David Cameron is a lone voice among the big five in opposing the tax. He told Hollande in Washington that an FTT would do nothing to stimulate growth which is staggering for a Prime Minister who has presided over the VAT increase , the pasty tax, the caravan tax… Apparently taxes on ordinary people are fine, but taxes on Cameron’s friends and funders in the City of London are unacceptable!

But in any case, he is wrong. The European Commission’s latest impact assessment suggests that, while the tax itself could reduce growth by 0.004% a year, if the revenues raised were re-invested in the economy, European growth would be raised by 0.2% to 0.4% – which may not be huge but it would bring the UK out of the recession that David Cameron’s government have plunged us back into. Independent estimates of the impact both of the revenue and the changes in market behaviour (a Robin Hood Tax would reduce the incentive to gaamble and speculate, and therefore encourage more long-term investment in infrastructure and manufacturing) suggest an FTT would produce even more growth than that.

The European Parliament was voting on a report from its Economic and Monetary Affairs Committee about the European Commission’s draft directive on FTT, although it is only advisory as the Parliament does not have control over tax policy. The report recognised that countries like the UK might not join in with the first wave of implementing the tax, and urged a smaller group of EU countries to get on with implementation regardless. It also proposed exempting pension fund investments, and extending measures to tackle tax evasion and tax avoidance.

Once again the G8 have committed to promoting growth and jobs as their “imperative”, but they also commit “to implement fiscal consolidation” which is precisely what has plunged at least 9 EU countries (and maybe more) into recession. They commit to keeping Greece in the Eurozone while demanding it implement policies which its recent election suggests are the main impulse for Greece to leave. Such contradictions abound in such a short statement, which is also remarkably long on non-specifics like “structural reforms”, usually code for taking workers’ rights away – but strangely that’s not what they ever admit to.

So the slow puncture of the global economy will continue, and electorates will continue to be told that more and more cuts are the answer even as those cuts produce fewer job opportunities, more unemployment and lower wages. European electorates are beginning to show a courage that their leaders lack, however, and eventually, the leaders will have to follow their lead.

“Support for human rights is in our core national interest and deep in our DNA as a nation. But our ability to promote freedom and democracy is strengthened by a strong economy and a global role. Foreign policy is not something that exists in a vacuum. … It is not the plaything or pastime of Ministers, to be channelled into utopian schemes to remake the world.”

That was it. No mention of the Ruggie Principles, no mention of ethical sourcing, no mention of corporate social responsibility, compliance with the OECD guidelines on multinational enterprises, ILO core conventions on workers’ rights… It’s just business, as a mafia boss would say about butchering his brother.

Actually, I think the Foreign Secretary does believe deeply and genuinely in human rights. I think his historical writings suggest he absolutely gets the massive breakthrough in human rights that occurred at the end of the 18th century, although after the fashion of Edmund Burke rather than Thomas Paine. Under him, the FCO is still – as it was under his Labour predecessors – deeply committed on a day to day basis with the job of protecting people from oppression. He and his Ministers have responded positively and promptly when the TUC has sought assistance for trade unionists being abused in countries like Fiji or Iran.

His comment about playthings or pastimes is undoubtedly a rather snide reference to the late Robin Cook’s proud proclamation of an “ethical foreign policy” in 1997, but it does reflect the anguish which that pledge caused in the FCO when it had to confront the sometimes messy business of diplomacy and the requirement to deal with people democrats find repugnant. And it’s hardly surprising that a Conservative Foreign Secretary talking to a business audience didn’t launch a full-blown attack on corporate greed, malfeasance or misbehaviour.

But what I do think could have been expected was some challenge to business to do better, even if it came in the form of urging them to follow the best examples to be found in the corporate world. Or at the very least, some glimmer of expectation that they would need to live up to the requirements of the Ruggie Principles, international law and increasing corporate activism on human rights.

I would expect a Conservative to say that there was no contradiction between businesses doing well, and businesses doing good.

But William Hague blew it by just pandering to his audience, leaving them with a warm glow that could only have been enhanced by the fine wines and good food his CBI chums consumed. That’s not good government, even if – for one night at least – it felt like good politics.

