World Development Movement blog

Stephen Hester, boss of bailed-out bank RBS, is set to get just over £2million worth of shares as a bonus for his last year’s work.  Well, as one RBS shareholder (mine are part of the Government’s 83% stake, since they bailed you out and I’m a UK taxpayer) to another, Mr Hester, I think we’d better watch out

Murray Worthy, used to be Policy officer

Paul Krugman is an economist I have huge respect for, and one with whom I often agree. This made it all the more disappointing when I read his recent post for the New York Times dismissing the role of speculation in current high food prices. Sadly Krugman’s arguments, apparently lifted from an economics primer, fall far wide of the mark when it comes to the reality of food markets.

Iain Thom, WDM campaign assistant

Susan George, is a political scientist and world-renowned author writing about social justice issues for over 30 years.  Susan is the keynote speaker at this year’s Scottish campaigner convention in Glasgow on 19 March and I had the honour of interviewing her for WDM.

Environment Minister, Chris Huhne, was here in Scotland yesterday, speaking to MSPs about the UK Government’s plans for the Green Investment Bank.  Talk, perhaps inevitably, turned to whether the bank might be based in Edinburgh, given the renewable energy investment expertise that exists here.

Rosie Rogers, campaigner

It’s been two months since the first WDM pig piñata went to the public slaughter. Since then, the World Bank piggy banks have been smashed (or held in custody!) in Brussels, Cancun and over a dozen cities and towns across the UK.

After two long and dispiriting weeks, the Cancun climate talks drew to a close in the early hours of Saturday morning. Following the catastrophic outcome in Copenhagen, where an inadequate document was forced onto the supposedly open and democratic UN process in the final hours by a handful of (mainly rich) countries at the last moment, expectations for the Cancun meeting were always low.

Julian Oram, used to be Head of policy and campaigns

Yesterday morning we were greeted with new negotiating texts from the twin tracks of the talks here in Cancun. These new texts represent the closest approximation of the ‘progress’ reached thus far through the past ten days of discussions.