It was 1984. I was 12 years old, recording the pop charts religiously every Sunday on my shiny new cassette player. Every evening the family would gather around the television to watch the news. Every evening there would be stories of clashes between striking miners and their supporters and the police, with pictures of picket lines and running battles as the police attacked miners with truncheons and on horseback whilst they fought back.

The miners’ strike of 1984-1985 was a huge moment in British history. It lasted just over 11 months. The miners had the widespread support of the entire working class in Britain. Workers who felt that they were all under attack from the new Conservative government, led my Margaret Thatcher.

In the early seventies, the miners had struck successfully for higher wages and managed to bring down the previous Conservative government at the same time, with power stations closing and electricity blackouts forcing the country into a three-day week and darkness every evening.

Mrs Thatcher and the Conservative party were determined to have revenge. They first stockpiled huge amounts of coal, drew up contingency plans to use the army, and then deliberately provoked the strike. They were intent on starving the miners back to work- this was no exaggeration either as miners and their families had to endure tremendous hardship, especially in the harsh winter of 1984-85. My wife’s best friend’s father was a Scottish miner, and although only four at the time she remembers the many ‘poor days’ when they could only eat beans on toast because daddy was on strike.

Many support groups sprung up to raise money for miners and their families. In London, members of/activists from the LGBTQIA+ community got together and formed ‘Lesbian and Gays Support the Miners (LGSM)’. LGBTQIA+ people in the UK were at that time subject to widespread discrimination, including in the workplace, often forced to live their lives in secret, or estranged from their families and subject to violence. The Conservative government under Mrs Thatcher also used state power to enforce this prejudice, banning the teaching of homosexuality in schools.

HIV/AIDS was also exploited to intensify homophobia, as growing numbers of young gay men started to die from AIDS-related illnesses, what was at that time a very poorly understood, feared, and incurable disease. Indeed, one of the founders and leaders of LGSM, Mark Ashton, died of the disease two years later in February 1987, aged only 26.

Pits and perverts

LGSM raised money from the LGBTQIA+ community in London and across the country for the miners; they provided support for a series of mining communities in the Dulais valley in South Wales. The Welsh valleys were one of the key areas of coal mining in the UK.

They took the money there themselves, staying with mining families and building relationships with the women and men organising and striking, and in turn miners came to London too, giving speeches at fundraising events, including a big concert in Camden London, where the Bronski Beat headlined (one of my favourite bands, then and now- their haunting synth pop song ‘Smalltown Boy’ about a young gay man having to leave his family and go to London is honestly one of the best songs ever). The concert was called ‘Pits and Perverts’, the name taken from a headline in the right-wing tabloid newspapers about LGSM and the miners.

Solidarity

It is a beautiful story of solidarity- a word that is not heard or used enough these days, I think. A recognition that two communities and movements, miners and the LGBTQIA+ community had far more in common than they had separating them.

Many of LGSM were themselves working class, and had grown up in similar communities, often experiencing prejudice and discrimination, but also very aware of the everyday realities of working-class life and struggle. Over the year, with the many visits, strong and lifelong friendships were formed, and walls of prejudice and division broke down through community and a common struggle.

Most importantly the two communities realised they had a common enemy. There is a scene in the wonderful 2014 film about LGSM, Pride, where one miner’s wife, who struggles with her homophobic prejudice, shows her husband a newspaper story about the gay community and HIV/AIDS. He says, ‘you know the lies they print about us miners daily-calling us the enemy within- why would you believe the lies they tell about these people?’.

This is the heart of solidarity: shared struggles without erasing differences, taking action knowing there is a cost of standing with others, especially when it is hard. It is about collective liberation, recognising that only in everyone’s liberation can you begin to transform conditions for yourself and for others. LGSM, despite their own huge struggles, chose to focus on supporting the miners, seeing their actions as part of a shared struggle.

The constant need to fuel division and hate

My own feeling is that prejudice, racism, homophobia, sexism; these are all things that need to be constantly maintained and manufactured; that they often rapidly crumble when people are able to meet, to talk and to understand each other better, to share common struggles. Not always of course- none of this is automatic or simple and prejudice can run very deep indeed. The point is more that I think there is definitely an ongoing need to prop up division, to constantly tell us that we have more that divides us than unites us.

I also feel that prejudice is actually perhaps more common within the upper and middle-classes. This is I think because of physical and financial distance from the ‘other’ and support for the status quo, plus often an additional level of class prejudice. These parts of society are also more likely to have the power to amplify and codify their prejudices through law and the media. For the working classes, it is true that competition for scarce jobs and public services is more common, and can be weaponised, but equally poverty, proximity and shared hardship can be a key source of solidarity and struggle too.

Victory in defeat

The miners lost the strike; it was a huge defeat, not just for them but for the whole labour movement and the working class in the UK. It is no coincidence that economic inequality shot upwards in the following two decades in the country, as the power of labour was cowed and the power of capital boosted.

But a year later, at the 1985 gay pride march in London, LGSM were joined by coachloads of miners from all over the country, who marched at the front of the Pride march. At the Labour Party conference that year, a motion supporting equal rights for gay and lesbian people was passed, in large part because of the unions coming in behind it in support, strongly pushed to do this by the National Union of Mineworkers.

In the years since then, there has been huge progress in securing equal rights for LGBTQIA+ people, both legally and within society as a whole. For my kids at school now, listening to them discuss these things so openly, the level of prejudice of those years feels like another world. But none of this can be taken for granted. In the UK in recent years, as in much of the world, there has been a dangerous roll back of rights and growing levels of homophobia and transphobia, amid poisonous rhetoric from politicians and the media. As always, the protection and expansion of rights and freedoms requires constant vigilance and constant struggle.

END.

Author: Max Lawson, Head of Inequality Policy at Oxfam International and EQUALS podcast co-host. He is also a visiting Professor in Practice at the LSE International Inequalities Institute and the co-chair of the Global People’s Medicines Alliance.

Thanks so much to Amina and to Silvia for their help in writing this.

Food crises were not a single event for us. They were a rhythm. A bad rain, then a thin harvest, then a hard season, then, if we were fortunate, recovery. Then the cycle again. The sky set the rhythm, but the sky was never the whole story. Communities like mine had little cushion against a bad year, and how much cushion a community holds is not decided by the weather. In a household already stretched thin by that rhythm, birth order was never neutral. I was the first child of a polygamous family, and that came with a role attached, not just a place in the line. I was watched to see what example I would set. I was expected, before long, to help carry the household. When the harvest was thin, a firstborn child was among the first hands a family would call on, not the last.

A firstborn child is not asked if they have time to help. They are simply expected to have made it.

That is the direction my life could easily have taken. Fetching water. Looking after younger siblings. Working land that needed hands more than it needed a child at a school desk. What kept me at that desk, more days than not, was a bowl.

At school, once a day, we were given a ration through a World Food Programme feeding programme. Almost none of it came from our own fields or even our own country. Bowls like mine were filled with what international food aid shipped in those years: a porridge of sorghum, maize or wheat, a protein supplement, and oil for calories. What I remember is the powdered milk, mixed with water, and the dried, salted fish, broken into small pieces over the grain. I did not know, then, what WFP stood for. I knew the smell of the fish and the particular chalky taste of the milk, and I knew that bowl was often the most certain meal of my day.

Except on the days there was no school. We hated Sundays. We hated public holidays. No school meant no rations, so a day off was not a rest. It was a gap. I did not have the language then to call that irony. I only had the hunger of a Monday morning that felt, strangely, like relief.

We did not long for the day off. We longed for it to end.

That gap taught me something before I had a word for it. Some days, a system outside my family decided whether I ate. Not shameful. Not undignified. Just a plain, physical fact, and one that gave my family a reason to let me carry my share of the household from a desk, rather than from a field.

I say this because I know how the debate about aid usually goes. Someone points to what it has fed, vaccinated, taught, and cured. Someone else points to the dependency it can create, the power it concentrates in the giver, and the conditions that can arise without anyone asking to sign them. Both are right, and both are talking about the same bowl from different distances. From where I sat, seven or eight years old, waiting for a Sunday to end, the debate about power and dependency was not wrong. It simply was not the question in front of me. The question before me was whether I would eat that day or wait until Monday.

A system can need deep reform and still keep a child fed. Both things can be true at once.

Let me be clear about what follows from that, because in a season of aid cuts, it is easily twisted. The answer to an imperfect bowl is not an empty one. Taking the ration away reforms nothing. It only returns the hunger. When I question how aid works, I am not arguing for less of it. I am arguing about who decides.

I carry that bowl with me now, in a very different seat, in conversations about funding models, partnership terms and the language we use for the work we do. It keeps me honest about two things at once.

First, that reform is not betrayal. Questioning how aid is designed, who decides its terms, and where the power sits, is not an insult to the people it once fed. It is a way of asking whether the next firstborn child gets to stay at their desk without carrying the costs my generation carried alongside that bowl: the waiting, the conditions, the sense that help always arrived from somewhere else, decided by someone else. Even the food in the bowl had made that journey.

Second, that reform without memory becomes its own kind of distance. It is easy, from a table far from any child, to speak of aid only as a system to be fixed or replaced. It is harder and more honest to remember it has also been someone’s bowl. Somewhere, right now, it still is. Some child, somewhere, is dreading Sunday for the same reason I did.

That is the real distance in this story. Not the miles the food travelled to reach my bowl, but the distance between a table where a decision is made and a child who eats, or does not, because of it.

Some of that distance has begun to close. School meals are increasingly bought from farmers near the schools they serve, so that the bowl feeds a community twice. That is the right direction. The question is why, fifty years after my bowl, it is still the direction and not yet the norm.

We do not have to choose between gratitude and criticism. I hold both. Grateful for a scoop of milk that bought me time at a desk. Clear that the next child deserves a bowl that is filled more fairly, and decided closer to home.

The bowl was never the whole answer. But it was enough of one, for one child, more days than not. That has to count for something, even as we build something that no longer asks a child to dread the day off.

END

References

• The Sahel drought, 1968–74: widespread famine and displacement across Mauritania, Mali, Chad, Niger, and Burkina Faso, with an estimated 100,000 deaths and hundreds of thousands of people dependent on food aid.

Author: Adama Coulibaly is the Head of Programs at Oxfam International. He also write and speak on decolonisation, leadership, and the future of global development.

Listen to our latest episode with Olivier De Schutter as we explore whether we can end poverty without GDP growth.

Take a moment with the number. A trillion dollars. If you spent a million dollars every single day, it would take you two thousand seven hundred years to spend it. It is more than the entire GDP of Argentina or Nigeria. It is a figure so large that our brains are not really equipped to process it as a real thing.

According to Oxfam 60% of billionaire wealth globally is not earned in any sense you and I would recognise, but derived from inheritance, monopoly power, or crony connections. By UBS’s own count, the great wealth transfer is accelerating, with a record $297.8 billion passing to just 91 heirs in 2025. Musk’s own wealth did not surge through some new invention, but through a private-market revaluation of SpaceX and his AI company xAI, a paper merger that pushed his net worth from $500 billion to $800 billion in just four months. Tesla, the engine of much of his wealth, runs on public subsidy, tax incentives and regulatory frameworks his own companies have spent years bending into shape. The money does not materialise from genius. It is extracted from systems that workers built, that governments subsidised, and that the public is now invited to applaud.

Earlier this year while his companies held billions in government contracts, Musk was inside the US government running the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. DOGE fired the regulators, hollowed out agencies, and dismantled the oversight structures that might otherwise have asked awkward questions of his own companies. A Yale model estimated Musk’s political activities cost Tesla between one million and 1.26 million US vehicle sales. He took that hit and kept going, which tells you what the access was worth to him. This is regulatory capture as a business model, dressed up as a public service.

But this is not about one man and his excessive wealth. It is systemic, and the same pattern recurs across every region. In South Africa, the Gupta brothers spent years so deeply embedded in Jacob Zuma’s government that a judicial commission concluded the state itself had been captured, with cabinet appointments and contracts steered to serve private interests. In India, Gautam Adani built one of the world’s great fortunes in lockstep with his proximity to Narendra Modi, winning state contracts and infrastructure concessions as his net worth soared, while those who called it crony capitalism were brushed aside. In Mexico, Carlos Slim became one of the richest men on earth almost overnight when the Salinas government privatised the state telephone monopoly and sold it to him, handing a public asset to a private fortune that has dominated the country’s telecoms ever since. Billionaires are 4,000 times more likely to hold political office than ordinary citizens, and where they do not hold office outright, they buy the people who do. When wealth concentrates at this velocity, democracy is revealed as a sham.

