It’s always a bit surprising to be in at the beginning. A regional meeting of Put People First in Bristol last Tuesday, 17 March, was no exception.

The first surprise was that each of us imagined the meeting was being organized by the others. So we should really have been surprised to meet anyone else at all.

The second surprise was that NGOs, trade unions and environmental groups were there in more or less equal force – and seemed to agree on most things.

We were lucky to have excellent initial contributions from Joanne Kaye-Smith from the local region of Unison; Nick Dearden, Director of the Jubilee Debt Campaign; John Hilary, Director of War on Want; and Jane Laurie from Stop Climate Chaos coalition and Climate Friendly Bradford-on-Avon.

The third surprise was that we got very useful analysis and discussion, not least of the plentiful positive options on offer – and, of course, about how to get ourselves halfway decently organized for the future. The local BBC were there filming us, and other film-makers will shortly be posting edited excerpts on the New Internationalist website and elsewhere.

Coaches are being organised (and filling up) for the 28th demo. We exchanged email addresses with the intention of setting up an informal group that will stay in touch.

At least one message coming out of Bristol is that almost anyone could do just as well as, and probably a lot better than, we did. Others are meeting in Edinburgh and maybe Leeds next week – my colleague Chris Brazier will be there.

David Ransom is a Co-Editor of New Internationalist Magazine. The April issue featuring Put People First is now out and already available online on the NI website. Copies are also being distributed free with the Big Issue in London next week.

March 19th, 2009 New Internationalist

You’d have thought an idyllic island, a ‘British Crown Dependency’ off the coast of France with an average income of more than $50,000, must be a blissful place to live. Well, with 89,000 people and a notional $250 billion in the banks (that’s almost $3 million per head), it better had be.

But Jersey, one of the world’s leading tax havens – or ‘secrecy jurisdictions’ – isn’t quite like that. It never is. I’m told that local groups have been fighting against the tax avoidance industry ‘in a climate of fear and intimidation’. A quarter of the population lives in poverty. So that’s what the off-shore City of London is really like. Perhaps we got just a whiff of it from the very nasty and on-going Haute de la Garenne children’s home scandal.

Anyway, by a happy coincidence, a posse of campaigners and the incomparable Tax Justice Network will be joining local groups for a guided tour of the havens, a public fresh-air meeting and perhaps even a bit of overdue fun in Jersey on 12 and 13 March – just as finance ministers gather in Sussex, England, to prepare for the big G20 meeting in London on 2 April.

Since the easiest political trick in the book at the moment is to blame bankers and tax dodgers for everything, if the G20 meeting doesn’t come up with some pretty clear proposals for tax justice on 2 April it will have been a complete waste of time. After all, who’s going to pay those mounting tax bills? Britain provides more tax havens than anyone else, and Gordon Brown will be presiding over the G20 in London, so it should be a shoo-in.

Of course it won’t be – and the G20 itself has no legitimacy at all. So it’s just as well that Put People First has brought together the biggest coalition of social movements in Britain since Stop the War, for a demonstration on 28 March – and the World Social Forum meeting in Belém, Brazil, in February declared this a Global Day of Action.

David Ransom is a Co-Editor of New Internationalist Magazine which is preparing a special issue f0r Put People First as part of its ‘Clean Start’ coverage of the economic meltdown. For more on Tax Justice see October 2008 edition. Originally published on the NI blog.

March 10th, 2009 New Internationalist