Published 09/08/19 3:08 pm
We're hiring!
Could you be our next Robin?
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.
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
The SDGs need real solutions, not failed ideas
Instead of the same old failed ideas, we need real solutions to the SDGs funding gap more urgently than ever. Public services – whether in high or low income countries – are best funded through public money, which can be spent where need is greatest rather than chasing profit. These solutions include Global Solidarity Levies – alongside cracking down on huge global companies that dodge paying taxes in low income countries, and wiping out unpayable debts for the lowest income countries.
Yet over the last decade, politicians in high income countries have tried to fob us off with failed ideas. Their favourite is the so-called ‘Billions to Trillions’ approach, which lets high income country governments off the hook by relying on huge global companies to voluntarily fill the SDGs funding gap.
They claim that if these companies are offered profit guarantees, backed up by $100 billion from the aid budget, they will invest one trillion dollars into essential public services in low income countries. But this approach has been called ‘mathematical gymnastics’ – experts suggest this sort of private investment could only double the aid budget at best.
Click here to read our report: Billions to Trillions: A Reality Check
More and more evidence – from both high and low income countries – also shows that public services such as hospitals and roads do not generate big profits. Guarantees then leave governments on the hook for sky-high payments decades to come.
In Lesotho, annual payments for one hospital built through a ‘Public Private Partnership’ (PPP) ended up costing half the country’s entire health budget. In 2018, Chancellor Philip Hammond vowed not to sign another ‘Private Finance Initiative’ (PFI) deal for UK public services for this reason, and the French Court of Auditors recommended the strategy be abandoned in 2017.
And private funding also neglects the most vulnerable.
The ‘Billions to Trillions’ approach ignores the evidence that low income countries are often left worse off, wastes scarce aid money, and doesn’t reach those most in need. And every day spent talking about ‘Billions to Trillions’ is a day wasted, when real solutions to fill the SDGs funding gap are being ignored. It’s time for governments to get real, and force those who can best afford to pay a bit more, to do so.
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