#Wonga, #Welby and the Socialists

The recent indignation over investment of Church of England pension funds into Wonga , a payday lender business reminds me of a story from the United States.  

In 2007 Senator John Edwards was a presidential hopeful who'd already gained public attention when he'd spoken of his plans to tackle global poverty. He was campaigning in Spartanburg .

"If you're two days from pay day and you don't have any money in the bank and your children have to eat, you'll do anything," Edwards said during his 20-minute speech at Spartanburg Memorial Auditorium. "We ought to have a national predatory lending law that cracks down on these predators, and we need to help people save."

As journalist Trevor Anderson pointed out Spartanburg was HQ of Advance America, a prominent payday lender who'd made financial contributions to Hilary Clinton.

 

 

Archbishop Welby isn't calling for a predatory lending law and neither is Vince Cable who endorses his stance. He says he wants to see Wonga put out of business. 

.Wonga founder Adrian Beecroft responds in The Telegraph by describing Vince Cable as a socialist and not fit for office.

I was reminded of a conversation some years ago with our founder. I was asking him why he'd never used the term social capitalism in his paper on People-Centered Economic Development.

He said. "In the US, social for most means being a socialist, which is one step further than being a baby burning communist" 

Later, writing about the activities of an "economic hit man", he'd point out that this perception is not shared by most Europeans

But where were the socialists, if indeed their are any socialists in Britain, on this issue?

Labour leader Ed Miliband has rejected the dogma of his father, a Marxist academic and wants to save the capitalism his father hated..  

'While there’s capitalism, there’ll be socialism, because there is always a response to injustice.’

Our background in social enterpise was to have sourced an initiative to tackle poverty in Russia, which introduced a community microfinance bank. In 1999 our founder noted:  

"There were also critical food shortages in the region, children living on the streets because they considered orphanages intolerable, women having to resort to prostitution to feed their children, and a near-total lack of new economic opportunities.   Economic opportunities for women were routinely negotiated in bed, if at all."

The Russia/US Regional Initiative in Tomsk ran from January 2001 to December 2005. The Tomsk Microfinance Bank, a key component recommended and requested by P-CED, remains in operation and has been fully self-sufficient and profitable since 2003. To date, more than fifteen thousand loans have supported the creation of thousands of new businesses.  More than 80% of loans went to women.

It was in 2004, while Labour were in power, that we'd appoached government for support with a proposal for business to invest in community development funds, saying

“Traditional capitalism is an insufficient economic model allowing monetary outcomes as the bottom line with little regard to social needs. Bottom line must be taken one step further by at least some companies, past profit, to people. How profits are used is equally as important as creation of profits. Where profits can be brought to bear by willing individuals and companies to social benefit, so much the better. Moreover, this activity must be recognized and supported at government policy level as a badly needed, essential, and entirely legitimate enterprise activity.”

As we would discover, these 'socialists' showed up where we were raising awareness of social injustice in Ukraine, to support the oligarchs who'd been identified as the root cause of social injustice. One of them even handed over half a million dollars of his 'wonga' to support Tony Blair's Faith Foundation, while children in Ukraine perish from malnutrition in institutions and aborted foetusus are trafficked for profit.

Faux socialists,  profiting from rhetoric without courage, faith without works.