By Callum Christie, edited by Tom Guyton-Day

Climate change is the defining issue of our time. How we combat increasing global temperatures will define our life on this planet going forward.

​The talk of market-based solutions is too little too late, if it were 2000 not 2020 perhaps a steady change could work but not anymore. We need drastic action. 

Ursula von der Leyen is proposing the EU reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by at least 55% by 2030 from 1990 levels, giving the EU new direction, much needed after the chaos and nationalism of the 2010s. To achieve this, Brussels must go big. 

Through Next Generation EU funding, Europe-wide projects should be planned and invested, funded through European taxes on carbon, financial trading, and single-use plastic. This Next Generation funding is a major step forward in monetary and fiscal union for the EU; first comes collective borrowing, next comes collective taxes to pay. 

The European People’s Party has long endorsed a Europe-wide energy grid. To realise this, the commission must be ambitious and utilise the sun of the southern states with the creation of massive solar farms and harness the wind and rain of the northern states for tidal and wind energy. Using the vast plains of Portugal, Spain and, less so, Romania, Bulgaria, and Italy alongside the storms and wind of the Baltic could transform Europe. 

The creation of an EU-wide green energy grid would significantly reduce emissions from coal, oil, and gas plants, in keeping with the EU emission targets. 

Creating this grid would tackle energy bills, create much-needed jobs in Southern member states, improve air quality, and give Europe a renewed sense of common purpose and unity. Within this political climate, a more united and cohesive EU could look outward as this plan tackled its internal issues of power imbalance and climate change. 

This project would address many issues within the EU: giving the EU common purpose and goal will increase support for the EU among Europe’s citizens and create a simple, more positive case for Europe. This is the kind of integration Brussels should focus on common-sense, common-purpose projects which help citizens. 

A project of this scale could significantly contribute to European energy independence, meaning less dependence on Russian gas and Middle Eastern hydrocarbons. 

Green energy alongside a safe, reliable nuclear energy programme could lead to this. Energy independence would have significant geopolitical benefits including a freer hand to pressure Russian and Middle Eastern governments on democracy and human rights. 

Investing in technology to remove the carbon already in the atmosphere is also crucial, or simply planting more trees to sink carbon. This would also significantly reduce Europe’s carbon footprint, giving Brussels a strong voice in Climate Change discussions globally. 

China recognises the threat of climate change to its internal stability so is likely to act decisively. If the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China deems something a threat, expect swift action. For America, pray for Biden; it is not an exaggeration to say the world may not survive another 4 years of Trump’s lack of climate action. 

EU member states should not waste their new Eurobond funding on pork-barrel spending and standard national budgets.

This new Eurobond must be used effectively if it is to remain a part of the EU fiscal arsenal.

All of this is bluest of blue-sky thinking; however, the alternative of toxic atmosphere thinking will be accurate for the political and environmental climate without significant action.

As FT stated perfectly: “Europe cannot carry the burden of emissions reductions alone, but neither can it afford to wait for others to move.” 
For detail: https://www.ft.com/content/32103b95-f945-4f14-9d32-b0cc8e819d56 ​

Edited by Martha Evans and Pictures by Tom Guyton-Day

But the question now becomes: how does one do it properly?

Personal branding is important for anyone who wants to advance in their career. It helps you build authenticity, trust, credibility, and connections.

Although, the difference between the saturated branding yourself and the genuine being yourself might give you the edge. Just, choose, wisely. ​

A personal brand tells the world about who you are as a human being personally and professionally.

A personal brand is about authenticity. And it comes only from your mind, your heart, and what you believe to be true at the centre of your personal and professional self. That’s why it’s unique – because it begins exclusively with you.

Through living your values, you will be seen as somebody who's clear about what matters, and you'll inspire people's confidence and trust in you and your brand.

Start by writing down three words that describe you and your personality. Now ask a close friend how they'd describe you. People see us differently from what we think, often without us realising it. It is terrifying but be brave and ask others what they think of you. You'll be surprised!!

