Richard Murphy - 'Will austerity work?’

Date: Wednesday 20 April 2016 
Time: 18:00 -19:30
Speaker: Richard Murphy
Talk Title: 'Will austerity work?’
Location: Ramsden Room, St Catharine's College

Speaker
Richard Murphy is a UK chartered accountant and political economist. He was senior partner of a practicing firm and director of a number of entrepreneurial companies before becoming one of the founders of the Tax Justice Network in 2002. He now directs Tax Research UK and writes, broadcasts and blogs extensively, the latter at http://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/. Richard was appointed as Professor of Practice in International Political Economy at City University in September 2015. During the summer of 2015 he was widely credited with creating Corbynomics’ and is the creator of the idea now known as People's Quantitative Easing. Richard’s latest book is ‘The Joy of Tax’ 

(Bantam, October 2015). Richard created the country-by-country reporting concept and has been credited with creating much of the debate on tax gaps in the UK and Europe. He also defined the term ‘secrecy jurisdictions’, now widely used in debates on offshore. He has been involved in many of the stories on corporate tax abuse that have made headlines in recent years. Richard is joint author of 'Tax Havens, The True Story of Globalisation', Cornell University Press 2010 and sole author of 'The Courageous State', Searching Finance, 2011. In 2012 the Association of International Accountants gave Richard their award for an outstanding contribution to the accountancy profession. He was named the seventh most influential person in international tax by the International Tax Review in 2013. In 2015 the Sheila McKechnie Foundation named him as their Economic Justice Campaigner of the Year.

Talk Overview:
Richard Murphy will talk about issues surrounding austerity, its perceptions and the potential political reactions to it. The talk will build on a paper Richard co-authored with Prof Ronen Palan of City University in November 2015 in anticipation of the Spending Review published that month but will also bring in themes relating to UK tax reform, the prospect of raising additional taxation and creating greater social justice by tackling the UK tax gap (a theme that was created by Richard but adopted by Jeremy Corbyn in the summer of 2015) and the funding of new infrastructure to get the UK out of economic stagnation (People's Quantitative Easing). The suggestion that will be made is that not only will austerity not succeed in balancing the UK government’s budget but trying to deliver that goal will lay the foundation for major political upheaval in the UK.

If you would like any further information please contact:
Philip Arestis at: pa267@cam.ac.uk or Michael Kitson at: mk24@cam.ac.uk.