SMART Solutions for BIG Problems

Published 09/08/19   3:08 pm

We're hiring!

Hi all,

We at Stamp Out Poverty are hiring for a Digital Campaigns and Communications Officer to help us get our message out there!

If you think that could be you, please send your CV and a cover letter to office@robinhoodtax.org.uk by 23:59 on Monday 26th August.

Please ensure that your cover letter addresses the points raised in the Person Specification.

When applying, please start your email subject ‘Application for DC&CO – <your name>’

Find out more >>> Job Description

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Job Title: Digital Campaigns and Communications Officer

Organisation: Stamp Out Poverty

Address: N1, London

Salary: £27,000

Contract: Full-Time 

Closing Date: 1st September at 23:59

Interview Date: Friday 6 September

Start Date: ASAP

The role

The Digital Campaigns and Communications Officer will have at least two years experience in the digital aspects of the post. The post holder will contribute to the design of campaign strategy and tactics, coordinate with allies, and implement all aspects of campaigns while working collaboratively with a top-notch team. The post holder will be responsible for supporter engagement, the organisation’s online and offline presence and feeding into strategy.

We are looking for someone with excellent communication and interpersonal skills, with a proven ability to lead projects and manage competing priorities under pressure. You will have good knowledge and experience of digital communications techniques and experience of delivering online and offline advocacy campaigns.  This is a challenging and varied role, ideal for someone with a passion for social justice.

Who we are

Stamp Out Poverty (SOP) campaigns for smart solutions to big problems. We are best-known campaign for the Robin Hood Tax (RHT) Campaign, where we call for an extra taxation of the financial sector, which could raise billions to fight poverty and climate change at home and abroad. It is a campaign with fairness at its heart that looks to turn the global economic crisis into an opportunity for the world. It’s a fast paced and popular campaign combining longer-term proactive work with reactive responses to opportunities that arise.

We also help coordinate the international Change Finance coalition, demanding a stable, democratic financial system that delivers for people and planet. SOP’s other campaigns include the Climate Damages Tax (pushing for taxation of the fossil fuel industry to pay for a just transition and to help those facing destruction from a changing climate) as well as challenging the privatisation of aid.

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Exposing the Trillion Dollar Lie

NEW REPORT: Billions to Trillions: A Reality Check exposes the lie that private investors will fill the SDGs funding gap

From the UN’s report telling us we have 12 (now 11) years to drastically reduce our emissions, to the school strikes and Extinction Rebellion, we know that a lot more money is needed to fund our response to climate change, as well as other urgent issues. We also know that those who did the least to cause mass inequality and climate breakdown often feel their effects the hardest.

That’s why it’s vital that we keep our promises to fund the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) – 17 goals agreed by all 193 countries of the UN to end poverty and tackle inequality, conflict and climate change.

But richer countries are failing to cough up the money they’ve committed to. In fact, over the last two years, aid to the world’s poorest countries has actually been cut. This is the opposite direction we need to be going in. Instead, these richer governments are increasingly turning towards the private sector to fill the funding gap. But our recent research has found that this won’t raise nearly enough money to meet our commitments to the SDGs – and could actually do real harm.

So while the protests took place all over the UK, we at Stamp Out Poverty were at the UN in New York, launching our new report, Billions to Trillions: A Reality Check, to expose the lie that banks and private investors hold the key to financing the fight against inequality and climate change.

Politicians in rich countries, and organisations like the World Bank, have been pushing the idea that trillions of dollars of private investment could soon flood into developing countries, to build hospitals, schools, power plants and roads and achieve the SDGs. This ‘Billions to Trillions’ approach claims that all developing country governments need to do is sign contracts guaranteeing huge profits to the banks and private investors, and the money will start rolling in.

Local communities and campaigning groups all around the world – as well as developing country governments – have been exposing these dodgy deals for what they are: a repackaged version of the failed ‘PFI’ contracts that failed so spectacularly in the UK and all across Europe. The examples are piling up of these rip-off contracts leaving developing country governments paying through the nose for shoddy hospitals and schools.

It’s tough to get politicians to give up on ‘Billions to Trillions’. Saying that private investors will fill the SDGs funding gap lets them off the hook. So we did a bit of digging – and found out that if developing countries stick to promising realistic profits, banks and private investors will only ever stump up ONE TENTH of the cash needed to fill the SDG funding gap

We refuse to let politicians fob us off with the lie that private investors will solve everything, when real solutions are needed. Those solutions are clear, and urgent: debt relief, action on tax avoidance, increased aid, and new global solidarity taxes on those most able to pay, like the Robin Hood Tax and the Climate Damages Tax.

Read the report: Billions to Trillions: A Reality Check

Climate Damages Tax Campaign launched

Watch the Climate Damages Tax launch here!

The Climate Damages Tax campaign launch was held in London on April 16th, with Caroline Lucas MP (Green Party Co-Leader), Barry Gardiner MP (Shadow Minister for International Climate Change), Foreign Minister for Vanuatu Ralph Regenvanu MP, Avinash Persaud (Head of Economic Reconstruction of Dominica post-Hurricane Maria) and Emele Duituturaga of the Pacific Islands Associations of NGOs.

