So far, we have focused on how state policies aimed at low-paid workers – on welfare and skills – have the effect of undermining bargaining power in the workplace. However, the state's effects on low-paid workers have much broader scope. In the final chapters of this book we turn our attention to wider factors that influence the labour market, exploring the role of social infrastructure and state regulation in supporting good work and overcoming labour market exclusion.

Starting with the former, we show how degradation of social infrastructure – from declining local bus services to childcare services that don't meet the shift patterns of low-paid workers – conspire to create barriers to work, especially for women. As we show, childcare and transport are not only social policy issues but fundamental to tackling low-pay low-productivity Britain. Childcare Self-evidently, childcare is essential to parents being able to work: no parent can go out to work unless someone is looking after their children. The responsibility normally falls on mothers: employment rates in mixed-sex couples with children under 12 are 20 percentage points lower for women than for men; average hours of work are more than 40 per cent lower; nine out of ten lone parents are women. Time-use data shows that women spend twice as much time as fathers looking after children (Wishart et al. 2019). Seven out of ten mothers of children aged below four say that having reliable childcare helps them to go out to work (DfE 2019).

Childcare in the UK is more expensive than most other highincome countries. Support for childcare is a mix of free and subsidized provision, support through the welfare system, and tax reliefs on childcare expenditure. Taking these into account, the net expenditure on childcare for couples with two children aged two and three using formal childcare is likely to be around one third of the average wage. For lone parents, net expenditure is lower. However, at 10 per cent of the average wage, there are still only four countries in the OECD with higher rates (see Figure 9.1).

This book was suggested to me by Alison Howson at Agenda Publishing, who had the excellent idea of asking five people to consider how far William Beveridge's assertion that five giants needed to be overcome in postwar Britain had actually happened and whether these giants had now been banished. These were Want (poverty), Disease (health), Idleness (unemployment), Squalor (housing) and Ignorance (education). I have lived through the post-Beveridge changing and expanding school system, and then worked “in education” at various levels and together with many valued colleagues and friends have researched and written about the education system in Britain and other countries. Together with many others I am sad that the education system in England, which slowly and with errors was beginning to serve all children and young people and help develop some measure of social and racial justice in our society, has been turned into a competitive, semi-privatized, profit-seeking and unjust system. Ronald Reagan, the former US president, had much admiring right-wing press coverage for his claim that “the most terrifying nine words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help’ ”. In my view the five most terrifying words over the past 40 years have been “Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher”, as they were the principal architects of what became “neoliberalism”, a free-market ideology which has dominated much of the world since the 1980s and produced, in England especially, pointlessly competitive and corrupted schooling. Other postwar European countries managed to banish much ignorance in their populations through more equitable and just education, and without the often vicious denigration of a state-maintained system and its teachers, which is still in full flow in this country. It has become more difficult to find out what is actually happening in many of our schools, as they have been turned into businessoriented institutions with all the claims for confidentiality that characterize businesses. Research that might be critical of policy and practice is discouraged and much research funded by government avoids searching questions. Current claims that governments are interested in “what works” in schooling avoid the question “works for whom?”

Some intrepid writers, along with committed journalists, have managed to study and write from critical perspectives, and a number of books, articles and blogs now question what is going on.

With so many funds available, and new launches coming to market so regularly, one might expect intense price competition among funds in the UK and Europe. But the European fund management industry is different. Cutting fees to attract clients is barely, if ever, used by active fund managers. For most firms, to take this approach would be to tacitly admit that their performance, or expected future performance, is not as good as their rivals. Regardless of the reality, the possibility that this could be suggested is enough to stop most active firms from taking this step. Index-tracking funds, on the other hand, do compete on price, which in turn puts competitive pressure on active asset managers to demonstrate that it is worth paying more for potentially higher returns. Trying to unpick the reasons for the limits of price competition in the industry touches on both the way fee structures are determined for active funds and the way funds are distributed in Europe.

How funds ignore the law of demand

As we briefly discussed in Chapter 1, the law of demand suggests that the higher the price of a product, the less will be demanded, all other things being equal, while the lower the price of a product, the more people can afford it and so will purchase more of it. The ways in which the funds industry does not abide by this law are explored below.

Firstly, funds do not have a price tag that is distinct from a client's investment. Clients’ investments in a fund are collectively used to pay for the costs the fund incurs. A fund pays these costs, such as those for its management, from its assets on a daily basis. These costs are then presented as an annualized percentage charge to investors. For example, if a fund manager's investments generate an annual return of 7 per cent over one year and the fund incurs costs equivalent to 1 per cent of its assets over that year, then the fund’s investors receive a return of 6 per cent over the year (7 per cent less the 1 per cent costs). So a fund's charge reduces the return it generates by that amount every year.