Meanwhile the world that produced this wealth continues as it is. The World Inequality Report drawing on the work of 200 researchers found that the poorest half of humanity holds barely 2% of global wealth while fewer than 60,000 people at the very top control three times as much as that entire bottom half combined. This cannot be separated from the Musk wealth story. The systems that funnel money upward at this speed are the same systems that underfund public health, load poor countries with debt they cannot escape, and leave communities without the basics that governments once treated as obligations.

You will be told, as you always are, that taxing extreme wealth is complicated, that capital flees, that redistribution is a blunt and dangerous tool. These arguments are made by people who would be taxed more. A wealth tax sufficient to fund universal healthcare and education across the Majority World has been modelled, costed, and proposed repeatedly. The obstacle has never been the arithmetic. It has always been the politics, and the politics is owned by the people the tax would affect.

But here is what the first trillionaire does not want you to notice. Across the same world that produced his fortune, the 99% are organising. Carnegie’s Global Protest Tracker recorded more than 110 major anti-government protests across 70 countries in the last year. Most of them powered by the same anger at the same rigged system.

Young people forced a tax climbdown in Kenya, brought down governments in Nepal and Madagascar and took to the streets from Morocco to Indonesia demanding the rules be rewritten. They did it without trillion-dollar war chests. They did it themselves, alongside people like you and me, in solidarity, and an insistence that this is not inevitable.

That movement is the counterweight to everything this moment represents. Billionaires are feeling the pressure. In May, Jeff Bezos went on CNBC to insist the tax system isn’t crony capitalism, defend his peers against ‘vilification,’ and deny that the ultra-rich avoid tax at all, the sound of a class that suddenly feels the need to argue its case in public.

Every wealth tax now argued seriously in a parliament, every billionaire levy being debated at the UN, every debt cancellation demand making it onto a government agenda arrived there because people organised and refused to accept the terms being set for them from above. The 1% have the money and, for now, control of the politics. The 99% have the majority, the moral case, and a growing refusal to be distracted from who is actually picking their pockets.

12 June may be the day the first trillionaire is officially minted, but, let it also be the moment millions more people decide they have had enough.

END.

Author: Ed Pomfret, Communications & media lead, Fight Inequality Alliance.

This article was first published by Fight inequality Alliance here and on their Substack. It has also been republished by Inequality.org here.

Fight Inequality Alliance

What a trillion dollars tells us about who really runs the world

SpaceX filed paperwork last week for the largest stock market listing in history, seeking $80 billion at a $1.75 trillion valuation, and analysts have pencilled in 12 June as the day Elon Musk officially becomes a trillionaire…

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2 months ago · 1 like · Fight Inequality Alliance

A revolutionary, racist, and revolting idea

A core idea on the right is that of the ”Great Replacement Theory”―that so called ‘globalist elites’ in charge of rich countries are deliberately seeking to undermine, reduce, and ultimately replace white people. Related to this is the concept of remigration, which refers to the mass deportation of non-white immigrants, regardless of their citizenship status.

Remigration as an idea began circulating in the early 2010’s but did not really break through until 2023-24. It is now well and truly in the mainstream and has been backed by far-right leaders across the EU, US, and beyond, parties who are either in government or leading in the polls. Relatively suddenly, the horrific, disgusting idea of the mass deportation of people because they are not white has become normalised.

Hayek had no friends for years

Friedrich Hayek, the godfather of neoliberalism, was a very lonely man for a long time. His ideas were deemed so revolutionary, so entirely out of step with the mainstream, that he struggled somewhat to get a job in any university.

To his huge credit, that never stopped him fighting for what he thought was right. I really wish he had given up. Yet he kept plugging away, fighting for what he thought was right, and what he thought should happen in the world. His ideas went on to become some of the most influential and of the last forty years.

A tale of two Frenchmen

The French economist, Gabriel Zucman has had extraordinary success in pushing to normalise the need to tax the super-rich. His main proposal is that the super-rich pay taxes equivalent to 2% of their wealth each year.

Conversely, his mentor and friend Thomas Piketty, together with the team at the World Inequality Lab, are calling for a tax on billionaires of 20%, in their recent Global Justice Report. (Zucman actually made this point too in his brilliant book with Emmanuel Saez, The Triumph of Injustice- saying that if the aim is to reduce inequality and deconcentrate wealth we need a rate of 10%, not 2%.)

These are of course two very different proposals- one moderate, one revolutionary. One would raise a lot of money for good things; one would eliminate billionaires in twenty years.

The question is do they conflict or are they complimentary?

Debates within Oxfam

A few years ago, our annual inequality paper, published for Davos, was called ‘Survival of the Richest’, and that year focused on the urgent need to tax the super-rich. When writing it we had to decide what we were going to call for ―what kinds of taxes and at what level.

Starting from first principles, we all agreed that we needed tax rates that were not just going to raise money, but that were actually going to reduce the level of wealth inequality in the world, not just slow its increase.

We did the numbers and found that rates of around 17% would achieve this. But then the debates began. We could not, many believed, call for such high rates of wealth taxation. These were pie in the sky. We would be “laughed out of the room.” Whilst we modelled what this would do to billionaire wealth, we in the end decided not to call for such high rates.

My own view is that as Oxfam, we should have, and that by doing so we should have pushed the boundaries of what was possible, in turn making the brilliant proposals of Zucman seem like the more palatable ones to politicians and decision makers. That by demanding these high rates we would be firstly demanding what was actually required to end the evils of extreme wealth concentration, and secondly stretching the bounds of what was politically possible and practical.

Laughed out of whose room?

Over the years, working on different topics, I have regularly heard that expression, ‘we will be laughed out of the room.’ For me it is quite revealing of a specific understanding of how change happens in the world, and one I think is wrong.

For a start, it presupposes that we are in the “room” in the first place. We are sometimes. It has happened to me a handful of times in my life. I remember working with Gordon Brown when he was UK Prime Minister with my colleague Anna, helping them create a plan to fund free healthcare in a series of countries in Africa. It was truly exhilarating ―every advocate’s dream. The plan was implemented, and millions of people got free public healthcare as a result.

But these moments are very few and growing fewer still.

The other thought behind this view is that we are in those rooms because of our moderate, technical and sensible proposals, and that conversely, if we start calling for radical, revolutionary things, we will not be invited back into the room again.

Demanding the stars

I really don’t agree with this. In fact, I think it is the opposite. That unless you demand the stars, you have no chance of getting the moon. If you go into the room with a sensible, technical proposal to go to the moon, then you will never leave the Earth.

Together with many others, we campaigned for years to make the case that healthcare should be free. That charging user fees for public healthcare, as insisted on by the World Bank at the time, contributed to killing huge numbers of people each year, denying healthcare to babies, to pregnant mothers, to the elderly. Together we built that room.

It is my strong belief that radical proposals are not just the right ones, but also by far the most tactical and strategic. They do not conflict with moderate ones. They create the space for them.

This is what the right do- their horrible, radical, and racist proposals do not prevent them becoming more powerful. They do not stop them being influential or being listened to. Quite the opposite- they build a new, racist room, that we all then have to operate in.

Conversely calling for moderate proposals on their own, without radical ones, is I think dangerous. It closes the space of possibility as politicians will often see them not as moderate but instead the outer edge of what is being demanded. It shrinks the room. Zucman agrees; his view is that his practical proposals are made more, rather than less likely to happen because of Piketty’s more radical ones.

Sticking only to moderate, technical proposals also stops us being able to do what the left is best at, which is tell a story of a radically more wonderful society for everyone. This in turn I think undermining our chances of success. I think it is no coincidence that the number of rooms is shrinking fast.

Our future is real. Theirs is a confidence trick

Radical ideas, expressed in ways that mobilise millions of people and make them emotionally commit to a different future, are what I think truly changes the world. They shift the whole understanding of what is politically “practical.”

I also think that as progressives, we have an advantage here, as our vision for a different world is inherently attractive to virtually everyone. No hunger, no poverty. An end to climate breakdown, a wonderful planet preserved forever. High quality public healthcare, education and housing for everyone. Less work, more happiness, more trust, more community, more caring for one another.

For the right, they constantly have to make a world that is only really attractive to the richest sound attractive to everyone. Hayek was very good at this, focusing on the universal desire for freedom from tyranny, and individual choice, and using that to promote a system where freedom was only really for the rich.

But it is very hard for them. The vision of a white Europe, free from anyone whose skin colour is different, or whose origins were in another continent, is not one that is positive or has wide appeal ―its main motivation is hatred and fear, not love.

It helps to have the billionaire owned media on your side, but it remains a constant confidence trick. The constant need to convince people that something would be good for them that wouldn’t, or that their troubles are the fault of x, y, or z rather than the rich and powerful, rather than presenting a genuine, positive and exciting vision of the future.

Building your own room

For me, our job, in the NGO, campaigning and advocacy world, is to focus mainly on building a new room, and then constantly pushing to expand it. Just like the vicious visionaries who dreamt up the dystopian “Great Replacement Theory” and came up with the idea of remigration. They weren’t trying to get into someone else’s room with moderate, ‘sensible’ proposals.

I was privy to an argument once between two of my bosses very early in my career. The debate between them was whether we should be calling for a pause in the bombing of Afghanistan to enable humanitarian aid to be delivered. One of my bosses said to the other, with a quiet fury, ‘The trouble is, X, if this were the campaign against slavery you would have us calling for more comfortable boats.’

This is what happens when you end up fighting in somebody elses room- instead we must always build our own one.

END.

Author: Max Lawson, Head of Inequality Policy at Oxfam International and EQUALS podcast co-host. He is also a visiting Professor in Practice at the LSE International Inequalities Institute and the co-chair of the Global People’s Medicines Alliance.

To contextualise this further, Musk is now $300 billion wealthier than 3.8 billion people in the world. If he were a country and his wealth were the GDP, the one-person Republic of Musk would be the 20th-largest economy in the world. If he were to spend $1 million per day, it would take him more than 3,280 years to exhaust his wealth. One of my friends said that for him losing $10 in one night would be a disaster for him. Feels like a joke, but not for billions of people.

In 2024, my colleagues and I at Oxfam projected that we would see the first trillionaire in a decade. We did not think it would happen quite as fast, but it’s no surprise to those of us who have been following and speaking about the dangerous inequality explosion.

Since the turn of this decade, we have seen a massive concentration of wealth at the top. In nominal terms, i.e. not adjusted for inflation, the world’s billionaires’ wealth is now 2.5 times higher than at the start of 2020, having grown from $8 trillion to more than $20.1 trillion as of 12 June 2026, according to data from the Forbes billionaires list.

Too much wealth and power in a few people

Just imagine what such wealth in the hands of a few people can do to the world. For a start, it can buy influence and political power. Politicians will do your bidding, and government policies can easily be used to appease you. The media – even if not under your full ownership and control (although much of it may be)- will be paying attention to every word you say, and the world will be keenly following it.

That could mean influencing an election in some distant land, sowing division and deciding what people talk about and how. These are not hypothetical examples: seven of the top 10 biggest media companies in the world are owned by billionaires.

No person should have such a massive amount of wealth-it’s too corrosive. Too dangerous.

Trillionaires and extreme poverty in the same world

Even as we get the first dollar trillionaire, the rest of the world is suffering. Globally, nearly 3.8 billion people are living in poverty, 2.3 billion lack enough food, and 3 billion people are facing a housing crisis. And governments are dealing with bankruptcies.

The ongoing war in the Middle East and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz have set food and energy prices soaring, hitting workers and poor people, especially in the world’s poorest countries, the most. Extreme hunger and poverty are expected to rise.

While this is happening, the stock market has hit a record high, further cementing the wealth of the richest. It’s the irony of the world we are living in: too much suffering and too much pain for the majority and too much wealth for a few.

This inequality is because of bad policies

This massive accumulation of wealth is due to bad policies by governments, especially the powerful ones. Mega corporations and their wealthiest owners have enjoyed lower taxes, benefited from deregulation and government subsidies. Musk himself is a big beneficiary of the American taxpayers. This has enabled him to build his empire.

Oxfam’s research shows that about 60% of billionaires’ money is not merited. It has been gained through cronyism, monopoly, and inheritance - these are takers, not makers

It’s a free market for the rest of us and a welfare state for the richest. Nobody should lie to you that billionaires are the most hardworking, most innovative people in the world.

It’s time to tax the super-rich

Tackling wealth accumulation and investing in the common good, like healthcare and decent, affordable housing, is what governments should be doing. It requires decisiveness and bold policy.