Unions met with the Ministers and with employers for a tripartite social dialogue on the first morning, and I represented the TUC. Other trade unionists were there from Mexico of course, as well as fourteen other G20 nations, from South Africa to China, Saudi Arabia to Indonesia. We stressed the need for action as well as fine words, on job creation, tackling the youth jobs crisis and on green growth.

Despite differences of opinion with representatives of business (the B20) over precarious employment, unions (the L20, for Labour) were able to agree a common position to put to Ministers, covering employment, social protection and rights at work. For the Guadalajara meeting, we put forward a joint list of measures to take on youth unemployment.

We’re looking in particular for the Youth Employment Task Force to set out a series of actions Governments could take, and we want the Task Force to continue at least into the Russian G20 next year to check that these actions are being taken and consider what else to do if these measures don’t reduce youth joblessness. As I said to the tripartite session, “we’re not done with youth unemployment until young people have a future again.”

Unions also called – in a pre-summit submission which we’ve been using to lobby DWP Work Minister Chris Grayling – for public investment in infrastructure and green jobs; reduced income inequality; action against insecure work; social protection floors; and a global Youth Jobs Pact. The summit communique should be available over the weekend, and we can see how far Ministers have heeded our calls.

In the UK, supporters of fair taxation, of rebalancing the manufacturing and finance sectors, and those worried about the Government’s commitment to overseas aid and tackling climate change will be redoubling their efforts to secure a Robin Hood Tax. And ahead of the NATO summit in Chicago this weekend, US union National Nurses United will lead a demonstration to Daley Plaza to call on the US Government to tax Wall Street not Main Street. Unions and NGOs in the US are gearing up for the launch of a Robin Hood Tax campaign to influence the debate around the Presidential election in the autumn.

Republican candidate Mitt Romney’s hedge fund career and events like this week’s revelation of huge losses at JP Morgan Chase have put the financial sector’s misdeeds on the electoral agenda, and will encourage further debate about how to tax the sector more effectively, continuing the earth-shaking debate started by Occupy Wall Street and Warren Buffett.

In Europe, the Commission proposal for a financial transactions tax directive will take another step forward next week when the European Parliament debates and votes on a report on the directive from its Economic and Monetary Affairs Committee. The Committee has already adopted its report in favour of the directive, and the Parliament is likely to approve the measure, albeit proposing further strengthening in line with campaigners’ proposals to make it more difficult to avoid the tax.

And on the same day as the European Parliament votes on the tax, an informal summit of EU heads of government will consider a new approach to growth in the EU, responding to the shift in political narratives away from pure austerity. This summit is also a response to the election of FTT-supporting French President Francois Hollande, and he has explicitly put the tax on the agenda for the summit.

German campaigners have already started, staging a mock marriage between Chancellor Merkel and President Hollande ahead of their meeting on Tuesday to emphasise the fact that the FTT is one measure they can agree on.

Robin Hood Tax campaigners will be out in force around the world and on the web. PCS conference in Brighton next week will see tax collectors and DFID staff donning Sherwood green on the seafront to show their support, and I’m taking Robin Hood hats to the G20 employment ministers’ summit in Guadalajara, Mexico where trade unionists from the world’s twenty biggest economies will demonstrate their commitment to make the finance sector pay their fair share to get the global economy back on track. And in Europe, campaigners will join an ETUC rally outside the EU summit and submitting a letter urging those EU leaders committed to introducing a tax to go it alone if Governments like our own continue to resist an EU-wide tax.

It’s a big week indeed for such a tiny tax.

But the big story really has to be the continuing decline of Chancellor Merkel’s CDU, who – again, this is according to exit polls, and I’ll update later when the final tally is in – saw their vote decline by a quarter from 35% to 26%. With Germany’s General Election due next year, this almost makes Merkel’s administration a lame duck, and it can’t even be blamed on the collapse of her coalition partners the FDP (whose vote again held up, as it did last week in Schelswig-Holstein).

In Germany’s most populous state, covering cities like Dusseldorf and Cologne, this is a major blow, and, coupled with Hollande’s ascent to the French Presidency, will put German-led austerity in Europe under increasing pressure this summer. The 23 May informal summit of EU leaders will not quite see Merkel isolated, but certainly increasingly embattled.

