In our first year, we’ve gone from nothing to shifting the terms of the debate around banking reform. We have worked closely with the New Economics Foundation to develop proposals and draft legislation that would ‘democratise’ money and banking and ensure that taxpayers would never again have to bail out the banks, and we’ve presented these proposals to MPs in each of the main parties, the Independent Commission on Banking and senior policy advisors at the Treasury.
We have also run public-facing grass-roots campaigns that have reached up to 18,000 people within 2 weeks. We are now starting to attract media attention, having advised BBC and Channel 4 producers, and will shortly be featured in certain mainstream broadsheet papers and other main television shows.
On top of that, we’ve sat on panel debates at Oxford University against the chair of the British Bankers’ Association and a senior representative of the Bank of England.
Here’s some of the other things we’ve been up to over the last year:
- We’ve been working with a key member of the team which set up the first genuinely new bank in the UK for the last 100 years, and a former treasurer at the head of one of the UK’s largest banks, to ‘road-test’ and strengthen our reform proposals
- We’ve met with think tanks and campaign groups on all sides of the political spectrum to raise awareness of the need for fundamental banking reform
- presented to the producers of a popular Channel 4 current affairs program on the issue of banking reform and the impacts of the current banking system
- We have undertaken deeper and more comprehensive research into how the UK banking system really operates, and how it creates money, than any work done to date on the issue.
- organised and hosted a 2-day conference focussed on banking reform for 130 students, with guest speakers including a Conservative MP, an extremely successful entrepreneur and Professor Mary Mellor of the University of Northumbria.
- Worked with some of the UK’s largest unions to get them to understand how the current banking system harms their members
- spoken at a fringe meeting at the LibDem autumn conference in 2010.
- trained activists and environmentalists from large NGOs and campaign groups on how banking reform relates to poverty, debt, inequality and environmental breakdown.
- attended round-table discussions with David Davis MP, Robert Peston, Professor Paul Wooley, and Tony Benn, among others.
- started and led an innovation group at The Finance Lab (a joint initiative between WWF and the Institute of Chartered Accounts for England and Wales (ICAEW)
- advised a team setting up a well funded, nationwide bank on our proposed new model of banking (one which doesn’t multiply debt, is not inherently unstable and invests on ethical principles).
- provided business and commercial strategy advice to a separate project investigating new ways of funding large investments in renewable energy (specifically, how the initial construction of off-shore wind turbines could be funded through a particular investment structure)
- attracted an average of 12,000 readers a month to our website