Next, think of your reputation. What do you want now and where do you want to be? Ask yourself how you can navigate your actions and steer towards what your reputation can be.  

​And finally, what do you want your legacy to be? What do you want to stand for? And what would be on your gravestone? 

Gandhi once said, "Your beliefs become your thoughts. Your thoughts become your words. Your words become your actions. Your actions become your habits. Your habits become your values. Your values become your destiny."

Finally, consider your audience. Ask yourself, where do they live? What are their values? And how can you match your beliefs with theirs?

If your personal brand has a strong direction, you will always be sailing on course toward your target market.
​
But, never forget that if you don't believe in yourself or what you are selling, how can anyone else?

​

Branding yourself keeps you current in your field, opens doors for you, and creates a lasting impression on potential and existing clients. By developing your brand, you’ll have control over the initial perception people have of you.


What is it that you want to be known for? 


A successful brand can go a long way with self-promotion, conveying loyalty, and offering consistency in the quality of the services you provide.

The first step is to switch the way you think about social media. Social media is no longer about posting photos of delicious food or fancy vacations; it has a wider objective to show off your true skills across multiple platforms that are consumed on a daily basis by many audiences worldwide. 

Next, you need to define your expertise. Simply outline your experience on a piece of paper and use that as a roadmap for you to reflect it in the digital world! This is crucial as it allows you to find out exactly what your core abilities are.
Even if you have zero experience, if you understand exactly what you want to do, you can educate yourself through the thousands of available learning sources we have now. Just don't forget to share your progress. The number of people that are going to be interested in what you share will amaze you!  

Establish a presence everywhere. But everywhere!!! 
Even the platforms that you hate or don't know how to use, you have to be on them, and learn how to use them! You’re being googled by friends, colleagues, and potential customers, so make sure your branded content is what people find when they google your name. Build a basic online presence through your website or blog if you need.
Just make sure people can get in touch with you in their medium of choice.
Claim your name before someone else does. While search engines will pick up on your social media pages, having your domain will produce a more finite result.

After that, you need to engage and connect with others. The good old Networking. Networking is one of the best ways to become known in the industry. By forming relationships with people in your audience, you can grow your business and your brand long-term. Don't build a one-way channel that spits out information only. Create an engaging community around you, where you'd reach out to others and engage with their content in a meaningful way. Simple steps like, liking their post and leaving a comment that not only attracts more eyeballs but also gets you identified as an active person who provides value. 

Get feedback —at work, at home, anywhere. The best way to measure your brand is the reputation others hold of you. Notice how they introduce you to others. Ask them what your top brand attributes and core strengths are.
Your unique brand message differentiates the best you have to offer, gives a good indication of what you’re like to work with, and shows how you make things happen.

Edited, Martha Evans

The public finances are a mess. The deficit is at a peacetime record high, debt as a percentage of the economy is closing in on 100%, and tough decisions in the near future will have to be made. So how should we proceed? 

Well, first we need to set out some guidelines. We need to be competitive for business, consider using one of the big tax raising levers: VAT, National Insurance, or Income Tax, look into the potential efficiency savings, as well as conclude our European free trade negotiations in a sensible way. 

My first proposal is to raise VAT to 22.5%, raising an immediate annual sum of approximately £13.5 billion according to the IFS. Whilst of course this will cause a slight rise in prices, very low inflation coupled with high wage growth, means a rise in VAT will have a negligible impact on the consumer due to real wages continuing to rise substantially. As well as pushing inflation up slightly, ever closer to the Bank of England's 2% target, reducing the risk of deflation and the need to respond with negative interest rates. Raising VAT results in a substantial boost to the Treasury, whilst also having little negative impact on immediate economic growth.

Second - Scrap the Triple Lock in favour of a Double Lock. Whilst this wouldn't immediately save money due to wage growth being above 2.5%, it would create a more sustainable settlement for pensions. One that ensures pensioners see the benefits of wage growth, whilst also being guaranteed there will be no cut in their real terms pension. This has the potential to save the Treasury billions in the long term, especially if both wage growth and inflation fall below 2.5%. Our pensioners have seen a £1250 rise in their pension since 2010, benefitting from large real terms increases. Now is the time for a more measured approach going forward.