By the way, a lot of the comment will focus on the entry into yet another state legislature of the ultimate post-modern fringe party, the Pirates, up from 2% to 8%. But as in Schleswig-Holstein’s regional elections last weekend, their entry into the legislature has seen the left-wing Die Linke party exit the stage. So yet again, Germany has given only minimal support to the narrative that says voters are abandoning traditional, centrist parties for the extremes.

The Court was ruling on a Dutch case where the Province of North Holland had required coffee machines – of all things! - to have certain environmental labelling. And whilst the Court ruled against the Province on the details of the case (beccause it had just required certain eco-labelling rather than including the underlying environmental standards to be met in tenders), the judgment defines what the public sector is required to do to so that social and environmental objectives can be included in the procurement process.

The EU procurement directives are currently under review, and unions are arguing for clearer language on these issues, so the Court judgment will be very helpful in setting down how that language could be drafted. But the Court’s judgment is also immediately applicable to all public procurement in the UK, and the Government should make it clear to all that social and environmental standards can and should be included in all future contracts.

The Fair Trade Advocacy Office, an NGO with which trade unions in Europe work closely, welcomed the judgment. Its Executive Director, Sergi Corbalán, said “we welcome the confirmation by the European Court that Fair Trade criteria can be supported through public procurement under the current EU rules.”

As last weekend showed, it’s not safe to speculate about what’s happening in Europe, because the detail keeps changing – and this month’s plethora of Presidential, Parliamentary, regional and local elections
suggest the primacy of the bond markets may have to give way to the primacy of electorates. However, we do seem to be living between two competing narratives.

On the one hand, an argument that Europe has a serious problem of market confidence and global competitiveness which needs to be addressed by a more or less prolonged period of austerity, and a smaller state. Market confidence requires fiscal conservatism, balanced budgets not just over the business cycle but pretty much permanently. Competitiveness requires labour market flexibility, low levels of  taxation, and lower wages.

On the other hand – and this is what I think – the story is one of a lack of demand, public sector deficits driven by the need to tackle the global financial crisis and growing inequality. The solution is growth and redistribution, not austerity. This narrative envisages a programme of public investment in infrastructure rather than cuts, training rather than deregulation and greater regulation and taxation of the banks (and a more redistributive tax and benefit system generally). Unions want wages to rise in countries like Germany to restore domestic demand and rebalance trade with the EU periphery.

Of course, people don’t fall conveniently into these two camps. Growth is the new mantra; most Greek political parties, even those who eject the bailout, favour remaining in the Euro; and everyone agrees to balance the books some time! But electorates who spent the last two years punishing centre left Governments now seem to have turned their fire on the centre right, and that looks to most observers like the crunching of the narrative gears.

So what does this mean for EU employment and social law?

It suggests, I think, that we might be nearer a turning point.

Last week in Romania, the incoming Social Democratic government renegotiated its deal with the IMF to reverse a 25% cut in public sector pay, and the German Finance Minister Schauble – a Christian Democrat, mind – has endorsed the metalworkers’ 6% wage claim, precisely because it would rebalance demand.

In terms of taxation, even the Secretary-General of the OECD has come out in favour of more redistributive tax and benefit systems (along with better education and training and job creation) as a way to create growth through greater equality: a manifesto for social policy that would go further than most European governments at the moment. Despite continuing hostility from the UK – or more accurately from the City of London – the Robin Hood Tax is getting closer and closer to implementation, albeit without the UK benefiting from the resources that will be raised.

On equality, there is a broad consensus that more needs to be done, including the measures in the Queen’s Speech, although we would have preferred them to go further, and there is still a crying need to address child-care and the growing need for elder-care across the EU. Where we’re really not making progress is on income inequality: as the TUC’s new living standards tracker launched today shows, it is the poorest households who are bearing the brunt of price increases.

We do not, however, seem to have reached the end of the road for labour market flexibility – also a feature of the Queen’s Speech and still, as the EU’s employment strategy showed when it was launched a fortnight ago, still a part of the Commission’s thinking despite the absence of evidence that making it easier to sack people or weaken their job security generally does anything to create jobs.

On industrial relations, the Commission’s attempt to regulate through the Monti II proposals looks unlikely to be agreed, which to be honest is probably the right decision – Monti II wouldn’t have worked – but does still leave the imbalance between economic freedoms and fundamental human rights that European Court Judgments have created. If unions and employers are going to play a constructive role in getting Europe out of the crisis its economy is in, unions need to be able to play that role without one hand tied behind our backs.

