Robin Hood Tax campaign 'has more Facebook fans than top political parties'
- Added:
- Feb 25, 2010
The Robin Hood Tax campaign – set up to push for the introduction of financial transaction taxes – has built a massive online following in just two weeks.
The campaign now has almost 120,000 fans on Facebook with more than 3,000 joining every day. This is almost four times more than the combined total of the three main UK political parties and almost twice as many as the US Democrats.
More than 61,000 people have voted in favour of the tax on the campaign’s website
www.robinhoodtax.org.uk with just 6,100 voting against – a margin of 10:1 in favour. Their verdict is supported by more than 350 economists who have signed the letter, including Professor Jeff Sachs, special adviser to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon.
More than 80 domestic charities, aid agencies, green groups, faith organisations and unions now officially support the Robin Hood Tax Campaign, up from 48 on launch day. Members of the coalition include Oxfam, Save the Children, TUC, Barnardo’s, the Salvation Army, the International HIV/AIDS Alliance, ActionAid, Unicef UK and Friends of the Earth.
The campaign is calling on all political parties to back a tiny tax on the transactions of banks and other financial institutions to raise hundreds of billions of pounds to tackle poverty, protect public services and pay for action on climate change at home and abroad.
The coalition of charities would like to see half the money raised from the tax spent domestically and the rest to be split 50-50 between poverty reduction and tackling climate change in developing countries.
Money raised by a Robin Hood Tax could be used to avoid cuts to vital public services and for a range of good causes internationally including:
• Meeting the Government’s target to halve child poverty (£4bn)
• Ending the benefit trap that makes it too expensive for people to leave welfare and return to work (£2.7bn)
• Protecting schools and hospitals at home and abroad under threat of cuts
• Meeting the Millennium Development Goals to cut child deaths by two-thirds, maternal mortality by two-thirds and tackle malaria and HIV/AIDS, and
• Providing resources to enable a deal to be done on tackling climate change.
The campaign was launched on February 10 with a short film entitled The Banker starring Bill Nighy and written and directed by Richard Curtis. The film has been viewed 330,000 times on YouTube alone, posted on countless newspaper and blog sites and will soon be screened in selected cinemas in the UK. The international campaign is also taking off with coalitions stepping up their efforts in the US and Europe. The German coalition has made its own version of The Banker , with France and US soon to follow.
Members of the coalition were joined today at the official Westminster launch of the campaign by Stephen Spratt, chief economist at the New Economics Foundation to make the political and economic case for the Robin Hood Tax to MPs. Richard Curtis joined them on the panel to present the creative elements of the popular campaign.
Since the weekend more than 2,000 Robin Hood supporters, the online merry men and women, have emailed their MPs to ask them to attend today’s Parliamentary briefing.
Max Lawson, Head of Policy for Oxfam Great Britain said: “It is clear there is a huge public appetite for this campaign. To have gained 120,000 Facebook fans in just two weeks shows that there is real appetite for a tiny tax on banks to fund good causes at home and abroad. The fact that this is almost four times the combined total of the Facebook sites of Conservatives, Labour and Liberal Democrats sends a clear message to our leaders that the public demands action.”
Claire Melamed, Head of Policy at ActionAid, said: “This campaign has fired the imagination of charities, unions, green groups and thousands and thousands of ordinary people around the world.
“Politicians from any party proposing steep cuts or tax rises will now face serious questions from voters about why they are choosing to make the public pay for the financial crises rather than put this tiny tax on the banks that caused it. The Robin Hood Tax campaign has shown that there is a real alternative, if politicians are brave enough to take it."
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