We hope you are all keeping safe and well and that you are beginning to unlock. It has been a tough time for so many but let’s hope we learn some important lessons about how to live our lives better with more respect for our fellow human beings who inhabit this planet with us. The Rev Paul Legacy Fund now stands at £20,648, thanks so much to everyone who has contributed, the fund is still open, we welcome more donations. The fund will be split equally between TAP and Z2K, the other campaigning group founded by Rev Paul.
 

Bring Compassion to Politics

One way of building a new beginning is to bring more compassion into public life and that’s exactly what our sister organisation, the cross-party group Compassion in Politics (CIP) is doing. They recently organised a group of politicians which joined with academics, celebrities, and civil society leaders in urging the government to make public health and wellbeing the priority of the Covid recovery plan.
 
In an open-letter, MPs from six different parties called on the Chancellor Rishi Sunak to move the country over to a “health and wellbeing economy where everybody has the basics needed to be able to achieve good health”.  Signatories to the letter say that Sunak has a “unique opportunity” to make good on the government’s own commitment to ‘level up’ society and to learn valuable lessons from Covid about the importance of tackling Britain’s systemic levels of inequality and the need to put wellbeing ahead of traditional economic targets.
 
They call for a “Covid Legacy Act” - which has been drafted by CIP with Professor Michael Marmot - which would make it the priority of every government department to meet people’s basic needs while working towards a set of health and wellbeing indicators such as child education, availability of green space, health provision, and adequate income. 
 

TAP campaigns

Meanwhile TAP is progressing the Elimination of Homelessness Bill and currently seeking support from other groups campaigning to end homelessness.
We are also working on a bill to ensure minimum income standards which builds on the legacy of our founder Rev Paul as he originally initiated the first research into the adequate minimum income, which went on to become the Real Living Wage.  
However, to make all the plans happen we need funds! So that is currently our priority, we hope to have some funds in place by in September, not just for TAP but also Compassion in Politics and the Coalition for Economic Justice, as we make a great team together.

Working together for economic justice

In order to strengthen our campaigning presence, TAP had talked about building a network with other campaigning organisations and Rev Paul was keen to do so. An opportunity arose when Tom Burgess, who became Executive Director of TAP after Rev Paul’s death in March, was elected chair of the Coalition for Economic Justice (TAP is a member) in May. He proposed a new direction for this group, which was founded in 2008 originally focussed on Land Value Capture as the route to economic justice. It was agreed to expand the mandate and invite like-minded groups to join the network. The CEJ seeks to build strength and unity by finding common ground and create awareness that real change is possible through a collaborative, inclusive and non-partisan approach. The aim is to achieve critical mass and mobilise support so the political will shifts to focus on well-being for us all. It is hoped to build a coalition of about 50 organisations with a collective online following of two million as this will provide a solid and engaged base an effective campaign.
 

What we can do

The most important thing we can all do is realise that it is to prioritise our health, without health we are restricted in our ability to lead a fulfilled and purposeful life. Also please follow us on Facebook & Twitter, like and share our posts and also ask your friends and colleagues to do the same and also sign up for updates, donate if they can. If you have some ideas on campaigns or useful evidence we could use, like real life stories of hardship but of also of stories of success, or if you have useful skills and would like to get more involved then email us at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)