But overall, I think this month’s election results suggest that the second narrative that I set out may be beginning to win more support.

Civil society has been discussing for at least the last two years what should replace the UN Millennium Development Goals adopted in 2000 and due to be achieved by 2015. Everyone knows that, even though progress has been made, the global financial and economic crisis of the last few years put an end to hopes that the MDGs would be realised on schedule.

The MDGs were an ambitious attempt to give the world measurable goals for poverty reduction, and they include many measures that unions welcomed, such as education for all or combating HIV/AIDS. Unions have a development agenda, of course – we are a movement dedicated to poverty eradication, equality, and economic and social justice, and with members across the world, north and south, after all. Much of what we are committed to is shared by others in civil society and in many political parties that form Governments.

But we are focused in a very particular way on the key determinant of poverty – the world of work. So we would like to see some new targets that currently aren’t part of the MDGs (except obliquely: decent work is one of the indicators for MDG 1, on poverty itself). What about full employment, a commitment to which is required by ILO Convention 122? Or the ratification and implementation of the core ILO conventions against forced and child labour, discrimination at work, freedom of association and collective bargaining?

Even more fundamentally (I’ll come on to ends and means) what about setting targets for equality within nations using indicators like the OECD’s Gini coefficient, which could, among other things, radically redefine the recipients of overseas aid? There are more poor people in India than in the whole of sub-Saharan Africa but India is considered a richer country than most of those sub-Saharan countries, for example.

David Cameron has indicated that he wants whatever replaces the MDGs to focus more on the economy, so I’m half with him. But then he had to spoil it by suggesting that this meant property rights, entrepreneurialism and investment. These are only means to an end (and not necessarily the means I’d choose, either!) but they are not sensible objectives for a strategy aiming to make people healthier, wealthier, wiser and more free.

International development charities and the Shadow International Development Minister Ivan Lewis have tempered their criticisms, pending the delivery of the actual expenditure next year. But clearly, people in the sector are worried that the Government may renege on the deal. That would be a massive breach of faith, and it is difficult to imagine how the pious International Development Secretary Andrew Mitchell could resist calls for his resignation. He would certainly have to develop a teflon-coated hide to avoid career-ending shame.

It may well be that the pledge will survive the increasing – and partly self-inflicted - pressures on public expenditure. And even if it does reach the promised level of aid, the Government could do harm enough simply by spending that money badly (for instance, on indiscriminate subsidies to the private sector). Successive Congresses have supported the 0.7% target and legislation. But we also want overseas aid to be promoting people’s rights, economic and social justice, and trade unionism, not just providing what some cynically call “more and better biscuits”.

So what has voting achieved over the weekend? Well, the voters have sent a fairly clear message in Britain, France and Greece that they are not at all happy about austerity (and even in Germany, that case can be made, but more weakly). It’s not yet clear whether that message will be heeded in Berlin, Brussels or Frankfurt (home of the European Central Bank). 

In France, Sarkozy stressed the dangers of having an untested President dealing with the economic crisis, but he barely defended the austerity that he implied was the only sensible reaction to that crisis. He was, after all, almost alone in the first round in supporting austerity, with extreme right, centre left and far left opposing it to varying degrees. Hollande is, as people are now making clear, in favour of balancing the budget only a year later than Sarkozy, although he plans to do so differently, with higher taxes on the rich, and more growth. But he’s not in a position to be much more radical than that even if he wanted to be, because so few other European governments share his opposition (several smaller countries like Austria and Denmark have arguably only gone along with EU austerity because they were outnumbered, but Hollande needs one or two more of the big 5 economies – Germany, Italy, Spain or the UK- on board to really change Europe’s direction and he will need to wait for that).  Hollande will therefore most likely seek to nudge Germany towards a more sensible approach to growth, with support from those like Mario Draghi at the ECB, Angel Gurria at the OECD and Sarkozy’s former Finance Minister Christine Lagarde at the IMF, all of whom have twigged that growth must be reprioritised.

