone who has to work bank holidays can take other days off in lieu. It would be illiberal in the extreme (and very unpopular with ordinary people) to take that extra annual leave away – so is that really what they mean? Read more »

   Filed under: Election, Europe, International development, Migration, Politics, Transactions tax, Working time | 1 Comment »

Omnipresent poster boy for thoughtful and iconoclastic Conservatives Philip Blond has backed the Robin Hood Tax. He did so at a debate tonight hosted by Unicef UK and Tory progressives Bright Blue. He argued that it would be a small pro-free market levy for social purposes, and would build “the externality of the real economy” into short-term damaging speculation. Read more »

   Filed under: International development, Tax | 4 Comments »