L-R: Ralph Regenvanu MP (Minister of Foreign Affairs, Vanuatu), Emele Duituturaga (Executive Director, Pacific Island Association of NGOs), Avinash Persaud (Head of Economic Reconstruction of Dominica, post Hurricane Maria), Barry Gardiner MP (Shadow Minister for International Climate Change), Caroline Lucas MP (Green Party Co-Leader)

 

Caroline Lucas MP pledges the Green Party’s support for a Climate Damages Tax

 

“Fossil fuel companies must become part of the solution they have created. We need to ask how much, and who pays?” – Barry Gardiner at the Climate Damages Tax launch

 

“Hurricane damages can be measured in dollars and cents but also in broken lives. The climate wars have started. This is the front line” – Avinash Persaud at the Climate Damages Tax launch

 

“Last week Vanuatu declared a state of emergency yet again. We do not have the resources to respond. We need commitment from our more developed partners, those who caused climate change” Ralph Regenvanu MP at the launch of the Climate Damages Tax

 

“Vanuatu produces 0.0016% of world climate emissions and yet is disproportionately feeling the negative effects. We just can’t afford what’s happening in our country” – Ralph Regenvanu MP at the Climate Damages Tax launch

 

“Where is the justice that those of us who are the least responsible for climate change loss and damage bear the greatest burden? Enough is enough” – Emele Duituturaga at the Climate Damages Tax launch

Find out more about the Climate Damages Tax

Published 16/10/18   5:03 pm

The Crash that Shook the World

Some of the world’s poorest countries were hit hard by the financial crash and are still struggling to recover. For us to really fight poverty and the causes of climate breakdown, we need to transform our financial system – to make it work for people and planet.

 

On September 15th – the ten year anniversary of the start of the banking crash – Stamp Out Poverty and the Robin Hood Tax (alongside unions and other campaigning organisations) launched the 10 Years On campaign in the heart of the City of London. We demanded that a decade after the crash and austerity, we need a financial system that works for everyone.

Ten Years On in the UK…

In the UK, banks were bailed out and we were sold out. Since 2010, we’ve seen our hospitals and schools cut by £50bn – the same amount that bankers from the Big Four UK banks made in bonuses over the same period. Austerity hit those least responsible hard, with little impact on the system or people that caused the crash.

…And around the world

This is even truer for developing countries, where the global recession caused by bankers in the UK and other rich countries hit money available for public spending hard. In 2009-10, low income countries lost out on $65bn from tax – this could have paid for essential public services like health and education. Some countries are still struggling to recover from the impact of the crisis and money for these things are needed now.

The crisis also saw donor countries turn inwards, away from global development issues. Wealthier governments continue to fail in meeting their international commitments to poorer countries, with contributions stalling at 0.3%, less than half the 0.7% promised We recently saw politicians meet in New York to discuss the Sustainable Development Goals – a series of targets to combat (among other things) poverty, climate breakdown and inequality. But not enough is being done to turn the tide on these pressing issues.

Why the urgency?

Right now, 650 million people live in extreme poverty, 800 million people are malnourished and almost 60 million children miss out on primary school around the world.

The Sustainable Development goals aim to change all this. As it stands, between $3 and $11 trillion per year will need to be raised to make them a reality. Some of this can be paid for out of taxes in developing countries, foreign investment, and aid from donor countries. But even after this, there remains a huge funding gap – $2.5 billion a year.

What can we do about it?

We need to make sure that those who can afford to help, make a fair contribution to reaching these goals. A Robin Hood Tax could go a long way. Globally, a tax on financial transactions – those carried out largely by banks, not people – could raise up to $500 billion every year. And we know they work – existing taxes like this already raise $30 billion a year. And we know they can help people – France brought in a financial transactions tax in 2013 and ruled that 50% of it must be spent on development aid and climate change.

We could do more.

Current proposals are cause for hope, particularly in Europe. Six months of the EU FTT – which could raise €22 billion a year and is in the later stages of talks – could plug the global funding gaps for childhood immunisation, malaria protection, and mother and child malnutrition, helping save over 7,000 children’s lives in developing countries every day, with money left over to send 90 million children to school a year.

And if we’re able to push this out across major financial capitals everywhere, it wouldn’t just help raise money. It would also make our financial system a lot safer. A Robin Hood Tax can help prevent the damaging types of trading that led to the financial crisis in 2008.

On the tenth anniversary of the crash, we can’t afford not to change our financial system for good.

 

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When will the world’s polluters start paying for their mess?

Ministers from climate vulnerable countries support for the call for a Climate Damages Tax to fill the growing need for loss and damage finance – Joseph Isaac, Minister of the Environment for Dominica; Ronny Jumeau, Ambassador to the UN and US for Seychelles; Anisul Islam Mahmud, Minister of the Environment, Bangladesh; and Ralph Regevanu, Minster for Foreign Affairs, Vanuatu.

Read their op-ed here.