In Greece, voters expressed their opposition to the bailout overwhelmingly, but the split left means that New Democracy gets the “winner-takes-all” extra 50 seats reserved for the largest single party. Even with that boost, their partnership with PASOK would not provide a Parliamentary majority, although I suspect the most likely outcome of the next few days of negotiation will be a New Democracy-led coalition including PASOK again but also including the centre-right Independent Greeks, but pledged to bargain for some relaxation of the bailout. Parties to the left of PASOK, who are unlikely to consider PASOK an acceptable coalition party), have nowhere near the Parliamentary seats needed to form  a government, and they are unlikely to be able to construct a majority by reaching out beyond the left. A further election is not unlikely, and an outbreak of left unity could see the left overtake New Democracy. But neither the German government nor the markets will be keen on that and are likely to punish Greece accordingly, something that would be deeply worrying for democracy.

Germany is of course the key to all this, and the Schleswig-Holstein elections don’t offer much in the way of answers. Merkel’s CDU clearly lost badly, although her more free market coalition partners the FDP did less worse than was expected (essentially returning to the result from the election before last). The SPD and the Greens may be able to form a government with the support of the Danish minority party the SSW, or even the uber-social libertarians of the Pirate Party which replaced Die Linke (the party to the left of the SPD). But a CDU-SPD grand coalition may result, and that is also at the moment quite likely to be the outcome when Germany holds its General Election in 2013. A red-black German coalition would be more growth-friendly than the current government, and therefore more helpful to Hollande, but would not amount to the rejection of austerity in the heart of fiscal conservatism that we’ve been hoping for. (And the forward march of Labour in the UK, which has seen the Liberal Democrats collapse further but UKIP being the main recipient of lost Conservative votes, is unlikely to result in a change of Government economic policy for some while yet.)

So, the weekend didn’t change everything. Although there are worrying implications for democracy in that, clearly we live in a world where one or two countries’ electorates cannot (and probably shouldn’t, as Merkel has inexpertly argued) change the EU’s direction. But after spending 2010 and 2011 punishing left of centre parties at the polls (eg UK, Portugal, Spain), European elections do now seem to be heading in a different direction. Anti-austerity campaigns have achieved a lot – but there’s a lot more to do.

The ILO’s social unrest index is based on research showing that people care more about jobs and incomes than growth per se. Torres’ own analysis of the report lists the following points about the current employment outlook:

• the current mix of tight fiscal austerity and tough labour market reforms is not having the desired effect, but actually making matters worse in terms of jobs and incomes. In over 90% of countries that have implemented austerity, unemployment is above its 2007 level;
• austerity cannot succeed in creating employment in the short term. Real investment is being hit by the lack of demand, limited credit access and confidence is ebbing away;
• austerity has failed to reduce fiscal deficits significantly. Despite aggressive cuts, Southern European countries face roughly the same fiscal deficits as before, unemployment has increased disproportionately and thousands of small businesses have closed;
• ill-conceived labour market reforms carried out in some advanced economies – particularly in Europe – have exacerbated precariousness and inequalities, while failing to generate new jobs.

Torres says:

“It is simply unreasonable to carry on down a path that is so evidently failing to heal the economy and create employment. Labour markets worldwide are still in intensive care … there are some 50 million fewer jobs now than at the start of the crisis. In the meantime, around 40 million people enter the global labour market each year.

“To insist on a cure that is killing the patient is a folly we can no longer indulge in. Europe could take a more balanced approach which – unlike austerity pure and simple – has proven to work. … The mood in the streets is becoming increasingly hostile to the austerity approach.”

But the ILO report, subtitled Better Jobs for a Better Economy, maintains that there is an alternative: a strategy focused on growth and jobs, including reform of the financial sector so that it supports the real economy rather than vice versa, progressive taxation and public investment. The ILO estimates that with just a moderate stimulus, 1.8-2.1 million jobs could be created in just one year in the advanced economies. The ’job-rich growth’ that the ILO maintain would result would eventually deal with deficits without huge social dislocation and unrest.

At a time of great pressure on public finances, this simple, fair and sustainable tax could help the UK to tackle poverty at home and overseas, and provide urgent additional funds to assist communities in developing countries to adapt to the onset of climate change. …

The economy must be judged by what it achieves for the common good of all our people.  The banks and financial corporations have brought our country to its knees in recent years.  This is clearly an opportunity for them to show that they are serious about being a source for social good moving forward.  From the perspective of the Church, and in the eyes of the public I’m sure, it is not acceptable for your Government to protect the very wealthiest people in our country at the expense of the poor, as appears the case with your current opposition to the Robin Hood Tax.

