What needs to happen?

As currently designed, the international economic and financial system prioritises the interests of footloose private investors and speculators, encourages tax avoidance, and builds in a tendency to economic crises. This creates substantial barriers to the creation of caring economies, based on gender equality, wellbeing and sustainability, all over the world, including in the UK. These obstacles are especially strong in countries that endured colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade.

The UK holds a dominant position in the governance of this system: as a member of the G7 and the G20 , an influential member of the Executive Boards of the IMF and World Bank (on which rich countries have more votes than others), and as the creator and lynchpin of a neo-colonial system of tax havens supported by the City of London. Civil society and government bodies in the UK therefore have a particular opportunity, and responsibility, to challenge this system and work towards a new international economic system which fosters the building of caring economies worldwide.

• Support the UN General Assembly in organising an International Economic Reconstruction and Systemic Reform Summit, to promote global transformation in light of the crises triggered by the Covid-19 pandemic
• Support the establishment of an intergovernmental UN tax body, with equal participation of all countries, to break the deadlock in efforts to eliminate global tax evasion and avoidance
• Address the debt crisis in developing countries by supporting the basic principles for a sovereign debt restructuring process, agreed upon in 2015
• Ensure that all UK Overseas Development Assistance supports the achievement of gender equality, wellbeing and sustainability in recipient countries