A Tiny Tax Whose Time Has Come

How we can defend people’s livelihoods and futures against the savage cuts to public services the UK coalition is inflicting?

How we can fund all the development Wales needs?

How we can pay for the projects that will build a green and caring society, one that also does its bit to make our world a better place for its poorest communities wherever they are?

A Robin Hood Tax or Tobin Tax would be a good place to start. The Robin Hood tax is a tiny tax on financial transactions. It could raise billions to create jobs, to fight poverty and to combat climate change. A tax with the added advantage of reining in the kind of speculative trading – gambling, really – that plunged large chunks of the world economy into its current crisis.

Last year I was one of 1,000 parliamentarians in 30 countries who signed a declaration calling for early implement of a Robin Hood Tax, to make the financial sector – which caused the current crisis - pay a greater contribution towards safeguarding livelihoods and saving lives. In other words, making them help to turn the global crisis they caused into a global opportunity.

Since then, the support for a Robin Hood Tax has soared, bringing together some strange bedfellows.

Not too surprisingly, the TUC and many trade unions - Unison, Unite and the GMB, the NUJ, the teachers’ unions and more - see its potential to help hold the line against spiralling poverty, as do charities like Barnardo’s, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams and many churches.

Overseas development charities like Oxfam want part of the proceeds to go towards fighting climate change in the world’s poorest countries.

Global supporters include UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, Bill Gates, George Soros, Desmond Tutu.

Even the Pope is onside: the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace recommended that funds raised from it be used to help low income countries suffering the effects of the financial crisis.

There’s strong support across Europe. As you might expect, Plaid MEP Jill Evans backs it, but so does the European Parliament. Right wing leaders like French President Sarkozy and German leader Angela Merkel have been pushing it hard. The new Spanish Prime minister Mariano Rajoy has just joined them.

Amongst European leaders, the most strident opponent is David Cameron – once again on the side of the greediest bankers against the wellbeing of millions. Ed Milliband and Ed Balls once said they supported it, but have backpedalled; while many individual Labour and Lib Dem politicians and members believe a Robin Hood Tax is right, their leaders are failing to stand up to Cameron, Osborne and the banking lobby.

In a letter to the G20, 1,000 economists - including Nobel Prize winners and our own Dr Calvin Jones – argued that the financial crisis “has shown us the dangers of unregulated finance” and that it’s time “for the financial sector to give something back to society”. They went on to say:

“Even at very low rates of 0.05% or less, this tax could raise hundreds of billions of dollars annually and calm excessive speculation. The UK already levies a tax on share transactions of 0.5%, or ten times this rate, without unduly impacting on the competitiveness of the City of London. This money is urgently needed to raise revenue for global and domestic public goods such as health, education and water, and to tackle the challenge of climate change. Given the automation of payments, this tax is technically feasible. It is morally right.”

I agree with them. I’d like to see Wales come out loud and proud in favour of a Robin Hood Tax on banks, hedge funds and the rest of the financial sector to make them pay their fair share to clear up the mess they created.

Let’s have a “Coalition of the willing” in Wales, to help push for this fair and useful tax - and to show Cameron and the other Westminster politicians that defending the interests of banking’s greediest is totally unacceptable to us. That it’s simply not fair for poor people to pay the price of mistakes made by rich bankers, to die for lack of medicines or for their children to be forced out of school because of an economic crisis they did nothing to cause.

Standing for Plaid Leadership

I have decided to put my name forward for the leadership of Plaid Cymru. The next few years will present a great opportunity for Plaid to fulfil our long term ambitions and I would like to be at the helm as we enter a new chapter in our history.

Now, more than ever, a strong Plaid Cymru is needed to put the transformation of our economy at the fore of the political agenda. I have the vision, ambition and determination to do that.

More information about my campaign and platform can be found on my campaign website www.leanewood2012.com or by following me on Twitter and Facebook.

Whose side are you on?

This week presented a rare opportunity for opposition politicians to come together in the House of Commons to oppose the deeply unfair reforms of the public sector pensions. By supporting a motion laid by the SNP and Plaid Cymru which called for the UK Government to reverse unfair changes to public sector pensions, the Labour Party could have sent a clear message that this issue was more important that party politics. Labour MPs could also have sent a message to the two million or so people who stood on picket lines and marched on rallies last Wednesday that their fight was their fight and their number one priority.

Instead, Labour politicians showed that tribalism is more important than the protection of the public sector pension scheme. They took the side of the Con/Dems on Wednesday. The motion was defeated 242 to 11.

This debate was the first one to be heard in the Commons in the last year-and-a-half since pension changes were first mooted. In this time, there have been 36 opposition debates held by Labour where public sector workers and their pensions have been ignored. A significant number of Labour MPs also crossed picket lines at Westminster last week even though some vowed not to.

