GEORGE OSBORNE'S Autumn Statement scares the pants off me. Billed as a give-away programme to boost the NHS and the economy, its real impact could be to throw Britain into a new round of recession and austerity.

The Chancellor knows that his tax revenues are shrinking - the rich no longer pay tax and the poor are too poor to make up the difference.

However much he promises the NHS, the Chancellor knows he will have to borrow £100 billion to balance the books this year.

His Autumn Statement has nothing to do with economic strength and everything to do with a shameless dash for the general election. It will all end in tears. And sadly it reminded me of the children who lived opposite us when I was little.

When I was a child, we didn't know we were poor. Everyone was poor. But we knew kids on the street who were poorer than us.

Sometimes my mum sent us over with things we'd grown out of or had left over. What comes back to mind, though, was Christmas.

Each year their kids got presents, just like the rest of us. On Christmas Day we would be out on the street strutting or sharing whatever we'd received. And so were the three girls opposite. The difference was that by February all their presents had disappeared.

Asking "why," we were told that the family had had a "catalogue Christmas." Their presents, bought on credit before Christmas, had been reclaimed by the catalogue company's agents when payments were not forthcoming.

This was not a new experience for the "Catalogue Kids." For them, life was full of apparent gifts that routinely turned into losses. Which brings me back to the Chancellor's Autumn Statement.

Parliament - and politics - struggles to lift its vision beyond an age of short-term, comfort-seeking contradictions.

Globally as well as nationally, today's biggest problems cannot be answered just by shuffling insufficiencies around. Nor is it necessary to do so.

When abundant wealth flaunts itself in the face of abject poverty, we just need a different starting point.

In contrast to the Chancellor, the music world has just produced a relaunch of Do They Know It's Christmas. The public rushed out to buy it. And the record raced to No 1, with the money going directly towards tackling the spread of Ebola in north Africa. It will not be enough, but this act of self-taxation is a gift, not an "on credit" loan.

Of course, it does nothing to address the structural underfunding of the World Health Organisation and the UN, or their programmes to eradicate endemic ill-health. But, like my mum on an international scale, it was an unconditional act of solidarity.

Herein lies the paradox. Society spontaneously heads in one direction while our leaders head in the other. So it was in the pre-Christmas attempt of global leaders to belatedly address the crisis of climate damage.

Faced with the enormity of climate mitigation measures urgently needed for some nations even to survive, global leaders reached for the "catalogue" rather than the cash.

The result was their launch of a - much-trumpeted - green climate fund (GCF).

Countries of varying shapes and sizes appeared to step up to the plate, pledging $10 billion to tackle the most pressing environmental catastrophes on the horizon.

Britain, promising $1bn, emerged as one of the more virtuous contributors. It seemed to be another act of significant solidarity.

But hold on a moment. This $10bn is less than countries had already promised. It is the bottom end of a $10-15bn target set by the UN last year.

And countries were supposed to have coughed up this amount before this month's UN climate summit in Lima, Peru.

Moreover, the new GCF contributions are to be spread over four years and could be a third lower per year than had been pledged at the UN's climate summit in Cancun, 2010.

Back in 2009, "fast-track" climate mitigation and adaptation funds were supposed to run at around $10bn per year (from 2010-2012). Today's £10bn over four years is the promise of less, not more.

What deceit. Internationally, the world was offered a replica of Osborne's "gifts" to the nation - catalogue Christmas all over again.

Let us put these choices into a different context. Last year, US military spending topped $575bn.

Against this, the US £3bn donation into the GCF looks wimpish by comparison.

Put another way, Amazon managed to pay just 0.01 per cent tax on its last year's trading turnover. It did so by using the "banking facilities" of a back-street office in Luxembourg.

Amazon is just one of the flotilla of transnational companies for whom paying tax has become "optional." You may not want to blame them. It is just what international law allows.

At every level today's most punishing tax rates are levied on the poor - either in the reclamation rates of means-tested benefits or the "hard currency" repayment terms of development loans.

Optional tax regimes for the rich now leave little in the coffers of national governments to fund the supranational institutions they once set up.

So, the G20 finds itself reduced to its own Do They Know It's Christmas? events, feigning a compassion that never actually delivers.

Global leaders are systematically reduced to singers without songs - miming acts of sham solidarity - while only the public continues to throw in cash.

This is the chasm that divides and shames the space between public compassion and political leadership.

In the same way that my mum sent small gifts across the street, communities send small gifts, unconditionally, across the planet.

What we currently lack is a global leadership that matches up to the citizens they represent.

Interviewed by BBC's Radio 4, a spokesperson for the Luxembourg government was strikingly honest about its position.

No, the country wasn't likely to change its tax laws while others were free to set up alternative havens. Yes, it would be happy to agree to a flat, minimum tax rate on footloose capital - as long as this was an international agreement, imposing a de minimus tax rate and blocking access to international markets to non-signatories.

"Of course," he added, "the world will not agree to this."

Even the BBC is unused to such honesty. So where do we turn next?

The world desperately needs social movements that rescue - and redirect - today's "interventionist" debates.

All too eagerly, our leaders queue up to endorse cold war "solutions" to punish errant nations - Russia, Iran, Argentina, Greece, or anyone whose transgressions might challenge Western hegemonic power.

There is no reluctance to threaten countries, but an absolute reluctance to challenge the hegemonic power of capital.

Yet one of the most important interventionist measures of our time remains permanently excluded from the terms of global summits.

It is the Tobin tax - the proposal to levy a fragmentary rate of tax on speculative movements of capital.

Administered by the UN, this could turn the World Bank into a vehicle for rescuing the planet rather than holding it to ransom.

The technology that underpins today's most speculative capital movements also enables it's easiest taxation. The question is whether we have the will to tax excess wealth and whether a differently structured UN would be allowed to control the process?

It is at this point that our leaders refuse to lead. Britain is at the forefront of asserting that hegemonic capital must never be constrained.

To do so would be to threaten the very core of today's corporate feudalism. So it is that one part of public services will be robbed to prop up another. Meanwhile, the new boss of British Gas is to be paid an astronomical £14 million salary for running a near gas monopoly.

These are the wealth divides that historically have preceded huge societal upheavals.

What threatens us most is not migrant labour but migrant capital. It is the "created" conditions that invite people to starve, to fight or to flee, that we have to redress.

None of the answers to these problems will be found within the mindset of a "catalogue coalition."

Tomorrow's leaders have to be reminded that the only statements of any relevance will be ones which recognise that the planet - and how we live on it - is for life ... not just for Christmas.

Alan Simpson is former Labour MP for Nottingham South.