A permanent wealth tax on the super-rich can help keep inequality in check, especially if it is designed in a progressive way where the rates paid by billionaires and trillionaires are far higher than for those that are ‘merely’ multi-millionaires or centi-millionaires. A much higher rate of tax would be needed to actually reduce inequality- last week the economist Thomas Piketty recommended a permanent tax on billionaires of 20%.

The money generated from such a tax could mean a lot to billions of people and governments. Just as a thought experiment, a one-off 10% tax on Musk’s $1.2 trillion dollars would raise $120 billion-enough to end extreme poverty in the world for a year. He would still be a trillionaire.

Any wealth tax should be accompanied by other measures, such as regulations to break up monopolies and oligopolies that hinder fair competition and exploit consumers, and stronger protections for workers’ rights.

Finally, governments must set up clear timebound targets to rapidly reduce inequality and monitor progress. They should aim for a Palma ratio of 1 or below- this means the top 10% would not earn more than the bottom 40%. That means that, on average, a person in the richest 10% will still be 4 times richer than someone in the bottom 40%. So far from perfect equality, but much better than today, where the richest 10% can be 5, or 10 times richer than the bottom 40%.

The world cannot afford trillionaires, or indeed billionaires, while the majority of people sleep hungry and tens of millions die from preventable diseases. Governments need to take bold action. And we citizens must demand they do the right thing.

END.

Author: Anthony Kamande is Inequality Research and Policy Advisor at Oxfam International.

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I was confronted with my own lack of awareness about why such vast inequality exists between the Global North and the Global South. I also realised that, as a company, we had not engaged in a meaningful way with Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It is arguably the most under-fulfilled human right of them all, affecting billions of our fellow human beings:

‘Everybody has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and wellbeing of himself and his family …’

I reached out to Jason Hickel, and we had many long conversations. Jason previously worked in international development and was a passionate believer in the narrative of aid as the solution to global inequality. But once he started digging, that belief was shaken to its core. Those conversations are what finally led me to write a play called “A Fine Idea.” The play looks at human rights in a more expansive way, drawing our attention to the structural drivers of an extreme status quo. I wanted to explore whether theatre could help audiences engage with ideas traditionally confined to economics books, policy papers and academic conferences.

Much of the action takes place in Kenya during the June 2024 Gen Z uprising. This historic mobilisation saw massive numbers of (mostly) young Kenyans take to the streets to demand that the Finance Bill 2024 be rejected and not passed into law. Crucially, these young protesters were explicitly joining the dots between proposed sweeping domestic tax hikes, including on basic goods like bread and cooking oil, and the rigid conditionalities attached to International Monetary Fund (IMF) loans. What began as peaceful protests turned deadly; scores of young Kenyans were killed by police, many were abducted, and some remain missing.

This is not an isolated phenomenon. This youth-led resistance represents a tectonic shift echoing across the Global South. In recent years, from Kenya to Nepal, Bangladesh, the Philippines, Morocco, Madagascar and Indonesia, a new generation is rising. They are refusing to accept the suffocating logic of austerity imposed from afar.

Conversations with Kenyan activists and experts, including the incredible Wanjira Wanjiru have deepened our understanding of these protests and the profound economic questions surrounding them. While most people in the Global North view the Bretton Woods institutions as positive or neutral, Wanjira pulled no punches when we asked for her perspective, describing them as “a cancer within our continent.”

What made me write this play is not simply the scale of global inequality, but how normalised it has become. We treat poverty, debt and inequality as facts of life rather than the consequences of economic systems shaped by political choices. “A Fine Idea” is an attempt to open up that conversation and ask whether a different future is possible.

END.

For those interested in exploring these questions further, “A Fine Idea” will run at the Arcola Theatre in London from 11 June to 4 July. EQUALS podcast subscribers can access £15 tickets using the code 15JO. I’d love to see you there ―and please share these details with anyone who might want to join the conversation.

On the final performance on 4 July, will join us for a post-show discussion to explore the themes of “The Divide” and the wider questions of global inequality raised by the play, followed by an audience Q&A.

Author: Christine Bacon is the Co-Artistic Director of ice&fire theatre and the writer of the play “A Fine Idea.” She is also trustee of the Student Action for Refugees.

Listen to our latest episode with Guy Standing on the profit-churn approach of modern education, inequality, basic income, and how to reclaim common goods.

Me and my colleagues Maaza and Anthony with Uncle Ho

Living beyond means

It is quite common, certainly in my experience, for leaders in countries to set as their goal the country as a whole moving forward out of a particular income bracket by a certain date, whether it is moving from low to lower-middle income, or from lower to upper middle income, or finally moving up to become a high income country.

In some ways this is totally understandable as it is a simple way of delineating progress. But countries are not individuals, who are either rich or poor or somewhere in between. They are collections of millions and sometimes hundreds of millions of people with individual lives, aggregated in very different ways.

These country income thresholds, set by the World Bank, have a huge impact and influence. Access to different levels of support, whether it is grants or concessional lending from donors, is strongly linked to them.

But ultimately, they are averages, and averages are of limited use, especially in situations of high inequality, which is more likely than not the case in most countries of the Global South.

Equatorial Guinea for example, was a high-income country between 2007 and 2014. It has now slipped back into upper middle income. At one point during the euro crisis, it briefly had a higher per capita income than Spain. Yet throughout it has had infant mortality rates similar to Mozambique or Haiti and half the population live in poverty. Virtually all of its oil wealth has been captured basically by one ruling family.

Poverty in Equatorial Guinea

The ‘K’ shaped economy discussion

This tyranny of averages has become news recently because of the discussion of the ‘K’ shaped recovery in the USA. 49% of all US consumption is by the top 10% of incomes. Whilst the top is booming, and this carries through to the overall growth rates and usual performance measures of the economy, ordinary people are struggling.

The K shaped economy and recovery is a hot topic in the US but relevant everywhere

Many of the economic measures we use first came into being in the rich world after WW2, with the greater availability of standard and regular national accounting statistics. This coincided with a period in the rich world of low inequality, which could be one of the reasons why problems with relying on national averages were not really a big thing. Sometimes in fact the incomes at the bottom were growing faster than the top so averages underplayed the progress being made.

The country classifications, into low, middle, and high, were made up by the World Bank, becoming fully formalised in the late 1980s. From the beginning they were criticised, and alternative measures proposed, perhaps the most successful being the Human Development Index (which measures health and education outcomes as well as income but is still based on averages). Nevertheless, like GDP growth, these thresholds have taken on a political life of their own.

Learning from the success of Vietnam

I was lucky enough to be in Vietnam late last month, talking with academics, students and policy makers, organised by my wonderful colleagues in Oxfam in Vietnam. Vietnam has a huge amount to be proud of. It has witnessed rapid and uninterrupted growth in GNI per capita, rising almost fivefold between 1995 and 2024, whilst at the same time keeping inequality at a reasonable level. Vietnam has a medium level of inequality, at a Gini of 0.35, similar to Germany, and below the World Bank threshold for high inequality, which is a Gini of 0.4. This combination of relative equality and high growth has translated into the elimination of extreme poverty, and a far better life for the huge majority of Vietnamese.

Vietnam- rapid progress in per capita GNI with inequality remaining fairly level.

However, by some measures, especially those measures of top incomes and wealth, Vietnam is becoming more unequal. Also, their equality is largely a product of the way the economy is structured before government intervention (this is known as ‘market inequality’)- whilst there have been big investments in education and in health in recent years, the redistributive impact of taxation and government spending on inequality remains relatively limited.

The Vietnamese government have a very clear goal to reach high income status, and to do this with double digit growth. Our key discussion on the visit was that in doing this, they need to work very hard too to keep inequality at manageable levels. Looking at the experience of other countries in the region, they have a clear choice of the path ahead. In preparing for our visit, my amazing colleague Anthony pulled together these charts- the first compares China with Korea, which is quite startling- you can see Korea reached high-income status whilst constantly maintaining inequality at a medium level. China by contrast saw a huge leap in income inequality, going from being one of the world’s most equal countries to having high inequality, on a par with the USA. It was not just Korea either, but also countries like Japan, Taiwan, Thailand- all grew rapidly whilst keeping inequality at a reasonable level.

China and Korea- both had very rapid growth, but China GINI also rose very sharply

The second looks at Vietnam in comparison to four countries, Philippines, South Africa and Thailand.

Today the Philippines and Vietnam have very similar per capita average incomes, but poverty in the Philippines is three times higher because they have much higher inequality.

South Africa is upper-middle income, but famously also one of the most unequal countries in the world, so also remains with high levels of poverty. Conversely Thailand, which has broadly the same average income, has levels of poverty more than three times lower than South Africa.

In short, it is quite possible to grow at the same time as managing inequality at a good level, and ideally at a Gini below 0.3, the World Bank threshold for low inequality.

This has huge political implications, as the discussion in the USA shows. The K shaped economy thesis could equally explain why Gen Z protests exploded in high inequality Kenya, despite robust economic growth for years and a steady progress towards the government target of reaching upper middle-income status by 2030.

K is also for Kenya

If the majority of consumption is by those at the very top, then the economy, and the market is tailored towards them. The media often targets them as a result, and advertising definitely does by definition. Their lives dominate the films, the television we watch. It can sometimes feel like their lives are the only lives we know about or hear about. They are also much less exposed to rising food and energy prices. They also tend to be the ones in government and in power. It becomes rapidly a tale of two countries, and not one, and where the tale of the top is the only one that is told. This is I think not only a deeply unfair but also an unstable situation.

Ditching the averages

In short, using average incomes to define whether a country is poor or rich is convenient and easily understood, but it obscures as much as it illuminates. An average measure is useful broadly in proportion I would say to the level of inequality in a country, and in high inequality countries it is not very helpful at all. This is something that has long been the case in most of the Global South and is now once again becoming more the case in a number the rich countries of the Global North too.

We can start by much better and regular measurement of inequality too. Other combined measures, like the World Bank’s ‘prosperity gap’ measure are also very useful. There is no shortage of better ways to do this, and we need to use them.

It is time to live beyond means.

Now, sitting here in 2026, this feels mercifully calm. By my count, since 2020 we have had five global level shocks to the economic system. First was the impact of Covid itself on the global economy.

Second was the credit crunch that followed the pandemic as rich countries rapidly increased interest rates prompting further debt crises. Virtually simultaneous with this was the energy and food crisis that hit the globe after the Ukraine War. Fourth was the widespread economic disruption prompted by the actions of the second Trump administration; the sudden imposition of tariffs on the majority of countries, and the huge cuts to Official Development Assistance (ODA) that happened pretty much simultaneously. Now fifth is unlawful US and Israel war against Iran, which is creating a food and energy shock that may dwarf that of the Ukraine War.

Add to this a sixth crisis too, which was already becoming apparent in the 2010’s but seems much more present in the 2020’s. The relentless rise in huge and horrific extreme weather events and the slow but equally relentless reductions in food production because of climate breakdown.

All in all, the 2020’s have so far been a decade of almost permanent economic crisis.

Winners, losers and inequality in times of crisis

Each of these crises has its own unique aspects but also has some strong similarities, especially regarding inequality. These crises are always hardest on ordinary people everywhere; and particularly on women, racialised groups and other vulnerable people. They are also particularly hard on ordinary people in the Global South, in countries that are largely unable to provide them the kind of social protection that is available to many in the Global North.

Each crisis costs governments dearly, and drives up public debt, as they seek to stay afloat and where possible help their populations. Once again, whilst almost all governments feel the fiscal pain, rich country governments, with their hard currencies, have much lower borrowing costs, and Global South governments are the most exposed.

Finally, each crisis, whilst at times temporarily denuding the fortunes of the richest, always seems to leave them richer than they were before.

Compound crises

Picture a family in Nairobi, whose main breadwinner is a taxi driver, who have a small plot of land back in their home village. The lockdowns of Covid-19 hit business hard with tourism grinding to a halt, but they managed to scrape by. Poor and erratic rains have meant food and income from their small piece of land has been much lower than it used to be. At one point in 2021 they had to move house in their informal settlement of Kawangware in Nairobi because of flooding that damaged their building and swept away many of their belongings.

When the food and fuel crisis hit in 2022 they had to take out a loan against their car, so they managed to avoid selling the taxi but ended up in much more debt. In 2023 the hospital bills and funeral costs of the taxi drivers’ mother also added significantly to their financial problems. Their oldest daughter had to drop out of high school as there was not enough money to pay school fees.