I was proud to visit a number of picket lines last week and march with my fellow Plaid Cymru members, including our leader Ieuan Wyn Jones, during the Cardiff rally. Labour politicians were conspicuous by their absence; a fact that did not go unnoticed by many of the people taking part in the rally. This non-committal position reflects the deep malaise their leader Ed Miliband now finds himself in by refusing to back the strikers and going as far as condemning the withdrawal of labour.

If Labour politicians cannot back the public sector workers on an issue as clear cut as the unjustified degradation of hard-earned pension rights then surely they should be asking themselves whose side are they on?

Plaid supports strikers

Tomorrow, one of the biggest days of industrial action will take place in the UK in living memory. I will stand with the many ordinary men and women who are calling for the pension schemes they signed up to and paid in to, to be honoured. It is not too much to ask for a retirement without poverty after a lifetime of work but that is exactly what is at stake if the Westminster coalition has their way with the public sector pension scheme.

This is precisely why this issue has garnered such wide-spread support, particularly from trades unions which have never previously taken part in industrial action. Refuse workers, teachers, nurses, civil servants, meals on wheels providers will all be screwed by this Westminster cabinet of millionaires. Yet if you swallowed the rhetoric, you would be forgiven for thinking that tomorrow’s strikers are greedy, self-serving and not living in the real world.

Education Secretary of State Michael Gove this week described some of the union leaders as “militants itching for a fight”; a statement rendered even more farcical by the emergence of pictures of him kneeling proudly on an NUJ picket line in the 1980s.

The Government’s lead negotiator with the trade unions is Francis Maude MP. This privileged son of a Tory MP has been hopelessly inept throughout the whole proceedings and shown an ignorance of Government policy that mystifies his appointment as the government's liaison person with the trade union movement. I'd say that it's the Westminster Coalition Government that is actually ‘itching for a fight’ with the public sector. After all, they have form when it comes to cracking down on the public sector in their brief, but incredibly destructive, 18 months in office.

In Plaid Cymru, we know whose side we are on. We recognise that public sector workers deserve to retire without facing grinding poverty after a lifetime of dedication. Most importantly, we are not afraid to declare our support for such a just cause….are you listening Ed Miliband? As a Unison member and chair of the cross-party PCS group in the Assembly, I will proudly take my place on the picket line tomorrow.

I have no doubt that moral argument is on our side. With solidarity and determination, victory will be ours too.

More for the bankers

The Westminster coalition has revealed plans today to “assist” the flagging housing market by underwriting mortgages with £400 million of tax-payers’ money. While the finer details of the plan and whether it applies to Wales are yet to be revealed, the stated aim of the 'Get Britain Building' initiative is to reduce deposits for newly built homes.

No one can deny that the construction industry is in need of a boost. That message came loud and clear last week with the launch of the Wales Construction Federation Alliance in Cardiff Bay. Housing building is undoubtedly one of the best ways to stimulate an economy. The housing charity Shelter, amongst others, has shown that for every £1 of public money spent on house-building, the economy gets £3.50 back. There is a strong imperative to provide affordable housing in Wales where social housing is more scarce than in England.

However, the latest gimmick from the Con/Dems is an ill-thought out response to these challenges. The banks, propped up with tax-payers cash have carried on their 'business as usual' with the culture of excessive pay and bonuses persisting unhindered by the mistakes of the past. With a 100% guarantee applied to their lending decisions, isn't there a big risk of mistakes repeating themselves? It was irresponsible lending in the US sub-prime mortgage market that lit the touch paper for the casino capitalism bonfire of 2008 that is still raging today. How do we know that George Osborne won't sanction even more reckless borrowing with a cast-iron guarantee to mortgage lenders? As Mervyn King said in August 2008:

"We don’t guarantee lending to other forms of borrowing; we don’t guarantee lending to manufacturing borrowing...it would be a very dangerous move to move to a situation where the government saw its major role as guaranteeing lending...why should the taxpayer take on the risk of borrowing by individual borrowers some of whom are risky it’s the lenders who should take the risk. And what we saw in the first half of 2007 was that not enough attention was paid to monitoring the riskiness of that lending.”

Furthermore, wrapped up in today’s announcement is an offer of a heavy discount on council houses – worth up to 50 per cent – in a bid to persuade people to buy their homes. This will further exacerbate the scarcity of social housing and increase waiting lists. When little or no social housing building is taking place, this is an irresponsible and ideological move by the Con/Dem coalition. Thatcher’s right-to-buy scheme of the 1980s may have had its supporters but the heavy discounts, allied with a failure to replenish housing stock, laid the seeds for the shortage of social housing we have today.