Third - Cut out the extra non-COVID spending the government announced in budget 2020. This extra spending accounted for £18 billion of extra spending in financial year 2020/21, and over 4 years was set to amount to £100 billion more in spending compared to previous plans set out under the May government. In times of financial hardship, this is unacceptable. Manifesto pledges or not, the government needs to address the situation here and now. Whilst extra spending may be helpful to certain departments, our fiscal state needs to be factored into the equation. With our deficit high, debt to economy high, and public finances in a mess, hard choices must be made, and savings of £100 billion over 4 years could substantially help in the country's need to fiscally consolidate. Now isn't the time to be spending this money.

Fourth - unfreeze fuel duty. Since 2010 the freeze to fuel duty has not only cost the exchequer £11.2 billion, but had there been no freeze, UK carbon emissions would be upto 5% lower than they currently are as of 2019. Whilst ending the freeze to fuel duty isn't a huge short term money maker, it does have other impacts. From an environmental perspective it acts as a carbon tax, and could help the UK in meeting its climate targets, something we're currently not on track to do. From an economic standpoint, this could push inflation up from its current low, and like the VAT increase, push us closer to the 2% target, avoid deflation, and therefore prevent the need to have negative interest rates to force spending. 

Fifth - Tackle tax avoidance and evasion. Over the past decade the government has endeavoured to get people off of the benefits system, and into work. Whilst it's right that the government has ensured less people are taking out of the system, as a country we also need to ensure people who should be putting in actually are putting in. Annually tax evasion and avoidance costs the exchequer £7 billion. This isn't money to shrug a shoulder at, and is another healthy addition to the revenue raising measures proposed. It would in my eyes be quite hypocritical to ask people to endure tax rises, and spending cuts, whilst at the same time allowing people not to pay their fair share of the tax they already owe. 

Sixth - Consider 5% efficiency cuts to some government departments, cuts proposed by Sajid Javid during his tenure as Chancellor. Whilst these floated cuts were never outlined in detail, they could if looked into, and managed correctly, save substantial sums of money, mounting potentially into the billions. Whilst of course no one likes budget cuts, the government should at the very least be considering them, especially when they have substantial room for manoeuvre with a current majority of 78 seats.

Finally, the UK should remain in the European Single Market as a lead player in the European Free Trade Association (EFTA). Whilst many Brexiters may cry betrayal, I would argue this is the best way to deliver on the 2016 referendum, whilst also safeguarding our economy. EFTA allows the UK to sign free trade agreements outside the EU Customs Union, control our fishing waters, leave the Common Agricultural Policy, diminishes the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice, and allows us to play a leading role in Europe whilst being outside of the EU. Alongside this membership of the Single Market would give business certainty, make the UK an even more attractive place to invest, and according to the Bank of England would boost our projected growth over the short to medium term, resulting in a better debt to GDP ratio. We voted in 1975 to be in the Common Market, so let's be in the Common Market, safeguard our economy, and respect the 2016 referendum.

Some of the measures above are controversial. They involve cuts, tax rises, breaking promises, and having a close relationship with the EU. But what they together do is consolidate our country's fiscal position, safeguard growth, and get debt to GDP down. Coming out of this pandemic we need to get back on the road of responsibility, be the country of business, and the country that takes the tough decisions. We need to level with the British people, tell them this is the reality, be honest with them in Europe, and build a sustainable future. Afterall, we're all in this together.

​

By Tom Guyton-Day

​Governments have managed to move entire clinical and financial mountains during the Coronavirus pandemic. The virus has a total worldwide death toll of 962,000 and climbing, so far this year.
 
Climate changes are estimated to already be killing well over 160,000 people per year, according to the World Health Organisation and has been ongoing since the 1980s – and continues to this day, and forever more (at current predictions it will get worse).
 
This begs the question, if climate change kills so many over such a period of time – why aren’t governments across the globe doing more to combat climate deaths? If we can move such financial muscle for one issue, why not another?
 
