PM holds his nose but Robin Hood tax won't go away

DAVID CAMERON flies to Cannes today for the G20 summit to oppose the Robin Hood tax on City transactions, but he is facing a campaign that is clearly gaining momentum.

Bill Gates, the billionaire founder of Microsoft, is the latest big name to join the call at Cannes to back the plan to take money from the rich (City investors and bankers) to give to the poor in order to raise funds for the Third World.

Actor Bill Nighy is in Cannes, too, banging the drum for the Tobin tax on behalf of Oxfam. (Nighy made a hilarious video supporting the tax in 2010, playing a supercilious banker who sought to dismiss it as "a sweet little idea" that would never work.)

German Chancellor Angela Merkel is backing the idea too, on the basis that the revenue should be used to boost growth and reduce deficits across Europe.

Meanwhile in London, the Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams has given the tax the moral authority of the Church. He wants the money spent on "investment in the 'real' economy, domestically and internationally".

Tory MPs were astonished to hear Cameron say during Prime Minister's Questions yesterday that Williams "spoke for the world" when he gave his backing to the anti-banking protestors who have occupied the square at St Paul's Cathedral.

Cameron's aides insisted the PM was drawing the line at a tax on financial transactions in the City, but many Tories are complaining Cameron appears to be facing both ways. His only ally seems to be Barack Obama, but the US President is increasingly looking like a one-term wonder, with other preoccupations.

Cameron is fortunate that he can at least go to Cannes boasting some growth - 0.5 per cent - in the UK economy. But he knows that each day the clamour for a change from his Plan A in deficit reduction grows stronger as growth fails to match Treasury predictions.

According to The Daily Telegraph’s political columnist Ben Brogan, hacks from a tabloid paper lie in wait for Chancellor George Osborne on his morning jog through St James's Park to ask him: "Have you got a Plan B yet?"

The Mole suspects we will hear more about Plan B (covered up by the usual economic guff) in Osborne's Autumn Statement on 29 November. If the G20 summit does not pull Greece and the euro out of its nose dive, Osborne will say: "Desperate times require desperate method." And then go for growth by pumping more money into the system by borrowing. ·