The Robin Hood Tax would not be levied on banks’ transactions with their high street customers, but only apply to transactions between financial institutions. While different rates of tax would apply to different types of transaction, they would start at just five pence for every thousand pounds traded – an average of 0.05 per cent.

But even such tiny taxes would raise hundreds of billions of dollars a year given the scale of transactions – equivalent to $10,000 a day for every one of the 1.2 billion inhabitants of the world’s 30 richest countries in the OECD. Experts have estimated an international transaction tax system could eventually raise as much as £250bn ($400bn) every year.

While an internationally agreed tax system is the best way to proceed, the UK Government and European Union should start extending transaction taxes already in existence, such as the UK’s 0.5 per cent stamp duty on shares, the campaign says.

This would both raise much needed money and encourage other countries to adopt the proposal, with modern foreign exchange markets an attractive and easy target for a unilateral tax on sterling and Euro transactions.

Before the financial crisis banking was the most profitable industry in the world, with profits five times that of the pharmaceutical industry, and three times bigger than the privatised utilities. Yet banking is not taxed to the same level as other sectors. So plenty of greed, increasing inequalities, and the ability to get away with it without contributing to the social costs in any way has been the modus operandus for far too long.

The campaign is calling for countries which levy the tax to keep half the proceeds domestically and for the rest to be split 50-50 between poverty reduction and tackling climate change. The UK’s share of the tax would amount to tens of billions of pounds.

Money raised by a Robin Hood Tax could be used avoid cuts to vital public services and for a range of good causes including:

• Meeting the Government’s target to halve child poverty (£4bn)
• Ending the benefit trap that makes it too expensive for people to leave welfare and return to work (£2.7bn)
• Protecting schools and hospitals at home and abroad under threat of cuts
• Meeting the Millennium Development Goals to cut child deaths by two-thirds, maternal mortality by two-thirds and tackle malaria and HIV/AIDS, and
• Providing resources to enable a deal to be done on tackling climate change.

This campaign is part of an international movement calling for similar measures, and has wide public backing. Countries such as the UK will need to find a means of addressing the deficit which as it is will force huge cuts in public spending and/or the raising of taxes in some form. Tax the very people who have suffered the most from the recession, or tax the industry that caused it? Tax an industry that is making immense profits anyway, and make a massive difference to people's lives both at home and globally.