What should the UK government be doing to protect people from the impacts of the cost-of-living crisis, both in the UK and around the world, to improve public services and to help tackle the household debt crisis?

Nearly ten million people are heavily in debt in the UK. We are in a personal debt crisis. Rent debt, credit cards, and utility bills have all piled up £2.4 billion owed in energy debt alone. Bad jobs, low wages, and the lack of a proper safety net pushed many people in to debt, and the cost of living crisis has supercharged it.

Additionally, the UK has a role in the debts of some of the 54 countries currently in debt crisis. This is not an accident. For centuries, powerful governments, institutions and corporations have used debt to control and plunder the resources of countries in the global south for their own gain. Debt Justice is a part of a global movement to end unjust debt and the poverty and inequality it perpetuates. Only together can we build a fair economy that serves people and the planet.

Presented by:

- Adrienne Roberts - Senior Lecturer in the Department of Politics at the University of Manchester. She specializes in feminist international political economy with a particular focus on the gendered relations of finance, debt, development, and trade.

- Heidi Chow - Executive Director of Debt Justice. She was a campaigner at Global Justice Now for 13 years, challenging the power and politics of inequality and poverty both in the UK and globally.

The New Thinking Series is a series of discussions in the House of Commons, hosted by John McDonnell MP and Claim the Future, which present innovative ideas to shake up the status quo. 

The last decade has seen wages and benefits cut or frozen while the assets and incomes of the rich have grown hugely, with our tax system guaranteeing the rising wealth of the super-rich in particular.

UK private wealth has been growing substantially over time. There is currently no comprehensive tax on ownership of wealth in the UK, but as with other countries there are many taxes which relate to wealth. 

This event will discuss proposals for Wealth Taxes; a Financial Transaction Tax (FTT); and more transformative tax measures to tackle today's rampant inequality and economic crises. 

The Wealth Tax Commission recommends a one-off wealth tax on high-wealth couples would pay at 1% a year for five years – raising  £260billion. A Financial Transaction Tax (FTT) - a super tax levied on the £8 trillion-a-day financial markets could be a significant part of a just taxation system

Presented by:

Arun Advani - Associate Professor in Warwick University’s Economics Department, a Research Fellow at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, a Visiting Fellow at the International Inequalities Institute, and a Commissioner at the Wealth Tax Commission.

Keval Bharadia - A political economist specialising in transformational approaches to development justice. Keval has consulted for international NGOs including Oxfam, Christian Aid and Stamp Out Poverty.

As was requested during the session we are including a link to Keval Bharadia's report and talk, where you can find the figures mentioned and more infomation on Financial Transaction Taxes and fair taxation policies. 

We are also sharing a link to the Wealth Tax commission mentioned during Arun Advani's presentation and an intestesting Tax Simulator Tool which shows how much revenue could be raised from reforming the taxation of wealth.

The New Thinking Series is a series of discussions in the House of Commons, hosted by John McDonnell MP and Claim the Future, which present innovative ideas to shake up the status quo. 

Featured image John McDonnell speaking as Shadow Chancellor at the Community Wealth Building conference in Preston on 8th February 2018. Photo credit Sophie Brown under Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Please note: this session also contained a visual presentations of the graphs and stats to back up Professor Danny Dorling's arguments. We suggest listening to the podcast with the aide of the slides that you can view here. 

In this episode Professor Danny Dorling discusses the wide range of inequalities in family incomes and other key measures, and how these have changed over time, using social statistics, graphs and charts to highlight the extent of the crisis. 

When there was last a similarly rapid rise in prices, in the 1970s, the UK was one of the most equitable of European countries by income: what will a cost-of-living crisis mean now that we have become one of the most unequal countries? And could one of the implications of the crisis be to help begin to reduce income and wealth inequalities in future? 

With contributions from John McDonnell and Ian Byrne MP.

About Danny Dorling: 

Danny is a British social geographer and Halford Mackinder Professor of Geography, University of Oxford. He has lived all his life in England. In his own words - to try to counter this potentially myopic world view, in 2006 Danny started working with a group of researchers on a project to remap the world to show who has most and least. His work concerns issues of housing, health, employment, education and poverty and he has published more than a dozen books on social inequalities in Britain, on issues of housing, health, employment, education and poverty.

The New Thinking Series is a series of discussions in the House of Commons, which present innovative ideas to shake up the status quo.