Prince Charles has called for a new Marshall Plan, inspired by the American investment in post war Europe, in a last ditch attempt to get the world moving, in a war footing manoeuvre to get the world to turn around, away from the cliff that already kills over a hundred thousand every single year.
 
It is estimated that governments across the globe have spent an extra 9,000,000,000 US Dollars as of May 2020 on fighting the pandemic that has killed so many, according to the IMF. This is a conservative estimate.
 
This compares with the relatively minor cost of stopping climate change, at a paltry 300,000,000,000 US Dollars, or the GDP of Chile, estimated by the United Nations. Quite a large sum, but considering the GDP of the world in 2019 was 80,000,000,000,000 US Dollars, and if you observe the changes the world is currently undergoing - from mass migration of species from birds to humans, to the quick extinction of thousands of species, the very fact world Governments are willing to spend so highly on one project would suggest, getting them to spend on stopping the climate crisis might not be so hard.
 
So, why don’t Western and Eastern governments do more to halt the climate crisis? Frankly, it shows there is hope but it also makes you wonder – why don’t governments do more to halt the fast growing – catastrophic – problem. 
 
It’s hard to argue for any specific point on why it is that governments are doing so much to combat this very short-term crisis, over that of the very long. You could perhaps argue it’s due to the modern nature of fast news and an attitude of “we must do something” mentality.
 
Perhaps, this might not have happened in the mid 1980s, when the main contact with the electorate was via newspapers, calmed by proprietors, and the 6 o’clock news, again calmed by “experts”. Perhaps this world-wide mass movement is brought on by the shock deaths of loved ones we see on screens but, if this were true, why don’t governments respond faster on the climate crisis, long in the press and discussed widely by the chattering classes.
 
I have another theory. Climate change is a poor man’s problem, often black or brown people, outside the Western cores that make up Europe and North America. It can’t be denied there won’t be those in the US already experiencing hellish fires like those in California this summer.
 
This, however, seems somewhat light when compared with what is likely to happen to Bangladesh over the next fifty years (something akin to Venice I am told) and what will happen to the Middle East as they experience longer, hotter, and drier summers. Migration crisis’ will not be the preserve of the bad years – rather a norm as desperate people cling to life.
 
Climate change will likely have little impact on the people of the West, but they will surely impact those in developing nations across the world far harder. Most in the West just don’t believe that climate change is really their problem, beyond having their lifetime experience whale watch.
 
So, it’s not really about money – it’s potentially about those people – those far flung people of different culture, language, and colour, but do they not – as human beings – deserve to live or rather, live with dignity and avoid the harshest pains – primarily brought by the Western consumer and the new Eastern flank of developed nations?

Ending climate change is clearly possible but unlikely. We can do it, but we won’t. Not at this footing. The Covid-19 crisis shows the shoe is available. Why don’t Western governments take that footing and act quickly, before it’s too late. 

To find out about your carbon footprint go to: footprint.wwf.org.uk/#/

I was doing relatively well on the footprint front, until I put that I flew to India - rather blew the numbers out of the water. 

Edited by Martha Evans and Picture Edit by Tom Guyton-Day

Edited, Tom Guyton-Day

By James Campion, edited by Josh Broadhurst 

By Tom Carter

By Tom Guyton-Day and Edited by Martha Evans

​Recently Momentum put out a social media post – hardly my favourite people…, presumably in an attempt to ease back the middle classes who had been scared away by talk of 80% income tax rates. They suggested instead, the enemy was not those earning £150,000 a year and instead the trillionaires that flitter between London, the Channel Islands, and the far-flung East on their ‘holidays’ or lifestyles as they’re better termed – my words not theirs’. 
 

Many then decided to reply about the rate of tax being too high for those earning £150,000 – one woman pointed out that someone earning that much might look to pay just over £51,000 in tax. A staggering sum! I then, of course, laughed because the idea that someone earning £150,000 a year would actually pay any income tax at all bemused me. They don’t.

