by Kate McFarland | Jun 4, 2017 | News
With the UK’s General Election taking place on June 8, 2017, two green political parties–the Green Party of England and Wales and the Scottish Green Party–have included calls for basic income in their election manifestos.
As its first point on economic policy, the Green manifesto calls on the UK to “[t]ake steps towards the introduction of a universal basic income, including a government sponsored pilot scheme, as a means to increase security and avoid the poverty trap.”
The Scottish Greens’ manifesto includes a similar call for the government to take steps towards a UBI. Additionally, a section on protection of public services includes the comment, “Green voices will help deliver the change needed to end our reliance on fossil fuels, deliver millions of green jobs, and begin the transition to a universal basic income.”
Support for basic income from the Green Party of England and Wales is not new: the party’s sole current member of the House of Commons, Caroline Lucas, tabled an early day motion in June 2016, which calls on the central government to “fund and commission further research into the possibilities offered by the various basic income models, their feasibility, their potential to guarantee additional help for those who need it most and how the complex economic and social challenges of introducing a basic income might be met.” To date, the early day motion has gathered 38 signatures from MPs.
Meanwhile, none of the UK’s major parties have incorporated basic income into their election manifestos. The Labour Party has recently shown interest in basic income, and even established a working group to research its potential and feasibility. However, despite some earlier speculation that basic income might appear in Labour’s election manifesto, this prediction has not been realized. Additionally, Scotland’s largest party, the Scottish National Party, has not endorsed basic income in its manifesto, despite its past support for motions on UBI.
Further Reading
Jonathan Bartley, “The Greens endorse a universal basic income. Others need to follow,” The Guardian, June 4, 2017.
Jonathan Bartley is co-leader (with Lucas) of the Green Party of England and Wales.
Reviewed by Genevieve Shanahan
Photo: Polling place in London, UK, CC BY-SA 2.0 Cory Doctorow
by Kate McFarland | Jun 4, 2017 | News
A Special Rapporteur of the United Nations will hold a panel discussion on universal basic income and the future of human rights on Thursday, June 8, 2017.
Organized by Professor Philip Alston, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, the event will explore the potential for basic income to mitigate global economic insecurity. The panelists include two cofounders of the Basic Income Earth Network — Professor Philippe van Parijs (University of Louvain, Hoover Chair of Economic and Social Ethics) and Guy Standing (School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London) — in addition to Isabelle Doresse (People’s Universities in Northern Pas de Calais, ATD Fourth World) and Alex Praça (Human and Trade Union Rights Officer of the International Trade Union Confederation).
The panel will discuss a report prepared by Alston and submitted to the UN’s Human Rights Council. Alston’s report addresses the concern that “the human rights movement needs to address and respond to the fundamental changes that are taking place in economic and social structures at the national and global levels,” including precarious employment, automation, increasing inequality, and the obsolescence of traditional forms of labor market regulation.
As Alston describes the idea, a basic income “is explicitly designed to challenge most of the key assumptions underpinning existing social security systems”:
Rather than a system where there are partial payments, basic income guarantees a floor; instead of being episodic, payments are regular; rather than being needs-based, they are paid as a flat rate to all; they come in cash, rather than as messy in-kind support; they accrue to every individual, rather than only to needy households; rather than requiring that various conditions be met, they are unconditional; rather than excluding the well off, they are universal; and instead of being based on lifetime contributions, they are funded primarily from taxation.
The 20-page report describes each of these characteristics of a basic income, overviews the history of the idea, and describes various types of basic income and related policies, such as a negative income tax and cash transfers. Alston also lays out some examples of the possible cost of implementing a basic income scheme.
Alston holds that “the basic income concept should not be rejected out of hand on the grounds that it is utopian” and encourages further discussion of the policy as a means to alleviate economic insecurity and promote human rights and social justice. He additionally urges that the debate on basic income be united with that on social protection floors.
Further Viewing and Reading
The June 8 panel discussion will be broadcast live online here.
The full report on universal basic income of the Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights is available in the UN’s document repository or can be directly downloaded as a PDF here.
Reviewed by Genevieve Shanahan
Photo: Human Rights Council during 15th Session, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 UN Geneva
by Kate McFarland | Jun 3, 2017 | Research
The Institute for Policy Research (IPR) at the University of Bath published its latest report on the effects of basic income — titled “Exploring the Distributional and Work Incentive Effects of Plausible Illustrative Basic Income Schemes” — on May 18, 2017.
Authored by IPR Research Associate Luke Martinelli, the report builds upon the working paper “The Fiscal and Distributional Implications of Alternative Universal Basic Income Schemes in the UK” (March 2017), in which Martinelli used simulation techniques to model four different types of basic income schemes (varying according to the amount of the benefit and accompanying changes in the tax and benefit system) and their effects on poverty and inequality.
The new report carries out a more detailed analysis of basic income schemes set at the three levels found to be most plausible in the earlier report: the level of the tax saving implied by the UK’s personal income tax allowance (which it would replace); the level of the UK’s existing social assistance benefits (many of which would be replaced); the level of existing benefits plus premiums for the disabled.
In this new contribution, Martinelli examines the predicted impact of these schemes on financial work incentives, including both financial incentives to work at all and incentives to increase work marginally. Martinelli looks in greater detail at the distributional consequences of the basic income schemes, including the effect on women and disabled individuals.