Now in 2026, with the very sharp rise in food and fuel prices once again, they may be forced to sell the taxi, to have enough to pay rent and buy food to survive. They are contemplating taking their other children out of school and moving back to the village.

This is a fictional story but based on a family I know very well. It is I think probably very typical of the majority of humanity- around half of the global population live below the $8.30 a day poverty line. Not the poorest of the poor but just scraping by. It shows how personal and global shocks hit families hard, and how they can also interact. How it is possible to get through one crisis, maybe two, but beyond that crises compound and the scars left become more and more permanent and serious. This includes debt traps and the slow depletion of what few assets a family owns, including the need to sell assets like a car that undermine the way the family makes its money.

This is known as the ‘poverty rachet’ effect, made famous by the brilliant Robert Chambers; whereby sudden, irreversible events (like a medical emergency, a bad harvest, or a forced distress sale of land) can permanently lock a household into a lower economic tier.

Governments too, follow a similar path, having to take on further debts, often in foreign currency and at high interest, to get through one crisis, only to be hit by another, and then another, slowing development to a standstill and throwing things into reverse.

Wealth rachets

Whilst not described perhaps in quite the same way, wealth too is I think subject to a rachet effect from multiple crises. We know of course that in normal times, when someone becomes very wealthy, then that wealth can develop a momentum of its own. Wealth begets more wealth and is maintained over generations.

At times of crisis economic wealth is often in part destroyed, but what we see is how fast it bounces back, and how resilient it is. Wealth can become more concentrated still, as even when the richest lose assets in a crisis, they still have resources left to buy up the assets sold by others, often at knockdown prices, or are able to use their wealth to lend to others, often through financial intermediaries. So, each crisis can increase wealth concentration sharply.

The super rich saw their wealth hugely inflated by government interventions in their economies in response to the 2008 Financial Crisis and then again in 2020 when Covid-19 hit; trillions of dollars were poured into the global economy, driving up asset prices worldwide, and with this the fortunes of the richest. They have been able to use these resources to reinvest and in turn to make money out of subsequent crises; for example, in lending more money at high rates of interest to countries of the Global South, or in the rapidly rising shares of food and energy corporations or weapons manufacturers.

This graph in The Economist a couple of weeks ago pretty much sums that up:

Centrifugal or centripetal crises

Joseph Stiglitz talks about centrifugal forces in the economy, which, like a roundabout in children’s playground, force things outwards, driving inequality higher. Economic shocks are I think very likely to have this centrifugal impact on our economies, with each crisis driving us further apart.

He contrasts this with centripetal forces in the economy, which can act to increase equality. An example could be market regulation, or investment in public services.

Yet in the 20^th century, the response to shocks like the Great Depression in the USA, or World War Two, actually led to greater equality, not greater inequality in many countries. There is no automatic link between economic crises and rising inequality, although this is much more common. Governments can respond to economic shocks ways that actually reduce equality.

Most recently this was true with income inequality during Covid-19 in a number of countries; in the USA, whist wealth inequality grew, income inequality fell faster during Covid-19 than it had for decades, and child poverty was cut by 40%, the largest drop ever recorded, thanks to the prompt and generous action by government. Sadly, these government actions were allowed to expire soon afterwards in Congress, losing that progress that was made against child poverty.

At times of crisis, the way people respond often shows their true colours- this is true of governments too.

Equality is also the best protection

Looking at things the other way round, in a world of almost annual economic shocks and seemingly permanent crisis I strongly think that the most direct way to mitigate their harmful impacts is to have a low level of inequality in the first place.

More equal societies for a start radically reduce the individual impact of personal crises. For example, free, universal public healthcare stops anyone being forced into poverty by catastrophic health expenditures. It spreads the risk, and makes individual lives far less precarious, even if their incomes are still not very high.

Equality also helps mitigate the impact of global crises too. More equal societies are more cohesive. Risks are distributed more fairly across society, and as a result the overall risks faced are reduced. They are more prepared to cope with shocks when they arrive, whatever those shocks are; be it the impact of AI, rogue presidents, typhoons, wars, or whatever else.

Equality is the best protection.

ENDS

Author: Max Lawson, Head of Inequality Policy at Oxfam International and EQUALS podcast co-host. He is also a visiting Professor in Practice at the LSE International Inequalities Institute and the co-chair of the Global People’s Medicines Alliance.

In our previous EQUALS episode, Adam Hanieh explores how crises like war, financial shocks, and pandemics ripple across borders through energy prices, food systems, and rising living costs, hitting the poorest of the population the hardest. Listen here.

As the conflicts in recent weeks have shown, fossil fuel dependence also triggers energy access disruptions and price shocks that disproportionately affect poor households and marginalised communities across the world, who are struggling to afford their bills. Meanwhile, super-rich individuals and corporations reap huge profits from fossil dependence, consolidating power and wealth. These are the true colours of climate inequality.

But an alternative exists. A just transition away from fossil fuels to renewable energy is possible, viable and can reshape how societies are organised around energy. It could break the cycle of dependency, inequality and violence.

A truly just transition must go beyond replacing fossil fuels. It must reshape who owns, controls, and benefits from energy, ensuring it is treated as a public good and a human right, rather than a source of profit, power and securitisation.

Humanitarian crisis and Iran: when energy becomes a weapon

The unlawful war waged by the United States and Israel against Iran has killed at least 3,636 people in Iran, including 254 children. Up to 3.2 million Iranians have been displaced from their homes, and strikes have damaged 763 schools and 334 health centres.

A deeply concerning trend is the growing instrumentalization of energy and fossil fuel dependency. Energy infrastructure has been targeted throughout the conflict. More than 80 energy facilities have been attacked since the war began, with damage estimated at up to $58 billion. After Israel bombed facilities in Iran, Tehran responded with strikes on the infrastructure of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait and the UAE. Inside Iran, communities already under strain have been left enduring daily blackouts.

The war is also burning carbon at a devastating rate. In just 14 days, the conflict generated over 5 million tonnes of CO₂, draining the global carbon budget faster than 84 countries combined. And yet, the war is dismantling energy security across the region and could divert around $25 billion into rebuilding fossil fuel infrastructure, repairing the very systems that drive instability, instead of investing in an energy transition.

The closure by Iran of the Strait of Hormuz— which carries around 20% of the world’s crude oil — and the US stopping ships from entering or exiting Iranian ports triggered what the International Energy Agency (IEA) has called the greatest disruption to global oil supply in history.

Because of its reliance on Gulf oil, Asia has been hit hardest: the Philippines declared a national energy emergency, Pakistan announced school closures and homework for half of all public officials to save fuel. In Sri Lanka, fuel prices have risen 33 percent, with food costs possibly climbing up to 15 percent, as fertiliser supply chains also collapse in Hormuz.

The IEA reported more than 32 governments implementing extraordinary energy conservation measures and nearly 50 introducing emergency consumer support. Public budgets are once again being stretched to carry the weight of fossil fuel dependency, subsidising the profits of the corporations driving this crisis.

Venezuela and Cuba: fossil fuel reconfiguration without human recovery

When the US military seized Venezuelan President Maduro at the start of 2026, Trump made one motive clear: U.S. companies would develop Venezuela’s oil reserves and salvage oil revenue. Venezuela holds the world’s largest proven oil reserves, according to OPEC: 300 billion barrels or 17 percent of the global total.

Shares of some fossil fuel giants rose between 3-6 percent immediately after the military operation. In April 2026, fossil fuel companies moved to expand their presence in Venezuela, signing deals that included asset swaps and new rights to develop oil fields.

Meanwhile, ordinary Venezuelans still struggle every day to make ends meet. In late March, eight-hour power cuts returned, underscoring that access to reliable electricity and basic services remains fragile. Rising oil production cannot offset years of grid underinvestment, while the intensifying dry seasons and climate shocks continue to strain hydropower, which supplies 77% of electricity.

Nearly 8 million people still require assistance in the country, yet humanitarian response capacity has sharply declined. This gap reveals a critical risk: economic reconfiguration without human recovery.

Cuba tells a parallel story. In January 2026, the U.S. administration moved to severely limit oil shipments to the island. Venezuela had been Cuba’s primary oil supplier for decades, a lifeline now cut off. Cuba’s national electric grid reliant on fossil fuel, collapsed in mid-March.

Blackouts forced hospitals to suspend operations and schools and businesses to close. Shortages of cooking gas, gasoline, and diesel strained transport, food supplies, and water pumps. Once again, it is the poorest who pay the highest price.

Fossil Industry: crisis profiteering

Six of the world’s biggest fossil fuel companies — Chevron, Shell, BP, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil and TotalEnergies — are projected to earn $3,000 a second in profits in 2026, according to Oxfam research. That is an increase of $37 million a day compared to their 2025 profits. Their projected profits for 2026 stand at $94 billion: enough to provide solar power for the energy needs of almost 50 million people in Africa.

A large share of those profits flows directly to the wealthiest 1 percent — concentrated in the Global North — who profit from the climate destruction these corporations cause, while working to maintain fossil dependence through their monopoly on wealth and political influence.

Yet rather than investing those profits in the transition, these corporations are doubling down on fossil fuels. ExxonMobil announced a reduction of a third of its planned investment in low-carbon energy projects, while TotalEnergies refused to adopt a net-zero transition plan aligned with the 1.5° degrees Celsius target.

The fragility of fossil fuel dependency

Fossil fuel dependence makes energy markets fragile. When wars disrupt supply routes or damage infrastructure, prices surge, supply tightens, and the burden falls on ordinary people through higher energy bills, rising food prices, inflation, and deepening poverty. In 2022, as a ripple effect of the war in Ukraine, energy and food price shocks pushed over 70 million people into poverty in just three months.

For oil-producing countries, dependence on revenues from fossil fuels exposes economies to volatility and external interference. For consuming countries, reliance on imported fossil fuels creates exposure to price shocks and geopolitics.

African countries such as South Sudan and Zimbabwe illustrate this vulnerability. South Sudan, home to East Africa’s largest oil reserves, still imports most of its fuel due to a lack of refining capacity, and generates 96 percent of its electricity from oil. During the Hormuz crisis, power cuts in the capital Juba lasted up to 12 hours a day, paralysing businesses and daily life.

Zimbabwe, reliant on fossil fuel imports, began diluting petrol with ethanol and announced plans to scrap fuel taxes to ease prices. However, this measure has its own distributional challenges: ethanol blending does not necessarily reduce transport costs for consumers. While locally produced ethanol is untaxed, potentially easing prices, it can also reduce government revenue and concentrate benefits among a few large, wealthy producers.

The resilience of renewable energy

Renewable energy offers a more secure, resilient, and equitable alternative. Decentralized systems such as solar and wind are less vulnerable to targeted attacks, quicker to repair, and support grid stability during emergencies, as seen in Ukraine. They do not rely on continuous extraction, processing, and long-distance transport through fragile supply chains. Once deployed, renewables are locally available resources, reducing exposure to geopolitical shocks.

Renewables offer more stable costs, shielding households from the extreme price volatility, especially during conflicts. During the Hormuz crisis, electricity prices rose across Europe, but significantly less in Spain due to lower gas dependence. The country generates about 57 percent of its energy from renewables. Solar, wind, and hydro complement each other across seasons and times of day, reducing the need for gas as the backup source.

Renewables can shift power away from concentrated ownership by enabling decentralised, locally distributed generation that strengthens community resilience. Lebanon has shown the strong potential of decentralised renewable energy, as the recent economic crisis drove thousands of households and businesses to adopt solar power to provide essential services, such as water pumping. However, this transition was mired with inequalities in access, with poor households and marginalized communities unable to reap the same benefits. Lebanon’s energy potential was also harmed by Israel’s relentless military campaign which has also targeted solar panels, as it was done in Gaza, showing the limitations of resilience against such systematic destruction.

The Path Forward: Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels

The energy transition is not only about reducing emissions. It is about addressing one of the structural drivers of inequality, humanitarian crisis, and violence: fossil fuel dependence.

A just transition also depends on reforming the international financial architecture, which currently strangles the fiscal space in the Global South and tightens further during war and crisis. This drives debt burdens that can lock developing countries into fossil fuel dependency and constrain climate action. Global North countries must not only move first and faster but also enable the Global South to do the same.

A just and accelerated transition away from fossil fuels towards renewable energy offers a shared path forward. It can reduce emissions, ease geopolitical tensions tied to resource extraction and control, and strengthen energy access and security for communities. Most importantly, it can help build a fairer system in which the benefits of energy are more equitably shared, rather than concentrated among a few.

Author: Mateo Adarve Zuluaga is the Global Research and Advocacy Lead at Oxfam Great Britain.

