Being debt campaigners in a world preoccupied with debt
By Alys Mumford DISCLAIMER: I work for Jubilee Scotland but am writing in my own capacity. The world is changing: debt and deficit are front page news, the general public is becoming educated in the language of financiers, and the relative virtues of IMF policies are being discussed down the pub. Well..maybe that’s just the [...]
Stop Lying About the Nation’s Credit Card
We’re making sure that this generation does not bankrupt the next. Not saddling them with our debts, not maxing out on the nation’s credit card, but building a better future for our children. Tory Party Chairman Baroness Sayeeda Warsi For a party feigning concern about “the nation’s credit card”, the Conservatives are remarkably comfortable with the [...]
Bernie Sanders on the US debt debacle.
As the US Congress debates whether to accept a plan to cut $2.8trillion in spending over 10 years, and raise not one cent in taxes on the rich, let’s hear from the one* decent man in the Senate. * this may be a slight exaggeration – Franken’s not bad – but it’s sadly not far [...]
UK loses Zimbabwe payment record
By Tim Jones Part of my work at Jubilee Debt Campaign is to find out information about the debts owed to the shadowy Export Credits Guarantee Department (ECGD) of the UK government. The ECGD backs loans to other countries to be used to buy British-made exports, a process which leads to a lot of debt [...]
National Buy2Let Mortgage
We’ve all heard the Conservative/Lib-Dem analogy about thenation’s credit card. The coalition partners in Westminster love to accuse Labour of having built up the national debt as though they were maxing out a credit card. It’s easy to see why they do this – the public understand how a credit card works. In a recent [...]
Is the government making a profit on its debt?
The Bank of England’s inflation report was out yesterday. It says that there’s a good chance that inflation will hit 5% before the end of the year. The Consumer Price Index is currently sitting at 4%. Keep those numbers in your head. Now look at this one. The government is currently paying around 3.75% interest [...]
8 things about Britain’s debt
1) How big is it? We have had a higher debt: GDP ratio for 200 out of the last 250 years – historically, our debt is very small compared to the size of our economy (ie how rich we are). We also have one of the lowest debt: GDP ratios in the western world. 2) [...]
Film: arguing against cuts
words by me, film by Miles Joseph
Anger of a Doomed Youth
Scenes of 18 year olds smashing the windows of the Tory Party HQ were not what I expected today. I expected it to be big – possibly the biggest demonstration since the Iraq war protests of March 2003. But I didn’t count for the anger of a doomed youth. The NUS were quick to criticise. [...]
Kept your Promises? No you Haven’t.
On Sunday John Hemming, Lib Dem MP for Birmingham Yardley, claimed that not only had the Lib Dems stuck to their pre-election pledge to introduce a fairer system of university funding they had, in fact, scrapped fees for 54.2% of students. The justification for this extraordinary claim was that as around half of graduates under [...]
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