According to Martinelli, “Both of these elements are crucial to efforts to evaluate whether basic income has desirable effects and what types of design features would help make the policy politically feasible. The models we examine in this paper present a number of issues that basic income advocates will have to address as they think about implementation and policy design more closely.”
The report concludes that, with respect to distributional consequences, each scheme results in both winners and losers, stating, “Our core insight is that for the most part, even when particular groups gain (lose) on average, there are usually still non-trivial numbers of individuals and households who are worse off (better off).”
Concerning work incentives, each scheme sees a reduction in financial work incentives for most individuals. However, the distribution of effects was such that “we can imagine the effects of stronger work incentives on particularly sensitive groups to outweigh the more generalised effect of weaker work incentives over the wider population.”
Download the full report from IRP’s website:
“IPR Report: Exploring the Distributional and Work Incentive Effects of Plausible Illustrative Basic Income Schemes” (Institute for Policy Research, University of Bath).
Reviewed by Dawn Howard
Photo: “Rough sleeper” in Taunton, England; CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 Neil Moralee
by Kate McFarland | Jun 1, 2017 | News
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) released a policy brief on the costs of basic income schemes, its first on the topic, in May 2017.
The report, available for download from OECD’s website (“Basic Income as a Policy Option: Can it add up?”), has been published as part of a series on the Future of Work, which was launched in January 2016 following a policy forum in which over 300 participants convened in Paris to discuss and debate the impact of digitization upon jobs and the labor market. Previous publications in the OECD’s Future of Work series have dealt with such topics as automation, technological unemployment, job insecurity, and inequality; however, “Basic Income as a Policy Option” is the first to engage directly and specifically with the idea of basic income.
The policy report considers the cost of a universal basic income paid to all individuals below their country’s normal retirement age, looking in detail at the financial implications of such a policy in Finland, France, Italy, and the United Kingdom. The benefit as conceived would be taxable and take the place of most existing cash benefits and allowances, but it would not replace public services, such as health and education, or benefits related to special needs.
Using a simulation analysis (based on the EUROMOD), the authors conclude that a basic income financed at the level of current spending would fall far below the poverty line. Correspondingly, a basic income adequate to reduce poverty would require substantial increases in taxation. Even in the latter case, moreover, the policy might not significantly reduce poverty and might leave many worse off as compared to existing programs of social welfare.
The models do not take into account any possible changes in employment rates, working hours, or earnings that might result from the instituting of a basic income, nor do they take into account any reduction in spending due to a lowering of administrative costs.
In addition to the simulation analysis of the costs of basic income, the authors discuss, in general terms, other potential risks and drawbacks of the policy, and suggest alternative forms of social assistance such as more targeted policies and a participation income.
In a recent post in his Basic Income News blog The Independentarian, BIEN Vice-Chair Karl Widerquist cites the new OECD report as an example of a mistake that he believes to be common in the calculation of the (alleged) costs of basic income schemes: confusing the gross cost with the net cost.
Read the policy brief:
OECD (May 2017) “Basic Income as a Policy Option: Can it add up?”, Policy Brief on the Future of Work, OECD Publishing, Paris.
See also:
OECD (May 2017) “Basic Income as a Policy Option: Technical Background Note Illustrating Costs and Distributional Implications for Selected Countries”, OECD Publishing, Paris.
Reviewed by Dawn Howard
Photo CC BY-NC 2.0 OECD (From OECD Forum 2016: The Digital.Economy & the Future of Work)
by Kate McFarland | May 30, 2017 | News
Jamie Cooke, Head of RSA Scotland, will deliver a TEDx talk titled “Basic income – Scotland’s radical chance to lead the world (again)” in Glasgow on June 2, 2017.
TEDxGlasgow provides the following summary:
The welfare state, built for a different age, is crumbling.
As films such as ‘I, Daniel Blake’ have vividly demonstrated, a system designed to support and protect people at moments of vulnerability in their lives has been warped into one which uses sanctions to punish and control. As wages have stagnated, jobs have changed and incomes have been unpredictable, we have seen the growth of a section of society which Guy Standing calls the ‘Precariat’, living precarious, insecure lives. In turn, we have seen dangerous forces start to harness these insecurities, fuelling the rise of the far right in various parts of the world.
It’s a depressing picture, but there is hope – and Scotland, once again, has a chance to act as a beacon of enlightenment.
Glasgow is leading the way on developing basic income pilots, radical schemes to change the way we envisage work, income and our place in society; and in which we fundamentally shift the relationship between the citizen and state.
In this talk, Jamie will outline some of the positive paths we could take, and the role that basic income could play in creating a radically different Glasgow and Scotland.
For more information about the upcoming TEDxGlasgow event, including biographies and talk summaries of other speakers, see: https://www.tedxglasgow.com/speakers/.
Scotland is already becoming a hotbed of interest in basic income.
Earlier in the year, the City Council of Glasgow partnered with the RSA (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce) to investigate designs for a basic income pilot program. At present, the Council and RSA are working on a study of the financial, administrative, and constitutional feasibility of a pilot in Glasgow. Workshops on the topics are planned in June and July 2017, with a report to follow in September.
Other regions in Scotland, including the council areas of Fife and North Ayrshire, are also exploring the possibility of basic income pilot programs.
A Scottish affiliate of BIEN, Citizen’s Basic Income Network Scotland, was launched in November 2016.
Reviewed by Genevieve Shanahan
Photo: Sunrise over Glasgow, CC BY 2.0 john mcsporran
