European summits are fertile ground for PR stunts, if only because of the hundreds of journalists milling around waiting for decisions to be made.
Oxfam today has distributed copies of “(Not the) Financial Times”, a 4-page edition of our paper dated November 2016 and devoted to the effects of a hypothetical tax on cross-border financial transactions, or Financial Transaction Tax, apparently agreed in 2011.
In this alternative universe, bankers will be pleased to discover that the adoption of a so-called Tobin tax has helped boost their popularity rating from near 0 per cent today to 80 per cent by 2014.
“It has turned bankers from dinner party pariahs into a slightly less wealthy profession seen as having a social conscience,” the not-FT writes in 2016.
The European Commission has proposed a financial transaction tax as part of its 2014-20 budget proposal. That doesn’t mean Brussels and Oxfam are on the same page, however. The campaigners want the tax’s receipts to flow to development projects in poor countries, help finance public services in rich ones, and all-round fund the fight against climate change. Rather more prosaically, Brussels wants the estimated €55bn a year raised by the tax to finance the EU budget. And even that is far, far from being agreed – the UK has vowed to veto the move, which must be approved unanimously to become EU law.
The Oxfam non-FT is a pretty well-made spoof, though not quite as ambitious as a 12-page parody distributed in London in 2009 by G20 protesters (pictured), which the FT bosses graciously accepted as a form of flattery.
Either way, our non-colleagues at Oxfam are likely to be disappointed. The FTT is pretty low down the list of priorities right now, and won’t be a feature at today’s summit. If anything, the aim is to shore up the ailing financial sector rather than hobble it. Those bankers eager to rehabilitate their dinner-party reputations will just have to wait.
Across the globe: Gideon Rachman and his FT colleagues debate international affairs on