As the fifth suicide of the week took place on my train route into work, anecdotal evidence suggests that even the milder austerity policies in the UK which this week forced us back into recession us having a similar effect. And according to economic forecasters, if Governments don’t change course, we have at least a decade of this ahead of us.

There are many reasons for suicide, of course, and often it’s about much more than economic woes. But whereas the Wall Street Crash that precipitated the Great Depression of the 1930s saw bankers hurling themselves from Manhattan skyscrapers, it’s also worth reflecting on the fact that this time round, the suicides of ordinary people burdened with debt and insecurity, and with little hope of a brighter future for them or their children are contrasted with Barclays boss Bob Diamond surviving a 27% shareholder revolt against an annual income of £25 million.

What Angel Gurria is saying, however, is absolutely right – inequality is bad, not least because it inhibits growth, and (generally) it is increasing. He cites Latin America as one of the few parts of the world bucking this trend. Even in Scandinavia, with some of the most egalitarian countries, inequality is growing. He is also right to suggest employment for all, better education and skills training, and more progressive tax and benefit systems, as key solutions.

Where I would want the OECD to go further, though, is precisely in the mechanisms for redistribution. Tax and benefit policies are likely to have an effect only at the extremes, providing more resources for the poorest and taking more away from the richest. And a lot of recent thinking about inequality has pointed out that the major area where it has grown is actually between the very rich and the squeezed middle (the relative income of middle earners and the poor has not increased anywhere near as much). OECD research into inequality has identified the decline in collective bargaining and union power as a key reason why inequality is increasing, but the OECD hasn’t gone that extra mile to suggest restoring collective bargaining as a key element of economic policy. A really radical OECD policy would urge governments to unshackle unions and promote collective bargaining.

But three cheers out of four for Angel Gurria’s latest pronouncement!

Next month, the second Queen’s Speech of the coalition government will indicate whether that pledge will be fulfilled ahead of the deadline for meeting the target of 2013. But Ministers have been toning down their language on the pledge to legislate. The Conservative Party manifesto promised that the legislation would be enacted in the first Parliamentary term, a pledge not repeated word for word in the coalition agreement (not that the Liberal Democrats disagreed with the Conservative pledge), but already broken. Labour’s experienced and canny shadow international development secretary Ivan Lewis has written to his opposite number pressing him on the issue.

There is an argument to be had over whether we should spend 0.7% of GNI on overseas aid, and about whether aid is the best way to make poverty history. But there have to be very good arguments for abandoning a manifesto promise in this way, and the coalition simply hasn’t made that case. If they break the pledge, however, the role it played in Conservative Party strategy – to detoxify their brand and convince liberally-minded voters that they were in favour of tackling the moral blot on humanity of global poverty – will begin to fail. The nasty party charge will be back.

Union movements are increasingly resorting to strike action and public protests (in the last few days alone in the Czech Republic, India, Italy and Slovenia), and today France goes to the polls where the protest vote against the incumbent Nicholas Sarkozy is likely to see him only just claim a run-off place in a fortnight, and then lose to the moderate socialist Francois Hollande.

The finance ministers’ communique does refer to preparatory work for the June G20 summit, at which international bodies like the ILO will apparently be putting forward proposals for job creation. But with the British Government seeing small firms as the only source of such jobs (DFID this week announced a flea bite new fund to create a million – yes, a whole million jobs worldwide – through small firms), and the USA alone in the richest G8 countries putting on jobs in any numbers (about 500,000 in the last three months), this may be small beer. At this stage of a global recovery, even the USA’s uniquely positive record should be lamentable, and this is the best the G8 can do.

There is nothing in the finance ministers’ statement about the terrible scourge of youth unemployment, even though a G20 employment ministers’ working group is preparing a report on that very subject for the G20 summit. Nor is social protection mentioned, another key area that needs to be addressed (the communique says that social inclusion will be ever in the finance ministers’ thoughts, which is frankly little comfort!)