For more on the political economy of war, oil, and inequality, listen to our recent EQUALS podcast conversation with Adam Hanieh.

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Beyond this immediate devastation, the conflict is also driving wider consequences including higher energy bills, rising costs of food, deepening poverty, environmental destruction, and widening inequality whilst ordinary people everywhere will face ethe costs. It is communities in the Global South who live in poor and climate-vulnerable countries and have the least means to adapt to the growing chaos, face the brunt of the impacts – with women and girls disproportionately impacted.

Meanwhile, fossil fuels corporations are set to secure some of their best profits in history. As Oxfam research shows , fossil fuel companies are projected to earn almost $3,000 a second in 2026 while families struggle to afford energy bills worldwide.

A glimpse of hope?

The first conference on transitioning away from fossil fuels, held in Santa Marta last week, must be celebrated and it is a welcome solutions-driven process for moving away from fossil fuel dependency. Yet a key question remains over the political will to shift to translate words into action. Implementing a fossil-free future presents many political and financial hurdles, especially for the Global South that face increasing debt levels and limited support from richer countries.

Without proper finance to fund a fair transition away from fossil fuels, low- and middle-income countries won’t be able to phase out fossil fuels as fast, or at all. Many of them are trapped into drilling oil to service their debts, not to foster development. Over 3.4 billion people live in countries that spend more on paying debt interest charges than on health or education.

This is by design. The global energy system continues to follow a colonial model, where Global North countries extract resources and labour from the Global South – in this case, oil and gas – while the richest people and governments hoard the profits. Even if developing countries want to transition away from fossil fuels, they are faced with policy conditionalities of international financial institutions that reinforce the exploitation of fossil fuels. One study found that the IMF loan agreements with 11 of the worlds poorest countries were assuming that they must continue drilling in order to repay their debts.

The current financial architecture seems to penalize rather than help climate champions. In 2023, after a historic national referendum in Ecuador, that decided against the exploration of new oil reserves the country’s credit rating was downgraded by the international financial system, increasing the costs of its borrowing.

A just transition away from fossil fuels must not replicate the colonial power dynamics of the current energy system. It must happen hand-in-hand with a reform of the international financial architecture: addressing the debt crisis, rejecting the private investor-led approach to development and climate finance, reversing the aid cuts, and making sure the finance for a just transition comes from those most responsible for the climate crisis, not the poorest and most climate-vulnerable countries.

Global South leading the way for the just transition

Despite all the challenges, low- and middle-income countries are leading the way. Colombian president Gustavo Petro, was elected in 2022, aiming to decrease fossil fuel extraction, despite this accounting for around half of the country’s exports, two thirds of final energy consumption and 3 to 6 percent of GDP.

Colombia is not alone. These efforts should be celebrated and concretely supported, not penalised. Rich, historic polluters must phase out first and faster. Rhetoric by Global North promising to address these system’s imbalances such as addressing inequality or supporting fairer debt and tax decision making forums is not translating into practice.

To end the fossil fuel dependency and fund a just transition, we need a reformed international financial system where the Global South can have a voice and meaningful participation in economic decision making: if they’re not at the table, then they will continue to be on the menu. Until then, the only people benefiting from this system are rich polluters, the super-rich and vested interests.

The momentum gathered in Santa Marta must send a clear sign to policymakers around the world to carry on the momentum for a fossil free future in other international processes such as the upcoming UN climate talks in Bonn in June, COP31 in Turkey, and the second transition conference hosted by Tuvalu and Ireland in 2027. This year, global leaders must drop the fossil fuel dependency and pave a new, fairer path.

Author: Mariana Paoli is the Climate Justice Policy & Advocacy Lead at Oxfam International.

As governments convened in Santa Marta as part of a collation of the willing to phase out fossil fuels, last week’s Bulletin looked at how oil and gas companies are profiting from the current crisis.

Listen to the latest episode of the Equals podcast with Adam Hanieh who explains why crises like war, financial shocks, and pandemics don’t stay where they start. They move through the structures of the global economy.

Sir Humphrey, the quintessential obfuscating bureaucrat. If you click on the picture it should take you to the clip.

It is timeless classic because it captures a feeling about the way bureaucracy and politicians interact. Bureaucrats run rings around the politicians to ensure nothing is ever done, and the politicians are weak, self-interested and easily hoodwinked by the bureaucrats. You are left laughing about just how inept government and politicians are.

In more recent years, there have been a rash of new political dramas, for example ‘The Thick of It’ about UK politics or ‘Veep’ about US politics. ‘House of Cards’, was originally made by the BBC about UK politics was successfully transposed to the US. In Brazil, the show ‘O Mecanismo’ or ‘The Whirlwind’ in Korea were both very negative, portraying politicians and politics as broadly corrupt and self-serving.

What all these programmes have in common is an even deeper cynicism about politicians and government. They tend to focus on the self-interested motivations of the characters, and through this, focus on traits of ‘artifice, pandering, deceit and positioning for advantage- in general mistrustfulness’. If values and morals are mentioned, it is usually to be derided and mocked, mainly as weaknesses.

The West Wing- I have always striven and entirely failed to be as cool and unflappable as Leo (right) the Presidents Chief of Staff

Not all political dramas are entirely cynical; ‘Borgen’ in Denmark started off pretty idealistic- although it did get increasingly cynical as the series progressed. Another wildly successful series was ‘The West Wing’, which was about a pragmatic but progressive and value driven US President and his team trying to do his best to make the world a better place. It was felt by many at the time to be Hollywood’s answer to the real-world disappointments of the Clinton and Bush Presidencies.

One scientific study actually measured participants level of cynicism before and after watching episodes of ‘The West Wing’ or ‘House of Cards’ and found that House of Cards did increase people’s negativity about politics considerably.

Who benefits most from people becoming cynical about politics and politicians?

I think arguably broad cynicism with all politicians and government benefits those on the right of the political spectrum more than the left. Such cynicism drives down participation in democracy and a belief that voting can ever make a difference. Usually, the first to stop voting and exercising their democratic rights are the poorest people too.

As perhaps further evidence of this, ‘Yes Minister’ was one of Mrs Thatcher’s and Friedrich von Hayek’s favourite programmes. It was co-written by Anthony Jay, who was a close collaborator with right wing free market think tanks, and a speechwriter for Conservative politicians.

Well organised democratic politics is I think the most powerful yet peaceful mechanism ever invented to put the brakes on runaway capitalism and extreme inequality. It follows that anything that drives up political apathy and drives down political participation ultimately harms politicians on the left more than the right, as even if politicians on the right lose trust, the outcome is more power given to market forces.

Is art just imitating life?

But are these dramas just reflecting reality? Are they just showing us, in very funny ways, the reality of politicians, as entirely self-serving? I think many reading this will be thinking that these comedies are holding up a dark mirror to a dark reality; that politicians are indeed all the same, and united in their dishonesty, ambition and self-interest.

My own feeling is that this is neither fair nor accurate.

This is not to deny that in many countries, all leading politicians are terrible. That is clearly the case, and depressingly often. But just because it is often the case empirically, doesn’t mean that it is somehow an a priori fact. To put it another way, the fact that all of today’s politicians are useless and cynical does not mean we can conclude that all politicians are useless and cynical at all times and in all places.

(Arguably too this could in some ways become a self-fulfilling prophesy, as the more that politics is presented as an entirely cynical endeavour, the more it is likely to attract those the kinds of characters who operate primarily in this way, and the more it is likely to put better, more value driven individuals off pursuing politics- what has been described elsewhere as a spiral of cynicism).

Equally, just because politicians exhibit self-interested or other behaviours, does not mean that this is their only, or even their main motivation. We know from life, that unlike Hollywood, people are complicated; people do things for multiple reasons, often combining both values and self-interest.

Even the most moral politicians need to be good at politics

I would also say that political skills are essential for a good politician, which might seem obvious, but is an important point. The best politicians need to find ways to out manoeuvre their opponents and out communicate them too. Skills of building constituencies of support, of deal making, compromise, strategy- all of these are important if politicians are going to secure real change. The key thing I think is not that these skills are bad necessarily, but that they don’t become an end in themselves, but are instead deployed with the aim of securing real, progressive change. It is also pretty useless arguably to have unimpeachable moral values and commitments but never have the political skills to really achieve anything. Politics free values are as ineffective as value free politics in many ways.

Julius Nyerere, first President of Tanzania, with President John F Kennedy

If you think of the most successful, progressive politicians in history, whether independence leaders like Nehru in India or Nyerere in Tanzania, or progressive leaders like FDR in the US or Clement Attlee in the UK, all of them combined strong political skills with a strong commitment to building a better world for ordinary people. They were not saints, but neither were their actions reducible to naked self-interest either. On the other side, I think right wing politicians like Mrs Thatcher cannot be simply reduced to cynical self-interest; they were also driven by values too.

Defending Democracy

The recent summit hosted by Spain in Barcelona of world leaders coming together to defend democracy was to my mind a good example of politicians collectively pushing for a better world. The Prime Minister of Spain, Pedro Sanchez, has been particularly vocal in his opposition to war, and championing of the fight against inequality. He is clearly driven by values, but at the same time is an extremely successful politician who has managed to side-step many seemingly existential threats to his career and his government and consistently deliver progressive policies in Spain.

It is interesting and clever I think that these left-leaning leaders have chosen to brand their summit as a ‘Defence of Democracy’. Democracy is normally perceived as a good in itself, something above ideologies of left and right. This I think is true. It is also true that not just the right, but the left too can be anti-democratic and authoritarian.

But equally, ultimately, I think the demise and denigration of democracy harms the powerless far more than the powerful. This is because politics offers a way to balance human interests that is an alternative to a balance based instead on wealth or power.

So, I think we need to fight the cynical rejection of politics. We must always maintain that politicians are not all the same. That it is vital that we support politicians who are good at politics whilst strongly focused on building a better world.

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A recent UK drama-docu series Dirty Business has got people across the country up in arms over private equity ownership draining UK public services. Unfortunately, Thames water is just the tip of rotting refuse mound at the core public services, for both the UK and the rest of the world.

“They are good at what they do,” confides the beleaguered and disillusioned civil engineer Mikey Lazarus in ’ new series. “After they bought us, Macquarie [private equity firm] bought up our offices and then leased them back to us.”

What the character is referring to here has a name – a very unsexy one. It is called ‘dividend recapitalisation’ and is a very common tactic for private equity firms that buy up companies delivering public goods – from water to care, ambulances to prisons – and then work quickly to drain as much money from the company as possible. Before they sell up and moving on, that is.

Watching Dirty Business reignited an old injustice furnace that was first kindled whilst working on Oxfam’s Sick Development report with former Health Lead Anna Marriott. This report examines the privatization and financialization of healthcare provision around the world, and exposes how profit-hungry private equity firms and other private actors, are buying up hospitals in low-income countries – under the guise of ‘aid’ – and then using their old tactics to bleed them dry. Naturally, those that suffer more from this vampiric approach are the patients who face inflated costs and hopelessly low standards of care. Sick Development exposes the rot at the core of a neoliberal, private-sector-first approach to development.

Listen to this EQUALS episode with Anna Marriott and Dr Aquina Thulare on the cost of health privatisation around the world.

The tactics employed by private equity firms exposed in Sick Development are not new. In fact, they have been incubated by private equity firms across the UK and the US for years before being exported into other, less regulated contexts. An old colleague, Abha Jeurkar, and I examined an existing body of research on the privatisation of the Care sector across the UK to understand the impact. Spoiler: private equity firms are draining more than just the UK’swater ways.

In the 1980s, more than 90% of beds in care homes in the UK were provided by publicly owned care homes, and only 10% by independent providers. By 2016, this was reversed, with 90% of residential care now being delivered by independent providers, predominantly for-profit organisations. In fact, three of the biggest five care home groups that currently provide 20% of publicly funded care home beds in the UK are owned by private equity.

Private equity firms typically aim to double their money in three years or treble it in five years. Such steep returns often necessitate dramatically cutting cost by gutting companies, selling large assets and making swathes of the workforce redundant: one study in the US found that private equity firms have so far been directly and indirectly responsible for 1.3 million lost jobs across several sectors.

In the care sector, this manifests in big providers squeezing their staff and seeking to “optimise” the number of beds to ensure staff costs and overheads are kept to a minimum; they favour 60 – 70 beds per homes – despite research indicating that smaller care homes of 10 beds or fewer generally provide better outcomes. This is all done so they can continue to routinely offer 11% returns to investors. In fact, analysis found that private companies running care services took a whopping £250m in profits in just three English regions over the course of three years.

