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About Joel Benjamin

Joel Benjamin is a campaigner for social change and part of the People Vs PFI campaign.

Articles by Joel Benjamin

This week's editor

MM

Mairi Mackay is openDemocracy’s senior editor.

Constitutional conventions: best practice

Forget tax hikes: plan B is citizens' debt audits

Before raising taxes, local councils should look seriously at auditing their astonishing debt repayments.

Osborne's "budget lock" is a scam to encourage more borrowing from the City

By continually restricting the available finance from central government Osborne is encouraging a boom in personal debt and excessive council borrowing from the City of London.

Dispatches: how local governments are being fleeced by the banks on £15bn loans

Dispatches will tonight report on the latest banking scandal - the kickbacks and dodgy loans surrounding local government financing. So what's going on?

Fifty shades of tax avoidance, or, what are the bankers doing with our schools and hospitals?

Huge sums that are supposed to fund the National Health Service are finding their way into yet more offshore tax havens, channelled through Private Finance initiative (PFI) projects. 

Seven things everyone should know about the Private Finance Initiative

The Private Finance Initiative is a big part of the privatisation that's killing England's NHS, so why aren’t any of the main parties opposed to it?

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