Nick: So, be happy being a trouble-maker. And the second and third lessons?
Ben: Second, build collective power together. The march, the demo, the great speech, are the most visible acts but are not the main work. It was never the famous leaders that delivered. Even Nelson Mandela — they were really expressions of, or things enabled by, wider groups of thousands of leaders.
The main work is patiently organizing. Gather together people in your neighborhood, your workplace, or your faith community. Then bond and bind your groups with other groups. Revd. William Barber calls these fusion coalitions — because ordinary people are only powerful together, in coalitions of coalitions.
Third, create a story. Get above technical policy debates and have more profound conversations about who we are and what we stand for. Presenting data and formulating policy was always a necessary condition, but so insufficient that it’s not even in the top three lessons of how change happens.
Sometimes progressives say “we are the scientists, the experts, we don’t do myths and stories.” Well then, you’ll lose.
As the great union organizer Joe Hill noted, “a pamphlet, no matter how good, is never read more than once, but a song is learned by heart and repeated over and over.” In Britain in the mid-twentieth century, the phrase “Welfare State” came from the Archbishop of Canterbury. In Mexico recently, a big step forward in rights for domestic workers was enabled by the success of the movie Roma which set out no policy propositions, but changed the narrative.
Nick: And then, when you do these three, you win?
Ben: And then you can win. That beautiful chant “the people united will never be defeated” is, sadly, not correct. But what is correct is that the people divided will always be defeated. Inequality is a contestation over power. It asks us, in the words of the great civil rights song, “Which side are you on?”
Now I want to ask you about your work, Nick, because you do just that: you pick a side.
Your writing is in the great journalistic tradition of the exposé, bringing to light abuses of power and cover-ups, but it does so on economics. That makes you unusual. A lot of crusading journalism now goes no deeper than uncovering one politician who did something embarrassing; meanwhile, on the other hand, so many mainstream books on finance manage to be abstract, dull, and elitist. Your work, in contrast, lays bare massive looting.
How did you end up writing about what’s happened to finance, and more specifically, how did you end up writing about it in the way that you do?
Nick: I cut my teeth in a news agency, Reuters. They pride themselves on impartiality. Crudely, you went to one side, got some quotes, went to the other side, got quotes from them, tried to steer some sort of middle ground. The end result was sort of like “well this person says this, another person says that, here’s some analysis, and it’s complicated, the end.”
Then I was plunged into Angola, an oil-rich country with vast money flows, a few people who were very rich, very absent and very distant, and most in abject poverty. The news reporting was all about the war but almost nobody touched the economic side and how that related to the politics, even though everyone knew there was some awful connection. I began to see how money sloshing downwards through a political system shaped that system in its own image.
It was so clear that this was a story of people doing bad things, of bad systems and bad structures. Neutrality was a trap. I moved from an impartial “it’s all complicated” approach to being clear about good and bad and explaining it carefully and clearly.
The dirty secrets of what has gone wrong with finance are not only hidden in vaults — they are also hidden in acronyms or strange phrases. “Double Irish” is one, a linguistic masking that is maybe even more insidious than any physical masking. I try to peel away both of these maskings, and say, plainly, “this looks like looting.”
Ben: A lot of people portray corruption as an African phenomenon. But your work calls out leading western institutions, which until recently were fairly well-regarded brands.
Nick: It was a long process of pulling on threads, finding unexpected connections, then keeping pulling, and finding more. Then, in middle of doing that – I had just published Poisoned Wells, my book about oil in Africa – I got a call from the former economic advisor to the British tax haven island of Jersey. He wanted to tell me about tax havens. We met up in London and he detailed the corruption, the vested interests, and I saw it was the same story as Angola. My career, which I had assumed was going to go down the oil-in-Africa route, made a sudden pivot.
I had started in Africa, followed the leads, and ended up back at home in my own country. I laid this out in my tax haven book, Treasure Islands.
Ben: Desmond Tutu said when you keep seeing people drowning in a river, sure, go and rescue them, but also go upstream and stop the guy who’s pushing them in. From Angola, you have gone further and further upstream, right?
Nick: From Angola I could already dimly see offshore, because so much of the wealth was disappearing there. Then especially with the help of that Jersey official — he’s called John Christensen, and he co-founded the Tax Justice Network — I got to understand the global system of offshore, how it worked. It was much bigger than I had expected — and Britain and the United States sat right at its heart.
Ben: You went from writing about the oil curse to writing about the finance curse. What does the finance curse do?
Nick: Tax havens transmit harms outwards, to other countries, but countries with oversized financial centers transmit harms inwards, to their own people. Instead of providing services that support the creation of wealth, they focus increasingly on the more profitable business of extracting wealth. Democracy gets undermined, inequality gets worse, and economic growth slows. The answer? Shrink finance, for prosperity.
Ben: Your books includes no-holds-barred revelations of collusion between financial and political elites. How do those whom you have exposed respond. Have they sued?
Nick: I always worried that someone with infinitely deep pockets would destroy my life in the libel courts. But they haven’t sued, except with minor exceptions. They chose a cannier tactic. They didn’t engage the revelations at all. On a BBC radio program, I was up against someone from the financial sector to talk about the finance curse. I was worried, would they come out swinging, find some awful mistake in the book? Instead, and I was unprepared for this, her reaction was, “yes, well there are some problems in finance, it’s not always so great, but we are trying really hard and things are getting better.” And that was it. Opposing that is like fighting against mush.
OK so my son, who is 13 years old, has come into the room. So to conclude, can you explain to him, why we need to fight inequality, and how?
Ben: Hi. Great to meet you.
My daughter, she’s not much older than you, she goes on climate marches where we live now, in Italy. There was a big one planned for a school day, and schools were warning kids that going on the march would have them recorded absent from school without authorization, a mark against their name. But then it became clear that this march was going to be huge: thousands and thousands and thousands of kids would join, across the country. So the minister for schools said there were just too many kids to all be marked down like this, so he instructed that going to the march would count the same as going to school. Then, after the march, he agreed to change the school curriculum to properly include climate.
Each of those kids who won those victories weren’t powerful on their own, but together they were.
When we look back at history, we see that when the worst unfairnesses got tackled, it was only possible because people came together.
People standing up together is what stopped governments insisting that different races had to live apart; it is what stopped governments telling women they could not vote; it is what stopped company bosses telling little kids to work down mines or up chimneys. The lesson from history is this: if you want to make your school, your town, your country, fairer, you can – but not alone. You will find that lots of people care the same as you. It’ll still be really hard. But the only time we’ve ever made steps forward like that was when we’ve pushed, together.