And what of the residents of these care homes and their workforce? The entirely predictable outcome of this erosion of the workforce and resources is deteriorating standards in these homes, with too many residents, too few staff and too little resources to deliver a high-quality service. In one case in Lancashire, a man named Norman’s family paid £1,000 per week for his place in a care home owned by the UK’s biggest care home operator, HC-One. The quality-of-care Norman received was poor and he ultimately died after suffering two falls and a stroke. In the subsequent investigation, HC-One apologised for the standard of care that Norman received and acknowledged that there was a problem with staffing and medication at the home. Despite this, the family paid £125,000 in total by the time of Norman’s death.

In another one emblematic case, the Four Seasons Care Home group – formerly one of the UK’s largest care home groups – was bought private equity firm Alchemy Capital and subsequently underwent round after round of buyouts by different private equity firms, each buying the firm at a higher cost and issuing more debt to cover the shortfall. By 2008, Four Seasons had accrued an external debt of over £1.5 billion and were liable to pay an annual interest payment of £100 million. Four Seasons was finally forced into default for being unable to make the debt repayments, and collapsed into administration in 2019 putting the homes and futures of some 17,000 elderly and disabled people and 22,000 employees at risk. Now, Four Seasons is in the final stages of winding down, with its remaining homes sold and parent companies moving into liquidation.

Whilst there is abundant evidence on the insidious influence of private equity on care in the UK and US, this creeping financialisation extends beyond these geographies. The case of Thames Water presented after the decades long investigation of Ash Smith and Peter Hammond in Dirty Business should be seen as emblematic of both what is going on in UK public services more broadly and what is happened to global public goods around the world. With contaminated water in the UK public consciousness, the time is right to point to the rising tide of private equity ownership across a much wider range of public services – and crucially, as this blog highlights, in care.

In an age where shocking docu-dramas are seemingly manifesting more policy change than lobbyists shouting into the void – doffs cap to Gwyneth Hughes and Toby Jones – I’m left wondering, when will the series on the contagion of private equity in care take to our screens? Whilst it is great to see light being shone through the murky waters that is the Thames Water scandal, we need to widen our gaze and see this case for what it is – a symptom of the insidious role of profit-hungry private actors in public services.

END.

Author: Harry Bignell, EQUALS podcast project manager.

Listen to our latest podcast episode on inequality in Norway.

These studies show that for women under socialism, sexual relations were better, more fulfilling and more equal. The reason for this greater liberation in the bedroom is, according to , because women and men were far more equal overall in these societies. Critically, women were not nearly as economically dependent on men as they were in the West. State funded universal childcare, access to abortion and birth control, access to education, all radically reduced the unpaid care work of women and increased their economic independence. Women’s involvement in the workplace was far greater, women were scientists, engineers, even astronauts. Kristen grew up in the US, and aged 13 was inspired by Sally Ride, the first woman from the USA to go into space in 1983, only to discover that the first woman in space, Valentina Tereshkova, had gone up in 1963, 20 years before.

Valentina went on to become a global champion of women’s rights. Ghodsee documents how in the US, the government were seriously worried about the economic advantage women’s liberation was giving their soviet competitors and commissioned a series of comparative studies on this. More broadly, she shows how competition from the second world played a key role in driving governments in the first world to do much more to legislate and take policy actions that would increase gender equality and women’s economic freedom.

Of course, gender equality was very far from perfect under socialism, and the liberation of women was in part because it made sense economically, but there is no doubt that by a range of clearly empirical and objective criteria, women were genuinely much more economically and socially equal in these societies.

It was also very much at the core of socialist ideology from the beginning. International Women’s Day itself was the proposal of the incredible German socialist and feminist activist Clara Zetkin in 1910, building on the strikes of women garment workers in New York in 1908.

Just as in the west, ideals of democratic freedom, even though far from full realised in reality, put pressure on the countries of the east, so ideals of social equality and gender equality from the countries of the east, even if never fully realised, put clear pressure on the leaders of the west.

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Money can’t buy you love

Conversely, when communism fell, and former Eastern Bloc countries adopted free market economies, economic and gender inequality rose dramatically. Women were forced out of the workplace, social safety nets were dismantled, while right wing nationalist politics encouraged a return to harmful gender roles. Women were increasingly expected to leave the workplace and return to their homes and forced to take on the unpaid care responsibilities previously taken on by the state, restoring men’s financial power within relationships. They were once more put in the position where they had to rely on men to survive, and as a result, sex, marriage and relations with men became again far more transactional. In a kind of deeply dark, 21^st century version of Jane Austen, Ghodsee gives the example of new ‘gold digger academies’ in Russia. Aspiring gold diggers pay $1000 dollars a week in the hope of developing the skills to find themselves a wealthy male sponsor. Such sponsors are called ‘Forbses’ (after the Forbes rich list) and the women are called ‘tiolki’ or cattle.

This was not a simple snap back to sexist and misogynist ideas of ‘natural’ gender roles, artificially suppressed by socialism. There was nothing natural about this, but instead the answer lies in basic economics, Ghodsee maintains. The deep inequality and insecurity that free market capitalism brought is the key driving force.

She draws the link between this experience and the sharp increase in economic inequality under neoliberal capitalism in our modern world, and the concomitant, deeply concerning rise in misogyny, sexism, violence against women. The explosion in right-wing ideas and truly nasty high-profile figures like Andrew Tate and others, focusing on returning to some mythical ‘traditional’ role for women.

This is not simply an issue of scapegoating, or distraction, with young men encouraged to hate women and blame women for their lack of economic progress, although this is definitely a part of what is going on. For Ghodsee, it has a broader economic logic too, as when fewer jobs are available, and when governments are engaged in seemingly permanent austerity, it makes sense to push women out of the workforce, and to put them once again under the economic control of men.

This is not just about incomes but wealth too. Wealth is far more gender unequal than income, so the huge rise in wealth inequality, and in the importance of income from capital rather than income from work, also puts women back in a much more unequal position, with marriage being by far the most fruitful way in the US for a woman to get into the richest 1%.

Conversely, under socialism, and under the policies pursued by socialist countries, (as well as much more equal capitalist countries like Sweden or Denmark), gender relations were steadily and comprehensively decommodified, and relations between women and men were immeasurably better as a result, based on equality, not economic necessity.

This is not the only thing that is decommodified either; more equal societies, where things like health, housing and education are provided to everyone based on need, not on ability to pay, gradually take more and more of what matters in life out of the realm of money. Modern capitalism seeks to do the opposite, to put a price on everything, to turn water, health, education, clean air, greenspaces and even friendship and love into commodities to be bought and sold. In doing so, the inherent value of these wonderful things is strained, depleted and destroyed. Putting a price on something often devalues it, the point made by the philosopher Michael Sandel in his brilliant book, ‘What money can’t buy.’ I really agree with this. I feel personally, that the more of our common life we can take out of the realm of money and of driving profit for capital, the better it will be.

ENDS.

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Author: Max Lawson, Head of Inequality Policy at Oxfam International and EQUALS podcast co-host. He is also a visiting Professor in Practice at the LSE International Inequalities Institute and the co-chair of the Global People’s Medicines Alliance.

Listen to our episode with Kristen Ghodsee here.

I was staying at my mother’s house in Oxford recently and we went to the local public park with the kids. The park has an old stone house that now serves as the public library. Bury Knowle park and house were originally in private ownership. The house was built for a banker in 1800, and owned by a series of wealthy families, before being bought by the city council in 1930. It was turned into the park and library it still is today, as well as other uses such as being a baby clinic for young mothers.

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The UK has many such buildings and parks, formerly the large homes of rich people, now run for various government or public purposes- becoming libraries, hospitals, education colleges or various government training institutes. Many hundreds of other large houses and grounds are managed by the National Trust, which is an independent charity, and the public can pay to visit them. These properties are very popular, especially with the middle classes as the cost of entry remains a barrier. I love them, particularly the grounds, as they are generally beautiful landscapes with huge mature oak and other trees, an oasis from the industrial farmland that makes up most of our countryside. Great tea and cheese scones too.

A peaceful revolution

These houses and their transition from private ownership to public use are the very physical manifestation of an incredible reduction in wealth inequality that occurred during the 20^th century in the UK, where the share of wealth of the richest 1% fell from a peak of 72% to 18% in 1983.

In addition to many of these houses and their land being turned over to the public, many more were simply demolished, and the lands they controlled divided up. Over a thousand country houses were destroyed up and down the country.

Some of these houses were enormous, similar in size and stature to the fictional Downton Abbey, employing huge numbers of servants and other staff, all to support one family.

They were torn down, the many books in their libraries and their collections of art sold off, or given to the state in lieu of tax owed- today if you go around the National Gallery and look at the many amazing works of art, next to the name of the picture, you often see a short sentence saying, ‘donated to the nation by Lord X, in lieu of death duties’.

This radical shift was not the result of a violent revolution or insurrection, but the product of a peaceful, democratic transition that took the UK from being one of the most unequal countries in the world to being one of the most equal, on a par with Sweden. It is a story that is not well know at all and rarely told.

The reasons behind this dramatic destruction of privilege and great fortunes were multiple, the product of both deliberate policy and historical events, and the complex synergy between them. They have, I think, significant implications for today, where wealth is once again becoming far more concentrated in the UK and the rest of the world.

The purposeful destruction of extreme wealth

While peaceful and democratic, this shift did not happen without a fight. This was a dramatic battle between the newly enfranchised, newly organised and vocal working and middle classes, and the historically wealthy, many of whom could trace their wealth back to the Norman conquest of Britain.

The removal of trade protections on corn, and the competition from corn grown in the USA or Argentina, made farming less profitable, and not enough to support such palaces and the style of living that came with them.

Taxes on wealth, inheritance and incomes, played a huge role in this demolition of wealth. The ‘supertax’ introduced on the incomes of richest by the Prime Minister Lloyd George, who faced a huge battle to do it with the House of Lords. The estate tax, known also as ‘death duties’, which was introduced in 1894, reached a peak of 85% in the 1960’s.

The first World War saw many young men who were the heirs to fortunes killed on the battlefield, mown down by machine guns, leading their men over the top. It also saw many servants go to fight, and many houses temporarily requisitioned to become hospitals. Many did not come back either, over 720,000 were killed in WW1, around one in eight who fought. The emancipation of women, in part also driven by the war, but also the suffragette movement and the availability of better paid jobs that did not entail servitude, meant a collapse in the numbers willing to work as housemaids, parlour maids, ladies’ maids or cooks. Men too had better options than being stable hands, footmen or butlers, driving up the cost of having an army of servants.

Harder to quantify, but equally important, was a big shift in the public mood, that crystalised with Winston Churchill being ousted from government in July 1945, and the election of a labour government on a landslide.

Britons from across the political spectrum saw the old world as one that had led them into destitution, economic hardship and two world wars. They wanted a new, modern Britain, which would no longer tolerate such wealth inequality. The deference of the past was replaced by a new self-confidence that the future of Britain should be built by and for ordinary people, not the historically privileged elite.

Importantly, this reduction in wealth inequality was not simply the inevitable product of events. It was done with purpose, by politicians, acting on the will of the majority for a more equal country. Events such as war and stock market crashes of course contributed, but it was the policy responses to these events that mattered as much as the events themselves.

Even the richest were in many ways resigned to this new world. Whilst their wealth was much diminished, many remained extremely wealthy, and do so to this day. Often, they owned more than one of these houses, so were happy to see a few torn down or given away, content to keep their one country estate. The owners of Streatham House simply retreated to Glamis Castle in Scotland. This was not a complete revolution. Britain was left with a significant number of rich people who still owned one in every five pounds of national wealth.

High time we remembered how we made a more equal Britain

It is something we have all forgotten really. As people make their way into the library in Bury Knowle House to return a borrowed book to the desk situated in the former ballroom, little do they know about the quiet revolution to which they owe this opportunity.

Having reduced dramatically, wealth inequality is on the rise again. Old houses used by the government are in some cases being sold back to new rich owners, who often immediately close them to the public, making them once again private palaces only accessible to the richest.

Our current government in the UK, despite huge public support, remains far too timid to enact a wealth tax. They have increased the inheritance tax at least. Yet they have done not nearly enough to tackle the huge problem of wealth concentration, and with it the huge rise in inheritance, which is driving inequality across the country. UK millennials have much higher wealth inequality than previous generations, and our society is once again becoming one where your economic standing depends on your parents’ wealth, and not on your own endeavour.