People earning that much money, to be frank, employ men in grey suits to fiddle with their accounts and drive through their earnings – first into a consultancy firm (Bob’s LTD, for example). Let me explain: 
 
This £150,000 (we’re going with that figure because Momentum did. I could have chosen anything above £90,000 realistically) moves through Bob's LTD as turnover or revenue. In a traditional business this is usually income from sales of a product or service and it's the same with Bob's LTD - just in the form of one very large contract. 
 
The company presumably has vast “costs” – a car for example, to drive to “business meetings” and other costs such as a lawn mower to keep the “business lawn” looking nice. These “costs” then offset the turnover of the “company”, lowering the amount of “net profit” (revenue – all costs) the company makes – which is what is actually taxed in the end. So basically, they run their household as a business in the land of paperwork. Though, in reality most people run their household like a business – just one that sort of floats, neither sinking nor flying. Just floats. The people running Bob’s LTD are not wrong - the people that designed income tax are.

Generally, the aim of this imaginary person is to lower their tax bill and so, they lower their “net profit” by using their “business costs” to offset and lower this margin of profit. Anything from tractors to swimming pools can theoretically be counted as “costs”. Generally, the idea is to end up at zero profit or even a loss – and therefore… zero tax. I put all those terms in quote marks because there is no business – it’s just an accounting exercise, a common one at that.
 
What I therefore propose is a scrapping of income tax altogether which unfairly targets those earning between the ranges of the working-class income and the upper middle-class income, and women specifically within those thresholds and instead, we should raise the rate of corporation tax significantly which seems to include traditionally male purchases that can be easily be used to offset their tax bill.  
 
People say we should better regulate those crossing the boundary lines between corporation tax and income tax but my answer to that is – we’ve been trying to do this for a while and still people slip through the gaping cracks. It’s impossible to regulate this type of tax avoidance without employing a vast civil service that costs to employ. This, or abandon the rule of law - but that’s a dangerous path and one I’m keen to avoid. 

​The regulate argument also fails to compensate for the fact, people earning £80,000 a year can end up paying more tax than high flying billionaires which to most readers sounds ludicrous but is in fact reality...
 
I’ll leave it to the economists (which I am actually qualified but too lazy) to figure out what that rate of tax should be on this new improved corporation tax, but presumably higher than it is right now. Everyone would therefore run their household as a business – as they basically do already and have “costs” which run up against their turnover, lowering yearly “profit” or savings in reality. Why are we pretending that families don’t run their outgoings through puppet companies like above when they often do...? Why are we also pretending that family incomes and outgoings don’t usually follow much like a business, anyway.
 
This would also treat a significant issue in business right now, mainly as a result of the tax system being designed around men being the norm rather than men and women, collectively, being the norm. For now – costs such as childcare – anything you can think of that’s currently not claimable against tax, usually products and services women use more than men - would be included in “costs” and come off your tax liability. Men can claim for whisky and dinner, but women can’t claim childcare? Please.
 
Furthermore, this would also treat the major injustice that the rate of tax paid by someone earning £40,000 is incredibly different to the rate paid by someone earning £150,000. Don’t get me wrong, people earning both £40,000 a year and £150,000 a year are hardly poor but they’re out of a league – frankly leagues (in the measure) - behind those with an income of £3,000,000,000 a year. Hardly comparable. One group sends their children to a nice school and foregoes their holiday – the other has a GDP close to a West African country. Mind blown. So, why does the rate rocket from £20,000 to £60,000 but then basically collapse past £90,000 when people stop receiving income and start receiving income via “dividends” on their share of their “company”.
 
Momentum is frankly right, the Government should be doing more to tackle the grave injustice the middle class continues to undergo, being squeezed by sinking real term wages and an unfair tax system. Meanwhile, the super-rich skirt, at the pleasure of society often being served by accountants that perhaps may end up paying more tax than these highflying men of the sky - any tax at all. It’s not their fault - it’s the Governments. Scrap income tax and introduce family corporation tax.
 
For more on this topic and where I got the inspiration to consider the perspective of feminism on the way we deal with tax you can check out "Invisible Women" by Caroline Criado Perez.