While Italian union leader Susanna Camusso says “we will continue to demonstrate until they acknowledge that the labour reforms will not create a single job,” the finance ministers say only that:

Recent economic developments point to the continuation of a modest global recovery, supported by some significant policy actions that have taken place since our last meeting. The tail risks facing the global economy only months ago have started to recede. However, growth expectations for 2012 remain moderate, deleveraging is constraining consumption and investment growth, volatility remains high partly reflecting financial market pressures in Europe and downside risks still persist

Fiddling while Rome strikes?

It’s often difficult to identify unconscious self-parody (after all, what he says may explain the thinking behind policies like the EU fiscal pact and the UK government’s austerity policies), but what Tim says is that jobs are definitely a cost to employers because they have to pay the wages (er, don’t they get the profits out too, so actually most jobs are net benefits even to employers? Moving on…) But jobs are also a cost to the people who do them, because otherwise they could be living it up and relaxing (Tim does grudgingly accept that this might be difficult without a wage coming in, but remember, this is Worstall’s world we’re in now).

Arguments that unemployment costs us all because it requires public services to be provided with less tax revenue, and unemployment and other state benefits being paid out are, I suspect, unlikely to cut much ice with Tim, because I suspect he sees tax, public services and benefits as bad things too.

So let’s tiptoe quietly away from Worstall’s world, back to the real one where it would be a good thing if 48 million jobs were created from greening our economies, because it would help save the planet, produce remunerative (and, hopefully, fulfilling too) work for millions of people and an income for them and their families, as well as the tax revenues needed to start rebuilding welfare states. Some people may even make a profit out of it too. Although I’d advise against using those profits to buy a subscription to Forbes until they get a better class of writer….

* The countries are Germany, Spain, Bulgaria, Brazil, Dominican Republic, USA, South Africa, Ghana, Tunisia, Indonesia, Nepal, Australia.

A quick scan of the five other supporters of an EU agreement or, failing that, a sub-EU/sub-Eurozone tax suggests that the coalition of 9 countries needed to invoke a mechanism called ‘enhanced co-operation’ where an EU majority cannot be achieved, is still intact. Meanwhile, Hungary has indicated it will go it alone with an FTT regardless of what else happens in Europe, and the newly elected left-wing Slovakian Government is also supportive. And among the most strident opponents of an FTT (chiefly Cyprus, Malta, Sweden and the UK), Sweden has just broken ranks and agreed to consider an enhanced version of the UK’s stamp duty on share transactions (still the biggest FTT in the world, by revenue). Even David Cameron said earlier this year that if other European countries wanted to emulate the UK tax, as France already has, he would support that, although he’s been notably forked-tongued about the FTT ever since the last election.

Further afield, the South African government, which under pressure from union and NGO campaigners finally came off the fence in favour of a global FTT before the November G20, has announced that it will extend its own securities transfer tax to cover own-account traders (closing a similar exclusion in the UK stamp duty would double the £3bn revenue it produces currently, although slosing the South African loophole would raise less, even comparatively, because own-account trading is less rife).

Robin Hood dead? No. As Mark Twain once famously remarked, “rumours of my death have been exaggerated.”

Stunned, Greece mourns Dimitris Hristoulas, 77, who shot himself in front of the Parliament right on Syntagma (Constitution) Square in Athens. The suicide occured shortly before 9am, as people went about their business. He died from a single shot to the head. Within hours, dozens of notes and flowers were pinned to the tree under which he had stood.  Citizens rushed to Syntagma to pay their respects including priests, despite the stigma attached to suicide by the Orthodox church. Once more, Greek riot police are making heavy use of chemicals to prevent access to Syntagma (even right now).

The tragedy casts into sharp relief the human cost of the crisis that has brought Greece to the brink of the abyss, pushing Greeks to desperation. Hristoulas, a retired pharmacist described as an ‘upstanding and progressive’ family man left a handwritten note likening the government to Greece’s first cabinet under German occupation in WWII.

“The collaborationist Tsolakoglou has literally deprived me of any ability for survival which depended on a decent pension that I alone paid for 35 years with no subsidy from the state. As my advanced age does not allow another more dynamic way to react I cannot find a solution beyond ending my life in dignity before I begin foraging through rubbish bins to survive and become a  burden to my child. If a fellow Greek were to grab a Kalashnikov though, I could be right behind him. I believe that our young people who are left with no future, will one day rise up in arms and hang the traitors of this country at Syntagma Square, just like the Italians did to Mussolini in 1945 in Milan’s Piazza Loreto.”