High time I think to do more to tell the story of how we took on extreme wealth and won, and built a far fairer, more equal nation. If we did it before, we can do it again.

ENDS

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Author: Max Lawson, Head of Inequality Policy at Oxfam International and EQUALS podcast co-host. He is also a visiting Professor in Practice at the LSE International Inequalities Institute and the co-chair of the Global People’s Medicines Alliance.

Listen to our latest podcast episode ‘How Migrants Are Used as Scapegoats for the Real Crisis’

My pro-apartheid grandfather then forced us to return to South Africa in the worst days of apartheid, when black children were forced to live with their grandparents in the “homelands” (the least fertile bits of desolate land), and only blacks of working age were allowed anywhere near the whites. But a woman who worked in our block of flats had smuggled her son who was same age as me (eight) into the building, and we used to play together. One day, a gang of white teenage thugs decided it would be fun to throw bricks and rocks at us, and try to stone us to death. Thank God my aunt showed up and stopped the police arresting – not the thugs, but my friend for being in white area!

When I came back to Britain, I also saw institutionalised inequality. My mother had to travel round the country for work and enrolled me briefly in a private school before I went to a government school. I saw how the “school apartheid” in the UK which continues to this day. Wealthier children who are no brighter than poorer ones still get most of the highest-paying and most powerful jobs, perpetuating inequality through the generations.

At university, I realised that debt injustice was wrecking the lives of billions of people. My PhD became a book called The Crumbling Façade of Africa’s Debt Negotiations: Chaos, Arrogance and Secrecy. It traced how because creditors held 100% of power in secret debt negotiations, they decided the amount of debt relief based on the position of the most recalcitrant creditor, leading to a chaotic system where countries came back repeatedly for relief, while cutting spending on the things their people really needed – education, food, health and water.

I realised that debt was inextricably linked with poverty and inequality. Some borrowing was essential – helping to fund all the things citizens want and need; but when countries ran out of money to pay it back, they faced a debt crisis and ordinary citizens paid the price. The creditors (external or domestic) are nearly all rich, dominated by financial institutions and people making money out of wealth they hold in financial investments. On the other hand, those who pay the biggest price in a debt crisis are poor and middle-class citizens who see “austerity” - spending cuts in education, health, social protection, and public sector wages; and tax increases - to repay the debt. When there is a debt crisis, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

In the 1990s/2000s, I was at the centre of the fight for debt relief, advising the Jubilee debt cancellation movement and helping global South countries (the group known patronisingly as Heavily Indebted Poor Countries) to fight their case to negotiate maximum debt relief. We achieved a huge amount – including getting creditors to bring debt payments down to 10% of budgets. This allowed countries to double or treble social spending – providing free primary education to all children and saving millions of lives. In countries like Rwanda, governments invested in rural roads and small markets to create sustainable livelihoods for the poor. These efforts set up those countries for a decade of strong growth and poverty reduction.

How did we do it ? By combining a massive popular Jubilee campaign movement, analysis coming up with workable and affordable solutions. and tough lobbying by the beneficiary countries (evaluators later said they achieved US$27 billion of the US$100 billion cancelled).

Lots of people object to debt relief on the grounds that the countries are corrupt. It is true that corruption by lenders and borrowers is frequent – I and many others have been threatened with violence by the crooks when we have investigated them. To stop it we need strong laws at both ends. The UK anti-corruption law of 2010 was used by Mozambique in 2025 to help spare its citizens from having to pay US$2 billion of crooked loans, and many other countries need to strengthen their laws to cover debt contracts. Also vital is transparency and accountability to citizens and parliaments of the global South, not just by publishing data and contracts online, but through national accountability processes supported by capacity-building for parliaments and citizens to stop bad deals, and for government officials to produce the analysis citizens need. Last time, to ensure the proceeds of debt relief were spent, there was a revolution in accountability: countries designed their own Poverty Reduction Strategies, with strong citizen participation, and then committees of government, civil society and development partners oversaw the spending: that’s why the debt relief achieved so much development progress.

On the other hand, the big thing we didn’t achieve was to change the system. The creditors remained in charge, and decided by 2010 to abolish almost all the advances of the 2000s, and go back to decisions based on financial not development criteria. When in around 2015 creditors began to cut grant aid, and push countries to borrow in financial markets, just when the world had set new development goals which required trillions of dollars of financing, I could see that we were heading for a new debt crisis: and now we are in the worst crisis in history.

Why is it the worst crisis ever ? With the HIPCs, many of them had been in arrears for many years and so weren’t paying much debt service (except to the IMF and World Bank). But now almost all countries in the global South have astronomical debt payments. At Development Finance International we have built a Debt Service Watch database, the only one which compares external and domestic debt service with core social spending for 2025-26. It shows that on average countries of the global South are paying 35% of their budgets on debt.

As you can see from the map below, in almost all countries, debt payments are higher than education spending. Overall, 5.2 billion people live in countries where debt payments are higher than total social spending. On average, debt service is 3 times education spending, 5 times health spending and 9 times social protection spending. And in almost all of these countries, the high debt payment burdens go on for the next decade.

As a result, increasing numbers of governments - and especially citizens - are shouting much louder about the need for debt cancellation. They are angry because since COVID-19, their governments have been cutting social spending and increasing taxes even faster to make rapidly rising debt payments. We have seen this clearly in the 2024 Commitment to Reducing Inequality Index which we produce with Oxfam, where many governments rolled back anti-inequality policies in 2022-24 (though some countries continue to fight inequality well).

In addition, citizens are basing the demand for debt cancellation on new arguments such as reparations, decolonisation and paying for climate and nature justice (on average debt payments are 98 times higher than what governments are spending on climate !).

On the other hand, two things haven’t changed since the first crisis -though they are often used as excuses by the creditor community to say they make debt relief much harder.

1. Commercial creditors are more prominent. Banks have mostly been replaced by bondholders and investment funds. Both in their day have acted like the Wild West in terms of overcharging countries. Last time it took “moral suasion”, tax incentives and strong laws to get most creditors to participate in relief. Once again a minority are refusing to provide relief and launching lawsuits against countries (most recently Ethiopia). One of the things I am most proud of is helping in 2010 to design the UK “anti-vulture fund” law which forced recalcitrant creditors to participate. We urgently need an update of that law.

2. China is more prominent. China has been lending since the 1970s, and at the forefront of debt relief since 1977, providing as much or more than Western countries. It always wants to use its own processes, and not be corralled into action by the G7 or G20. Its lending shot up and became more expensive in the 2010s, and now it wants to be sure that Western commercial creditors and multilateral institutions will deliver their fair share of relief.

What can we do to end the crisis ? It is easy to design solutions which can achieve massive relief at relatively low cost. We need to focus on cancelling or cutting payments due in the next decade (rather than cancelling all the debt which would cost far more), to free up space for governments to spend money on the SDGs. Countries fall into three groups:

1. 40 lower-income countries need major service reduction, bringing down their payments from 35% of spending to 10% over the next 10 years (the HIPC target). As they don’t routinely borrow commercially, this would not negatively affect their “market access”.

2. 25 are regularly hit by natural disasters (earthquakes, hurricanes, pandemics). They need us to move beyond “pausing” their debt payments for a few years which just worsens the problem, to reducing debt payments for 5 years to allow them to recover.

3. 35 (mostly wealthier) countries, like South Africa, constantly borrow on financial markets to fund their budgets: they need comprehensive measures to reduce their borrowing costs.

To spend the proceeds, countries should build Just Green Transition Strategies to fight extreme inequality, climate crisis and nature loss at the same time – and participatory structures to hold them accountable for implementation. If we fund these with debt cancellation (and new money), we can make massive progress on the SDGs and the post-2030 agenda. But none of this is happening now because world leaders aren’t prioritising this crisis. To get them to focus on ending extreme inequality and poverty, and confront the climate and nature crises, a global popular movement is rapidly growing across the world – please join it now!

END.

Author: Matthew Martin, Executive Director, Development Finance International

Matthew discusses these issues in more depth in our latest podcast episode, unpacking how debt, inequality, and political choice intersect — and why things don’t have to stay this way. Listen here👇

EQUALS

Who Pays When Countries Fall into Debt?

When countries fall into debt, who actually pays the price…

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6 months ago · Equals Bulletin

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The Adam Smith Institute, a right-wing think-tank set up in his honour, is our nemesis every year when we release Oxfam’s Davos report on inequality. I have been in lots of debates with their representatives over the years, where they question the importance of worrying about inequality, and especially taxation, and instead explain that the answer is simply more free markets.

Interestingly this was not all Adam Smith said though. He is very selectively quoted. Unlike many modern economists who prefer theoretical mathematical models that abstract from reality, Smith was an empiricist, observing not just the UK economy (which at that time was very similar in shape to many countries in the Global South today) but also other countries all over the world. He made use of what concrete data he could get to help support his theories.

Class warrior Smith

In doing so, he was one of the first economists to theorise the idea of social classes to help understand the economy, dividing society into workers, landlords and capitalists. He also had a very low opinion of rich people, seeing them either lazy or indolent, living off the rents from their land, or as monopolistic, rapacious capitalists.

He was the first economist too to introduce the idea that the prosperity of a nation should be measured on how well the working majority are doing, and whether their lives are becoming measurably better, rather than only measuring the opulence of the richest.

Because of this I actually think he would have liked Oxfam’s Davos paper this year, Resisting the Rule of the Rich, which is about the dangers of economic power turning into political power, and the suppression of liberty and freedom for the many to protect the wealth of the few. He was deeply concerned about the influence of rich capitalists over politics and government policy, and he felt that if they were allowed to pursue their self-interest in this way this would run contrary to the common interest. That this would in fact be a very visible hand, and would instead lead to increasing monopoly power.

Anti-colonial Smith

This led him to be very negative about colonialism. He was opposed to the companies like the East India company that used their monopoly power to colonise and oppress other countries and reap huge profits, so he would probably have liked our Davos paper last year on colonialism too.

He was not a fan of big government either. He felt that governments were a very poor substitute for the free market. Branko Milanovic (whose brilliant book, Visions of Inequality inspired this blog) reckons Smith’s state would represent about 10% of GDP, whereas modern welfare states are more like 40% of GDP. There we would definitely disagree. I think that modern, accountable welfare states, using progressive taxation to provide universal free healthcare or education, and protecting the young, the old and those who are struggling, are one of the greatest thing humans have ever invented.

Smith believed that competition was the best way of regulating capitalists, and not government, as government can be captured by the rich and powerful – something he saw all the time. Politicians can be captured by wealth and money; that is as true today as it was in the 18^th century. His answer to this though was to keep government as small as possible. The trouble is I think that regulation of the market by a small government is likely to be very weak as they have very limited economic power to face up to rich capitalists. This surely leaves the capitalists free to conspire and form monopolies even more. For me, modern, accountable states that answer to the people and not to organised money are the best way to counterbalance the power of capital; rather than shrinking a state that is captured, we should be capturing it back.

Anyhow, given the focus of our Davos paper this year on civil and political freedoms and inequality, I began to wonder what kind of a foreword Adam Smith might have written for the paper, and I have assembled the following from his writing:

Wherever there is great property, there is great inequality. For one very rich man, there must be at least five hundred poor, and the affluence of the few supposes the indigence of the many.

As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for its natural produce. The wood of the forest, the grass of the field, and all the natural fruits of the earth, which, when land was in common, cost the labourer only the trouble of gathering them, come, even to him, to have an additional price fixed upon them. [yes Smith, and not Karl Marx wrote this!]

What improves the circumstances of the greater part can never be regarded as an inconveniency to the whole. No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable… If [justice] is removed, the great, the immense fabric of human society, that fabric which to raise and support seems in this world if I may say so has the peculiar and darling care of Nature, must in a moment crumble into atoms.

The mean rapacity [of]… merchants and manufacturers ... [shows that they] neither are nor ought to be the rulers of mankind. People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices…The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order [of people], ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it.

In the courts of princes, in the drawing-rooms of the great, where success depends not upon merit but upon favour, truth is seldom heard. This disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful… is the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments. [I can’t think of a better description of Davos.]

One feels we must all combine to resist the rule of the rich in our society.’

[Ok I wrote the last sentence, but the rest is direct quotes I promise]

ENDS

Author: Max Lawson, Head of Inequality Policy at Oxfam International and EQUALS podcast co-host. He is also a visiting Professor in Practice at the LSE International Inequalities Institute and the co-chair of the Global People’s Medicines Alliance.