The aim of this book is to provide an overview of terrorist finance in the twenty-first century and the measures employed to identify and obstruct money intended to support acts of terrorism. Terrorist financing has been a concern and topic of analysis for a large number of policy-makers and academics throughout the past two decades (and longer for a few specialists). In large part, the attention has been focused on the group or groups that represented a threat to a specific country. When the terrorist threat is local, and thus a national problem, this concern is understandable. Yet the dynamic changed at the end of the twen¬tieth century with the emergence of a more transnational form of terrorism. In turn, the states affected by transnational terrorist groups turned their efforts towards an international campaign against terrorist financing as one modality for suppressing and preventing acts of terrorism. The initial result was the con¬struction of mechanisms to combat the financing of terrorism (CFT) suitable for operation in the financial systems of developed economies. In time the international guidance evolved to offer some flexibility for implementation that recognized the different circumstances operating in the financial systems of a developing economy. A similar distinction can be found in the literature on terrorist finance, where a large part remains concerned with the financial systems of developed economies and a small portion analyses the impact of CFT measures on economic development, financial inclusion and the limited reach of formal finance in the developing economies.

The following chapters are the product of close to 20 years studying global finance and seeking to understand the efforts taken by national and international authorities to regulate and govern it. Much of the focus for this activity is located at the intersection of finance and security, and terrorist finance has been one of the central concerns. This text builds on research published in a number of edited books and academic journals, and it follows the general structure developed for a fourth-year undergraduate module at the University of St Andrews that I taught between 2009 and 2012. To access the publications and guidelines of the Financial Action Task Force and United Nations Security Council, mentioned throughout the text, please see the References section, which provides the general web addresses for these organizations through which the various publications can then be found.

Making the regime to counter terrorist financing global is more than simply expecting UN members to comply with the Resolutions of the Security Council. Yet that is the expectation of the Security Council, that all states are committed to take these actions because they are issued under Chapter VII of the UN Charter. The periodic reports of the Analytical Support and Sanctions Monitoring Team on compliance for the resolutions that impose targeted sanctions to prevent terrorist financing, however, reveal that is not the case. Beyond reporting data on accounts and assets frozen, states are expected to maintain travel bans, arms embargos and all other forms of targeted sanctions. For several states the cost of compliance, in the context of local conditions and with limited national resources, is simply too much. Financial and technical support is available but not as a per¬manent and ongoing subsidy to cover the continuing cost of compliance. The result is differing levels of implementation and enforcement among the member states of the UN, reflecting their level of concern for transnational terrorism and the local capacity to establish and enforce the CFT regime. As seen later in the chapter, if the FATF feels that a country's effort to act against money laundering and terrorist financing is insufficient, it will impose its measures intended to encourage the government to correct the deficiencies.

Even in countries with extensive formal financial systems and high levels of financial inclusion, the introduction of CFT measures at the beginning of the twenty-first century was not straightforward. An official from the UK's Financial Services Authority related one example of the problems created by them in a con¬ference speech in 2004: An “Oxford College [was] required to produce its 15th century charter, complete with seal to open a new account” (Robinson 2004: n.p.). The issue highlighted by this anecdote is the extent to which bank employees might require documentation to prove identity to satisfy the customer due diligence (CDD) requirement (also known as the “know your customer” obligation). The requirement is to prove one's legal identity so that the bank can avoid providing services to an individual or business that is the subject of targeted sanctions.

For a time after 2001 a frequent approach for introducing the topic of terrorist financing was to relate the announcement of Executive Order 13224 in the White House Rose Garden on 24 September 2001.1 The “Executive Order on Terrorist Financing: Blocking Property and Prohibiting Transactions With Persons Who Commit, Threaten to Commit, or Support Terrorism” marks the emergence of a more robust and aggressive CFT regime. Along with establishing terrorist finan¬cing as the initial battlefront in the US Administration's “Global War on Terror”, the “Rose Garden” speech of President George W. Bush provided several refrains that would be repeated regularly (Bush 2001: n.p.). These common quotations included:

But recall that the US was not one of the four states that had ratified the International Convention for the Suppression of the Financing of Terrorism in 2001. This situation was raised in the Rose Garden speech and President Bush said that he would be asking the Senate to ratify the Convention (which was recorded by the UN as 26 June 2002).

Many of the people living in Europe and North America on 11 September 2001 will have strong memories of that day and the live news reports they may have watched. It is, however, a very Western-centric view of the events. While suggesting the attacks had global significance, David Lyon reminds us of the Western-centric nature of the narrative surrounding the destruction of the World Trade Center. “True, their perceived significance differs from place to place. For instance, the national daily newspaper in Zambia granted only a couple of column inches of an inside page to the 9/11 attacks, on September 13” (Lyon 2003: 3).