We need a major social housing programme to provide the much-needed shot in the arm for the construction industry and to shorten the creaking housing waiting lists of local authorities across the UK. This would provide an asset for the public who will own the housing at the end of the investment. Under today's announced plans there will no tangible pay-back to the tax-payer. Mortgage lenders, bankers and private house builders will be the main beneficiaries.

The Westminster Coalition is keen to trumpet at every opportunity how their interest rates on borrowing are very low because of its austerity programme (or socially regressive and ideological war on the public sector and people on the lowest incomes, depending on how you look at it). Why not use these low borrowing rates to carry out a bold and ambitious social housing programme that will give people homes, jobs and help to build up the public asset base? The answer is ideological.

End all wars

This week in the Senedd the Conservatives held a debate calling on the government to plan a commemoration of the start of world war one in 2014. This was my contribution to the debate, from the Assembly's Record of Proceedings:

Leanne Wood: This debate is timely, given that there will be many families remembering past and present wars, and the loss of their loved ones at remembrance services throughout the country this coming Sunday. Those who have lost their lives in the conflicts of the twentieth century, and the more recent ones this century, will all be remembered. As they are remembered, I hope that there will also be time for reflection on the war that sparked remembrance Sunday. That war, which ended on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1918, started almost 100 years ago. Let us not forget that that was meant to be the war to end all wars.

The last known survivor of that war was the late Harry Patch. I will take some time to remember Harry’s words; words that, in my view, powerfully sum up the dark reality of what war is all about. When he was 107, Harry Patch said

'We’ve had 87 years to think what war is. To me, it is a licence to go out and murder. Why should the British government call me up and take me out to a battlefield to shoot a man I never knew, whose language I couldn’t speak. All those lives lost for a war finished over a table. Where’s the sense in that?’

Later, he said

'Too many died, war isn’t worth one life’

He said that war was 'calculated and condoned slaughter of human beings’. I know from my involvement in the recently formed Justice Unions all-party group, which I have helped to set up, that the wars ongoing today are creating big problems that are impacting on families and communities up and down our country. Physical injuries are visible, but mental problems and, in particular, post-traumatic stress disorder, is all too often not dealt with. In many cases, it is not even diagnosed. Work carried out by the corresponding Justice Union group in Westminster and research carried out by my Plaid Cymru colleauge Elfyn Llwyd has uncovered the vast numbers of ex-service personnel with post-traumatic stress disorder in the prison system or living on the streets. Elfyn Llwyd has led the way in campaigning for better services for mentally and physically injured service personnel. We are hoping that the Wales all-party group can do something similar at a Welsh level. For everyone who has contributed to this debate today, and who is interested in being involved in that all party group, please let me know.

In remebering the first world war, and all other wars, I hope that we can also remember all people affected: soldiers and civilians on both sides. We must learn the lessons from the past wars? Will we heed the words of Harry Patch?

To conclude, I support the amendment put forward in the name of Jocelyn Davies, which calls for an exploration of the idea of setting up a peace institute. I ask people to look at what peace institutes do in other countries: in Norway, Finland, Catalunya, Ireland and Germany. We have the powers to do this here. A peace institute could be an important educational resource and a vehicle for bringing together peace-related research; for example, on conflict resolution and arms conversion. The majority of peace institutes elsewhere in the world are self-financing, so it need not be something that requires any major financial commitment. All of the existing peace institutes enjoy academic independence. The setting up of a Welsh peace institute, working with other peace institutes around the world, would be a good way for Wales to commemorate the first world war, by making a contribution to a project that aims, finally, to end all wars.

Occupy Cardiff

Today, the Occupy movement comes to Wales. From 2pm today, protestors will gather at the Aneurin Bevan Staute in Queen Street in Cardiff to be the voice of the 99%.

In her book Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein shows how the world's rich and powerful, the 1%, love a crisis.

"When people are panicked and desperate and no one seems to know what to do, that is the ideal time to push through their wish list of pro-corporate policies: privatizing education and social security, slashing public services, getting rid of the last constraints on corporate power. Amidst the economic crisis, this is happening the world over."

Speaking at Occupy Wall Street, Naomi said:

"today everyone can see that the system is deeply unjust and careening out of control. Unfettered greed has trashed the global economy. And it is trashing the natural world as well. We are overfishing our oceans, polluting our water with fracking and deepwater drilling, turning to the dirtiest forms of energy on the planet...The new normal is serial disasters: economic and ecological...

The task of our time is to turn this around: to challenge this false scarcity. To insist that we can afford to build a decent, inclusive society—while at the same time, respect the real limits to what the earth can take...

I am talking about changing the underlying values that govern our society. That is hard to fit into a single media-friendly demand, and it’s also hard to figure out how to do it. But it is no less urgent for being difficult."

Thanks Naomi. That covers it.