2025 has been a year of resistance: the people versus the powerful. Life has become unbearably difficult for ordinary citizens and now - from Nairobi to Bangladesh, Italy to Peru - workers of the world are downing their tools and demanding better, rejecting a global economic order that treats their suffering as necessary for profit.

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Growing up in Mathare, one of Nairobi’s biggest slums, I know first-hand the violence of poverty, the preventable loss of lives lived hand to mouth, the indignity of hungry babies one cannot feed, rent one cannot pay, healthcare and education one cannot afford. Poverty is not a natural condition. It is engineered, maintained and ingrained by systems and governments that decide who thrives and who struggles. These are not accidents of fate, but political choices.

For instance, in Kenya we once had free primary education – now we do in name only, with a multitude of ways in which parents must actually pay. This retreat from education, health and social protection is not incompetence, it is deliberate austerity imposed on the poor while the wealthy continue to extract with impunity. Ordinary people are heavily taxed despite an already unbearable cost of living. Meanwhile, corporations receive exemptions and political elites shield their wealth. This became fertile ground for the Reject the Finance Bill protests of 2024 and 2025. We marched with fire in our bellies and radical hope in our voices. Hope that the future must be better. We are not asking for anything grandiose, we simply want to live in dignity. The state responded with violence and many lost their lives. We have seen this brutality repeated in Cameroon, Kenya, Madagascar, Nigeria, Peru, and Tanzania. All are reminders of what can happen when the elite feel threatened.

As the liberation leader Amílcar Cabral reminded us, people do not fight for abstract ideas. They fight to change their material conditions, to secure their children’s future, to live better and in peace. Yet today that future feels uncertain. Young people are delaying families because they cannot sustain themselves. Climate change and ecological collapse remind us daily that even the earth is pleading for an end to exploitation.

Still, I hold a deep belief that there is enough for everybody, enough land, enough water, enough joy, enough love, if we put solidarity, unity and humanity at the core of our politics. There is no scarcity, only hoarding and systems designed to keep abundance in the hands of a few.

The Gen Z protests have revealed the interconnectedness of all our struggles, from the economic protests of Nairobi to post-election protests in Maputo, from the barrios of Latin America to the townships of South Africa, I learned this as a grassroots activist at the Mathare Social Justice Centre. People’s struggles are always struggles for dignity and social justice. These must be the priorities of any government that claims to serve its people. A democracy that cannot feed, house, or protect its people is democracy in name only.

We cannot wish poverty away, it must be systemically eradicated, just as it has been systemically entrenched. This requires courage to confront capitalism, colonial legacies and the political elite. This change is not only necessary, it is inevitable. That world is calling us now, and we must answer.

END.

Author: Wanjira Wanjiru, Kenyan grassroots activist who co-founded the Mathare Social Justice Centre and won the Mawina Kouyate Daughters of Africa Award for activism

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This year’s report, Resisting the Rule of the Rich, once again lays bare something the public has known for a long time: the problem is not lack of information, but the deafening silence that surrounds the obvious.

Billionaire wealth has grown at three times the pace of the previous five years, reaching $18.3 trillion. Just over 3,000 billionaires own wealth equivalent to six times the combined GDP of Africa – a continent home to more than 1.5 billion people. At the same time, one in four people globally faces hunger. But the core message of the report is not about billionaires’ wealth or hunger. It’s about power – who holds it, how they use it, and what it costs the rest of us.

Common sense understands power. It always has.

The Normalisation of Oligarchy

Most people already know that extreme wealth tilts the playing field. They see how money buys influence, sets political agendas, shapes media narratives, and insulates the richest from accountability. Oxfam’s report states plainly that billionaire power now actively dismantles progressive policies and erodes civic and political rights – and that this is happening across the world, not in isolation.

For years we have been told that questioning concentrated wealth is divisive – and those who dared to question it were labelled. But common sense knows better: no democracy can function when the rules are shaped by those who can afford to rewrite them, or when those same rules apply differently depending on the size of one’s purse.

The Climate of Power

Resisting the Rule of the Rich also highlights how extreme wealth drives extreme damage – not just economically or politically, but environmentally. Drawing on Oxfam’s climate inequality report, Climate Plunder, it shows that the richest 0.1% produce more carbon in a single day than the poorest half of humanity emits in an entire year. Meanwhile, ordinary people – especially those least responsible for the crisis – have already reduced their emissions, while Europe’s richest 0.1% have increased theirs.

This is not a side‑issue. It is part of the same pattern: a global order where excessive wealth buys the right to decide who bears the burden.

Why Common Sense Matters

For too long, inequality has been treated as a technical problem – a matter of tinkering, modelling, and marginal gains. But today’s inequality is not technical. It is structural – a system deliberately rigged in favour of the powerful.

That’s why I keep returning to common sense.

Because common sense refuses to be intimidated by complexity. It recognises that hunger in a world of abundance is not a puzzle. That democracy distorted by wealth is not an accident. That a planet destabilised by the lifestyles of the few is not a mystery to decode.

Common sense tells the truth plainly: A world organised for the rich will never work for the rest of us.

And perhaps that is why it has been pushed out of the room for so long.

But the truth is this: people have never stopped holding onto it. And now, they are beginning to say it out loud again – clearly, calmly, without apology.

Common Sense Won’t Stay Silent!

That, more than any summit or speech, is what gives me hope.

Author: Deepak Xavier is the Head of Inequality, Economic & Climate Justice at Oxfam International and Global Convenor, Fight Inequality Alliance.

The world is not approaching a crucial tipping point: we are in it.

For many years, Amnesty International has warned of authoritarianism growing across and within countries. Evidence from the last year shows how this process is accelerating, and fast. One year on from the inauguration of President Trump, we have seen around the globe how leadership that prioritises military investment and foreign policy deal-making and rejects human rights protections and multilateral commitments is multiplying, and this has done dangerous damage to the hard-won equality, justice and dignity gains of these past 80 years the world over.

Equally for many years Oxfam has drawn our attention to the growing inequality emergency, with the relentless rise of the super-rich. As this report shows, this process too has accelerated; over the last year billionaire fortunes have risen three times faster than they have in the five years since 2020. The first trillionaire is on the horizon. Meanwhile one in four people are regularly worried about not having enough food to eat, having to skip meals to get by, and ordinary people’s lives are becoming impossible to afford.

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Authorities in a broad sweep of countries have employed authoritarian practices and introduced new measures to restrict freedom of expression, association and peaceful assembly. They have used these, and existing laws and regulations, to clamp down on human rights defenders, critics and opponents, or as a way to evade accountability and defend the economically powerful.

In an all too familiar tale, the brunt of this repression is born by those with the least buffer, with union organisers, environmental defenders, women, racialised, indigenous and LGBTQI+ people around the world being forcibly disappeared, arbitrarily detained or killed for their activism.

As this report clearly shows, these two deeply concerning trends of growing authoritarianism and rising inequality are not separate problems. They are not distinct dilemmas. They instead deeply entwined, as governments across the world side with the powerful, not the people, and choose repression, not redistribution.

It is imperative that our hard won-civil and political rights – freedom of assembly, freedom of expression and freedom to organise – are protected. Protest is a cornerstone of fair and democratic societies, it is a critical bastion against authoritarianism. It is equally important that the social and economic rights of all are fulfilled; rights essential for living a life with dignity, covering basic needs like food, water, housing, healthcare, education.

It is view, confirmed by the facts, that central to the realisation of all these human rights must be a rapid reduction in inequality; the gap between the super-rich and the rest of society must be closed, and fast.

The good news is people around the world are not sitting idly by as billionaires and authoritarians corrode the foundations of our freedoms. Inequality and tax justice advocates are demanding action on inequality, and specifically on the taxation of the super-rich. A UN tax convention is on its way to becoming a reality, led by Africa. From Malaysia to Madagascar, Nepal to France and the US – people are leading the way with - less a wave - and more a tsunami of global protests confronting the rise of the far-right, calling for a change to corrupt governments, who prioritise profit over people and facilitate the dominantion of the super-wealthy over the lives and liberties of everyday people.

Resisting the Rule of the Rich from Oxfam is a fearless and timely reminder of what is at stake, what is already lost and what is left to protect from the insatiable grasping hands of the billionaire class. Oxfam reminds us all that a new and more equal world is possible. It is time to organise, mobilise – and take it.

END.

Author: Agnès Callamard is the Secretary General of Amnesty International.

The tool goes alongside Oxfam’s latests flagship inequality report ‘Rule of the Rich’, which coincides with World Economic Forum in Davos. Under the hood, there’s some very interesting research that drives the numbers.

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The purpose of the tool is to put the enormous wealth gain of billionaires into perspective – it’s hard to wrap your head around numbers as large as billions or trillions. Over the last year, billionaire wealth increased by $2.5 trillion, or $80k a second, which is what the ticker is based on, rather than pulling data from markets in real-time.

The ticker isn’t proposing a specific tax rate (that’s covered in depth in a different report) or claiming that this wealth gain is available cash (most billionaire wealth is invested in company shares); it is purely one way of communicating obscene levels of wealth inequality.

At every billion-dollar milestone, the website shows two tiles with what that money could have been spent on.

The red ones are luxury items. A billion dollars could buy Buckingham Palace. For $25 billion, which billionaire will have made by day 3 of Davos, they could fill 200 Olympic-sized swimming pools with champagne. For $35 billion, what billionaires make in a week, they could buy all the art in the Louvre.

It goes without saying that these are just indicative, an attempt to put the scale of wealth into perspective. Buckingham Palace and all the art in the Louvre aren’t for sale, and even billionaires are probably not crazy enough to fill swimming pools with champagne!

Some of these numbers are based on public estimates; for example, the valuation of NFL teams is tracked by Forbes, and the cost to build a luxury underwater city is based on a conceptual idea. Others are more back-of-the-envelope calculations. The cost to make the Statue of Liberty out of gold is based on replacing her copper with gold - no calculations of the structural integrity were made!

More interesting are the green tiles. These show what the governments of low and lower-middle-income countries could do if they had this extra revenue. The tiles alternate between various Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) related indicators, but it is part of a model that shows what would happen if countries had additional revenue in their entire budgets. The $1 billion tile will show that 140,140 people would have increased access to basic water, but it would also mean:

• 258,563 additional children in education

• 1,241,472 people with increased access to electricity

• 31,616 additional nurses

• and 11,855 additional teachers…amongst the many other things governments spend money on (like infrastructure or defence).

This is just one year of additional government revenue and covers low and lower-middle-income countries only.

The data is driven by The Government Revenue and Development Estimations (GRADE) tool, a research project from the University of St Andrews and the University of Leicester in the UK. The idea of this model is to translate what increasing or decreasing government revenue has on the Sustainable Development Goals.

The tool is a game-changer for those who want to communicate the impact of increasing or decreasing government revenue. It’s been used, for example, to model the impact of reducing the debt burden of the poorest countries, the harm caused by tax avoidance and the benefits from a fairer tax system. For any campaigner or policymaker involved in fiscal justice and access to public services, it’s an underutilised tool that’s easy to use, publicly available and covers nearly every country in the world.

There are some very interesting features about this model worth highlighting.

1. It’s a non-linear econometric model. This means it is more sophisticated than simply projecting that for every $1 spent, something will happen. Put simply, if revenue increases a small amount, then little happens, but it gets to a point where there’s very rapid returns, followed by a plateau phase, where it’s not possible to improve things further (you can’t get more than 100% of people with access to electricity, for example).

   

2. The model takes into account governance. As Government revenue increases, the quality of governance tends to increase, and so there is less revenue lost to corruption, etc. The model also includes governance indicators that show how increased resources improve governance itself, which in turn improves SDGs, creating a virtuous circle.

3. It shows the trade-offs – or lack of. For example, in 2019, Nigeria lost $689 million in corporate tax because of revenue because of profit shifting to the Netherlands. The Netherlands gains from this arrangement but if the Nigerian government had additional revenue equivalent to these losses, this would avert around 651 child deaths annually in Nigeria while causing zero additional deaths in the Netherlands. This is because the Netherlands already has extremely high health outcomes; reducing revenue slightly has no measurable effect on this indicator.

4. It’s realistic and non-prescriptive. Because it allocates extra revenue to an entire budget, rather than a specific purpose, as would be the case for any new revenue source for a government, it gives a more realistic view. Other expenditures go up beyond SDG-related ones, even military spending, as the model assumes that new resources are spent in the same proportions as historically.

Huge thanks to Dr Bernadette O’Hare, Dr Stuart Murray and Professor Stephen Hall and the GRADE team for their technical support with the model. Check out the GRADE tool here and post any questions you have in the comments below.