Fighting the good fight: emerging pathways to Change

Something utterly unexpected occurred at the start of 2019. And it occurred in the most unlikely, yet perfect, of places. At the annual World Economic Forum in the Swiss Alps town of Davos, renowned as a shindig for the super-rich to schmooze, back slap, and brag about being concerned with the social good and the environment and then, with zero sense of irony, jump into their private jets to fly off and accumulate yet more billions, one of the panels went viral. On his first visit to the event, 30-year-old Rutger Bregman, a Dutch historian and author of the book Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World, suddenly found himself catapulted onto the international media stage (he was branded a ‘folk hero’ by Vox2) when he launched into an off-piste, pre-prepared riff about taxing the rich. The panel was about inequality but Bregman felt compelled to address, as he told The Washington Post, ‘the elephant in the room’ – a room stuffed with the world's wealthy. “I hear people talking the language of participation and justice and equality and transparency,” he told the audience. “But then almost no one raises the real issue of tax avoidance. And of the rich just not paying their fair share. It feels like I’m at a firefighters conference and no one is allowed to speak about water.”

Even watching the clip on YouTube you can almost feel the oxygen leave the room. “This is not rocket science,” Bregman continued. “We can talk for a very long time about all these stupid philanthropy schemes, we can invite Bono once more, but come on, we got to be talking about taxes. That's it. Taxes, taxes, taxes. All the rest is bullshit, in my opinion.”