WDM’s June meeting was a chance to plan the details of our appearance at summer events. We’ve confirmed that we will definitely have a stall at the Cowley Road Carnival on 7th July. We may also be at the Elder Stubbs festival on 17th August.

We also confirmed that our August meeting (on Tuesday 13th August) will be a summer social, with non-members welcome as ever. The details of this will be sorted out over the next few weeks, and we’ll pop them up on the website as soon as everything is confirmed.

If you see our WDM T-shirts at an Oxfordshire event this summer, please do come and say hello!

The May meeting was the Oxford group’s Annual General Meeting, which meant it was time to elect the new committee for 2013-2014.

We said a big thank-you and goodbye to Chris Manley, who stepped down as secretary after several years’ excellent work. We’re hoping he will continue to be involved with the group.

Mike Dee offered to become the new secretary and was elected unopposed (with warm thanks from the group for volunteering). He will now be the main point of contact for the group at oxfordwdm@gmail.com.

Other committee members were re-elected to their posts for another year. The new committee is as follows:

Chair: Sam Partington
Secretary: Mike Dee
Treasurer: Tina Everett
Communications Officer: Kate Griffin
Writer/editor of the Oxspur newsletter: Andrew Hodgson

Some tasks still don’t have a regular person allotted to them, such as:

• formatting the Oxspur newsletter (a Word doc)
• organising of event rotas

We will also be looking for a new treasurer soon. If you’re interested in helping the group, in however small a way, please do get in touch on  oxfordwdm@gmail.com.

Meet other WDM group members, share experiences, and come up with ideas and solutions for effective local campaigning. 11am-3pm ((tea and coffee from 10.30 am). At Christchurch, 105a Clarendon Park Rd, Leicester, LE2 3AH.

What’s happening with the global economy? How can we turn change in the direction of greater social justice? At our May meeting we welcomed Dr Peter Dwyer, tutor in Radical Economics at Ruskin College, for a chat about global politics.

Dr Dwyer is clear that the free-market model isn’t working; even arch-capitalists like Mario Draghi, president of the European Central Bank, acknowledge that people are losing faith in the market model. We discussed the relationship between the state and the free market and he pointed out that George Bush, despite being ideologically opposed to nationalisation, presided over “the greatest piece of nationalisation in modern history”: the multi-trillion-dollar bailout of Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac.

The obvious failures of the current system give us an opportunity to talk about alternative models, but so far there isn’t much political appetite for this. For example, nobody in mainstream politics is questioning the desirability of growth for growth’s sake; the Green Party is working on a zero-growth model but it isn’t being publicised.

We also talked about global superpowers such as China, with the surprising revelation that many items labelled as “made in China” are actually made in other countries and assembled in China; the origin of goods isn’t as clear-cut as we might think.

One of the questions from the group was about Dr Dwyer’s job title: why “radical” economics? The answer involved an interesting digression on the nature of our attitude to economics. Many universities see “economics” as a subject comparable to maths; there are right and wrong answers. Ruskin’s decision to put “Radical” in front of “Economics” is a way of signifying that the college sees the subject as more politically inflected and open to interpretation. It was interesting to hear that Ruskin students cover subject matter that many mainstream universities don’t touch.

We ran out of time before we’d finished discussing all the interesting issues raised by Dr Dwyer’s talk, but the group is hoping to get him to come and talk again before long, perhaps on his specialist subject of South Africa. He believes that the global South doesn’t get enough attention and it is “time to talk about the South/South dynamic”.

We finished on a hopeful note: the seismic changes – “Europe is being massively and violently structurally adjusted” – offer an opportunity to challenge old certainties such as the idea that markets are inherently more efficient. Dr Dwyer believes that “a space is opening up” for new and alternative ideas that might have been unthinkable before.

Why not come along to our June meeting and join us in planning our summer of activities?

Time: 7:30pm

Venue: Oxford Town Hall

WDM’s national Annual General Meeting will be about alternatives to the G8 consensus, with a speaker line-up including bestselling author Raj Patel. More details here. It’s free to attend, but you’ll need to book in advance.

We’ll have a stall at the Cowley Road Carnival on Sunday 7th July. Do come and say hello!

As ever, we’ll be spending the meeting discussing upcoming events and campaigns. You don’t have to be a member of Oxford WDM to join us – interested members of the public are welcome too. Just come along to Oxford Town Hall on Tuesday 9th July at 7:30pm.

WDM campaigners set up stall to help bankers quit gambling: Saturday 6^th April

 Campaigners from Oxford World Development Movement (WDM) were on Cornmarket Street on Saturday to raise awareness of bankers gambling on food prices.

 The tongue-in-cheek “Bankers Anonymous” campaign highlights a serious issue: financial speculation by banks and hedge funds is driving up food prices, sending the cost of basic foods spiralling beyond the reach of millions of the world’s poorest people. It also impacts food prices in richer countries such as the UK.

The World Development Movement is calling for tough controls on food speculation. The Oxford campaigners were asking passers-by to write to their MP calling for tighter regulation. It’s part of a “five-step programme” to stop the gambling.

At the weekend, WDM campaigners headed to central Oxford with our Bankers Anonymous banner. We were asking Saturday shoppers to write to their MP – but why?

Basically, bankers are betting on food. Doesn’t make sense? Nope, but it’s happening all right. People in the banking sector are treating global food prices as a commodity to be gambled on. It’s called food speculation. While a bet on the World Cup is harmless fun, this type of betting actually affects the outcome of the markets being speculated on.

Bankers are flooding food markets with capital, which has the effect of divorcing global food prices from the reality of production or demand. It’s creating wild swings in prices, which means paying more for our weekly shop here in the UK – and misery for people in the Third World.

WDM has responded with the tongue-in-cheek Bankers Anonymous campaign, a “five-step programme” to help bankers give up their addiction to gambling with other people’s lives.

We figure the bankers aren’t going to give up on their own, so we’re going to give them a helping hand with extra regulation. That’s why the Oxford WDM group were wandering around the aptly-named Cornmarket Street, asking people to fill in postcards that sent a message to their MP.

Europe’s finance ministers are meeting soon to tackle food speculation. But our own government, the UK government, is opposing the tough new rules being proposed.

Why is our own government trying to make life even easier for the bankers? And why are we letting them get away with behaviour that has already pushed 44 million more people into poverty?

Perhaps people aren’t screaming and shouting because food speculation is a confusing issue and under-reported in the media. But the basic facts are simple:

Bankers’ greed is messing up global food prices, making eating less affordable for everybody. People are going hungry so that bankers can make millions.

If you’re happy with that, you don’t need to do anything. But if you’re sick of paying for bankers’ bonuses with your weekly food bills, or seeing people in the Third World paying with their lives, it’s time to write to your MP.

Thanks to all the many people who stopped and talked to us on Saturday. It’s great to know the message is getting through and so many people are happy to take action.