Global support for a tax on banks is growing, says Gordon Brown
Prime minister predicts financial deal by G20 in June
- by Helen Pidd
- guardian.co.uk, Thursday 11 February 2010
A global bank tax could soon be agreed by the world's leading economies as a response to last year's financial crisis, Gordon Brown said today.
"Support is building" for a deal to potentially tax the international financial services sector to the tune of tens of billions of pounds, the prime minister said in an interview in today's Financial Times.
Brown said he hoped a deal would be hammered out at the G20 summit in Canada in June, glossing over the possibility that he may not be in charge by then.
He insisted he was not attacking banks or their wealthy employees for ideological reasons, but to raise funds.
The prime minister said those with the "broadest shoulders" should pay more, and insisted that the tax would raise "a substantial amount of money". But he admitted that many high flyers would do their best to avoid paying, and so the amount raised would be "not as high as you would like it to be".
He defended the new 50p top rate of tax, saying the government did not want to introduce it, but that needs must. "We have no desire to have a tax rate that is higher than necessary," he said.
Quite how a global tax would work is unclear, but Brown said he thought the International Monetary Fund would propose a method that would be "somewhat different" from the tax on wholesale funding proposed by Barack Obama.
The US president disagreed with Brown earlier in the year after he proposed that the state should take a cut of bank transactions – a Tobin tax – but the IMF is thought to be considering alternatives, such as a tax on bank profits, turnover or remuneration.
Brown also said he wanted to build up Britain's universities. "There are 1,000 universities being built in India and we want to be part of this educational export. I think that education will be perhaps our biggest export in 20 years' time," he told the Financial Times.
