Townsend: Refocus on inequalities and World Bank

Veteran anti-poverty campaigner Peter Townsend said after looking at domestic banks and their weaknesses, it was time to look at the inextricable links between the domestic and international economies.
There were examples of this every day, he said, just this week there had been the announcement of job cuts in Swindon because of the problems going on with Honda in Japan.
Townsend said the key organisation that he would like to "take a bit of stick to" was the World Bank, and part of his interest has arisen because of work on child poverty around the world.
If you took a look at the GDP of the 53 low income countries in the world it was less than the total of the income of the five biggest international companies, he pointed out in a speech that identified the weaknesses of the World Bank.
The World Bank had not achieved reductions in child poverty across the world, he said at the Fabian conference.
Then he went on to point to an increasingly lack of transparency about the actions of transnational companies, partly because of the dismantling of three UN bodies that used to track this, he argued.
Townsend, a LSE lecturer, also argued for decent labour conditions down the line, among subsidaries of big companies, and public awareness of this.

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