Martin Hearson argues that whilst David Cameron will receive a significant political boost from the media portrayal of his global leadership on tax evasion, nothing agreed at the G8 is in itself likely to make a big difference to tax haven secrecy or to developing countries. Importantly, there were no commitments on public registers for beneficial ownership.
The Enough Food for Everyone If campaign – successor to Make Poverty History – has succeeded in making tax haven secrecy the centrepiece issue of public debate around the G8 summit, which closed yesterday in Eniskillen. It also chalked up a genuine success, in pushing the UK’s overseas territories to join a multilateral initiative to share tax information.
But what emerged from the summit itself (and indeed, what David Cameron proposed ahead of it) was a set of ten ‘principles’, with no concrete commitments beyond endorsement of developments already taking place through the G20 and OECD. “The public argument for a crackdown on tax-dodging has been won but the political battle remains,” said the IF campaign. This outcome is not illogical, because competency on tax most definitely resides with those other organisations, rather than the G8. Indeed, some of the developing countries in the G20 would likely bristle if asked to implement a decision taken by the G8.
Over the past few days, it became increasingly difficult to distinguish the campaigners’ messages from those coming out of the government. This demonstrates a real success on the part of campaigners in shifting the public debate. As Melanie Ward, of development charity ActionAid and the IF campaign, wrote yesterday, “at points it was bizarre watching David Cameron, the UK prime minister, use language that could have been written by those working in development agencies.”
This book seeks to provide a detailed exploration of the relationships between individual architects, educators, artists and designers that laid the foundation and shaped the approach to designing new school buildings in postwar Britain. It explores the life and work of Mary Medd, one of the most important modernist architects of the 20th century. Kerwin Datu finds that this biography falls short in some places but is historically valuable when we compare Medd’s ideas with the current state of British education.
A Life in Education and Architecture: Mary Beaumont Medd. Catherine Burke. Ashgate. December 2012.
The planet is sick and human beings have to pay. Today, that is the orthodoxy throughout the Western world, and our ecological catastrophism is turning us into cowering children, writes Pascal Bruckner. Rather than preaching catastrophe and pessimism, Bruckner argues that we instead need to develop a democratic and generous ecology that addresses specific problems in a practical way. Amelia Sharman finds this philosophical work a frustrating read for the ways it ignores the large body of climate science on the significant detrimental impacts to many areas of the world.
