I applaud John O’Farrell’s article (A no-string basic income?, 7 January). The logic is a “no brainer”. A basic reason for money is to ensure the flow of goods from factory to consumer. Cut off the money supply and the system fails. This government’s policy of cutbacks and austerity does just that and tragically ensures a slide into increased levels of poverty, inequality and deprivation. A universal basic income would begin to reverse this trend and lead ultimately to a fairer future, where, it is recognised, the need for labour will continue to shrink and be increasingly replaced by automation.
We should be looking to a future where the economic benefits deriving from science and engineering will be shared by all, not a privileged few. Utopia or Dystopia? The choice is ours.
Alan Hutchison
Freuchie, Fife
John O’Farrell puts an exciting idea into currently boring politics. Labour should embrace it as a means of eliminating poverty.
Could the nation afford it? Yes. On my website convivial-politics-could-save-the-world.com, in an essay, “Citizen’s Income”, I describe levels of £4,000 for adults under 65, £1,000 for children, and £6,000 for pensioners, which in total would cost the same as the £231bn for “social protection and tax credits” in the July 2015 budget. This curiously termed item includes old age pensions, child benefits, tax credits, jobseeker and disability benefits. All of these, save disability benefit (which requires and deserves separate support), would be subsumed by citizen’s income. (Housing benefit is separate at £28bn in the budget under “housing and environment”.) These would be universal payments, as the entitlement of a citizen of the UK, with no means testing and very little of today’s personally demeaning bureaucracy.
My paper also advocates a progressive tax stretching from 2% of income for the poorest-paid to 79% for the highest. This embraces the notions that every earner should contribute to the national exchequer as a citizen’s duty and evidence of responsibility to the wider society, and that the higher the income the greater should be the contribution to the common weal.
Michael Bassey
Newark
Basic income is an idea whose time has surely come. Last year, the Bank of England’s chief economist, Andy Haldane, warned that up to 15m British jobs were at risk of being lost to technology as what he termed the “third machine age” would hollow out the labour market (Report, 13 November 2015). He is not the first economist to worry about technological advances. In 1821, after the Luddite riots, David Ricardo fretted about the “substitution of machinery for human labour” and in 1930, John Maynard Keynes coined the phrase “technological unemployment”. However, the pace and scale of change today has ensured that any notion of “full employment” is a fantasy in an economic system where increased profits always trump reduced hours, despite Keynes’ naive assumption that his grandchildren would only have to work three hours a day.
A basic, or citizen’s, income would allow carers to look after infirm relatives, permit parents to look after young children at home instead of farming them out to nurseries, and prevent people being exploited in dead-end jobs for poverty pay. Depending on the level at which it was pitched, it would effectively raise the minimum wage and, contrary to what Mr O’Farrell wrote, would actually help trade unions in organising workers.
In order to pay for basic income, the most logical change to the taxation system would be the introduction of a land tax, the effect of which would be to reduce property prices and, in conjunction with basic income, stimulate the economy by putting more money into circulation. The net result would reduce inequality and have a negative effect on the income of rentier landlords who would undoubtedly see the measures as an attack on capitalism itself: yet another good reason to make it happen.
Bert Schouwenburg
International officer, GMB
John O’Farrell might be interested to know that several experiments with universal basic income precede the Utrecht one. Namibia is an example. They are all based upon the arguments he summarises. But he could go further and consider the notion of “rightful shares”, advanced in James Ferguson’s Give a Man a Fish. A citizen’s income is based upon a principle of shared ownership of a nation’s wealth, not a handout decided by those who have captured most of that wealth. With income security on the basis of ownership rights, people have dignity and are liberated to become real citizens politically and economically. It also addresses the false premise of full employment in the form of decent work. And it cuts enormous red tape and inequities associated with means testing and targeting.
Estimates from around the world indicate that it is affordable even in poorer countries such as India and Indonesia. It could even work in a less developed country such as Bangladesh, especially as it approaches middle-income status over the next decade. The problem to overcome is high inequality, inefficient and unfair tax regimes and a paradigm change in the politics of distribution. Sounds familiar?
Geof Wood
Emeritus professor of international development, University of Bath
I think most Guardian readers would be instinctively drawn to the idea of the universal basic income as a signifier of a return to universal welfare, but we should be careful what we wish for. Charles Murray, arch champion of neo-liberal reform of the state, has been arguing for this for years as a means of eliminating forever the welfare state.
Karen West
Aston University
The idea of a universal basic income (UBI) has been part of Green Party policy for decades. Its modern incarnation was pioneered by the short-lived Oxford Ecology Movement in our manifesto for the 1979 general election, as part of a radically egalitarian position that also proposed a maximum earned income range of 3:1. In this we anticipated by many years the findings of Wilkinson and Pickett’s The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better and other studies showing that the smaller the income disparities, the happier the society.
The obscene income disparities seen today in finance, big business (and football) should have no place in a civilised society. Not for nothing did Gandhi allegedly say, when asked what he thought of Western civilization, “that would be a good idea”.
Anthony Cheke
Parliamentary candidate in 1979 for the old single Oxford constituency
What an exciting experiment the Dutch are trialling with the no-strings basic income. It sounds like the sort of utopia that those of us who want a fairer society, sometimes known as Labour supporters, yearn for. No doubt some financial guru will depress us by telling us how much it will cost and why it could never work but let’s wait and see how our Dutch neighbours fare.
Lisa Holcroft
Solihull