Paul Sellers

Nearly 60% of British children who fall below the poverty line live in households where at least one adult is in work. Children growing up in poor households are more likely to have poor health, to perform badly at school, to become teenage parents, and to come into early contact with the police.

This costs us all in many ways. Shamefully, we also have the largest gender pay gap in the EU, and two thirds of low paid workers are women, meaning poverty in the UK has a female face. Thousands of people are known not to be receiving even the minimum wage of £5.80. And yet poverty experts report that a single adult, working full time, needs to earn at least £6.88 an hour to reach the most basic weekly standard of living; and much more in cities like London.

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Today’s Friday film comes from the Fair Pay Network, a coalition of 15 organisations (including the TUC), looking to raise  awareness of the issue of poverty pay during the run up to the election.

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Owen Tudor

In what must have been one of the swiftest pieces of legislation ever to reach the statute books, the House of Lords yesterday approved the Debt Relief (Developing Countries) Act, which had completed its Commons stages just the day before. This was the Act which bans unscrupulous ‘vulture’ funds from buying up developing country debt at rock bottom prices and then suing the country in UK courts to get the debt back out of aid money given to those countries by DFID and others.

It was originally a private members bill, but an anonymous Conservative MP shouted it down at a crucial stage last month. Only public pressure forced the major parties to agree to fast track the measure, which will now become law. This is a great step forward for developing countries saddled with huge debts, a major win for the TUC-backed Jubilee Debt Coalition. And it also demonstrates that a lot of the time things take to happen is unnecessary delay – why can’t sensible, simple measure like this be done all the time?

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Posting on Left Foot Forward, Richard and Nicola have undertaken an analysis of ONS statistics, refuting the Daily Express’ claim today that 98% of new jobs in the UK have been taken by migrant workers.

They show that when all jobs in the UK are considered, broken down by nationality not by country of birth, 50.3% of the jobs created since 1997 have been taken by UK nationals (around 1,375,000 positions) and that employment rates for UK nationals remain at the same level they were in 1997 – despite the sharpest global downturn since the 1920s.

You can read the full post on Left Foot Forward.

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Ben Moxham

As if our financial Sheriffs of Nottingham didn’t have enough bad press, a new report shows that Africa may have lost $1 trillion US dollars in illicit flows to western financial institutions over the past four decades. The report – Illicit Financial Flows from Africa: Hidden Resource for Development – goes even further, stating that given the hazy nature of the data available, the true scale of this capital stampede might be as much as $1.8 trillion US dollars.

Is this just corrupt leaders buying Premier League football clubs and leaving their people destitute? According to the report by the think tank, Global Financial Integrity, only three percent of this total is due to the corruption of government officials, with a further 30-35% coming from crime. That leaves a staggering 60-65% due to, “the proceeds of commercial tax evasion, mainly through trade mispricing”.

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Owen Tudor

The Financial Times (FT) reports this morning (Monday) that Gordon Brown says support for a global bank levy is growing, with the British, French and German governments signed up, and the US already on course for its own version. It’s good that governments seem committed to “making the banks pay for the crisis” as one IMF official put it.

But as the FT’s John Plender says, a global bank levy won’t raise anywhere near enough to pay for the full costs of the crisis. As Pierre Habbard of the Trade Union Advisory Committee to the OECD has calculated, Governments need at least $624 billion a year to fund public sector deficits, action on climate change and achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).   That’s precisely why we need the Robin Hood Tax: unlike a global bank levy, that would get us much further towards paying for those costs of the crisis which have been borne by ordinary taxpayers (or could still be borne in public sector cuts).

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What better way to celebrate a bank holiday than with another Richard Curtis campaign video about bankers? This one has Ben Kingsley running into a bunch of Robin Hoodies played by whatever the collective nouns is for young film & TV stars. More on the campaign behind it at www.robinhoodtax.org.uk

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