by BIEN | Dec 31, 2016 | Bios & background Info, Opinion, Testimonies
Malcolm Torry – “My Basic Income Story”
Almost exactly forty years ago, I left university, got married, and started work in Brixton, in South London, administering means-tested benefits. I spent two years on the public counter: and it didn’t take long to understand how inefficient, degrading, and disincentivising means-tested benefits were. After two years I left to train for the Church of England’s ministry, and from 1980 to 2014 I served in four different South London parishes, and saw yet more of the damage that our benefits system can inflict.
In 1984 a group of individuals from a variety of walks of life met at the offices of the National Council for Voluntary Organisations in London to give birth to the Basic Income Research Group (subsequently the Citizen’s Income Trust). Since then we have held meetings, published a regular journal (The Citizen’s Income Newsletter), managed a website and a library, conducted our own research, and helped other organisations with theirs. The speed with which the debate has gone mainstream in the UK, as elsewhere, during the last few years, has taken those of us who have been working on the issue for more than thirty years a bit by surprise. Two years ago I retired early from a very demanding parish (we had the whole of the Greenwich Peninsula, as well as two other communities, in the parish) in order to concentrate on Basic Income and other research interests. Requests for presentations, articles, and assistance with research, continue to increase in number. The Citizen’s Income Trust runs on voluntary labour and a very small budget, and so is limited in what it can do; but we have an excellent group of trustees, and have benefited from occasional help from volunteers and students on placement.
In relation to my own research, it has been most generous of the London School of Economics to appoint me as a Visiting Senior Fellow at the London School of Economics for a second three year term, and equally generous of the Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of Essex to train me in using EUROMOD, the microsimulation programme. I am also enormously grateful to the many people who have assisted in various ways with my books and other publications. The now widespread interest in the Citizen’s Income Trust’s work goes a long way towards making up for the lack of human and financial resources.
Thirty years ago we helped to establish BIEN, we were pleased to be able to organise the BIEN Congress in London in 1994 (a rather smaller event than congresses today), and we have been pleased to see BIEN develop into a global umbrella organisation. The recent increase in both the extent and the depth of the Basic Income debate means that BIEN’s role as a forum for debate is now more important than ever. As the global debate and individual national debates continue to evolve, it will be essential to maintain the integrity of the debate’s vocabulary, to disseminate accurate information about research results and pilot projects, and to ensure that communication occurs between the many different aspects of the debate. Only BIEN can fulfil these roles. It has an important future.
At the end of 2016, the year in which BIEN celebrated the 30th anniversary of its birth, all Life Members were invited to reflect on their own personal journeys with the organization. See other contributions to the feature edition here.
by Kate McFarland | Dec 27, 2016 | News
BIEN’s Scottish affiliate, Citizen’s Basic Income Network Scotland (CBINS), will be holding a public event in Kelty, a town in Fife, on Saturday, January 28. The location is notable in part because the council area of Fife is presently investigating the possibility of a basic income pilot in one of its towns.
Karl Widerquist, credit: Enno Schmidt
The theme of the event is “Basic Income: Real Social Security”. BIEN co-chair Karl Widerquist will be the keynote speaker, and additional invited speakers include members of the Fife Council, Scottish Government, Department of Work and Pensions, and Inland Revenue, who will discuss the latest plans and possibilities for a pilot project in Fife.
Launched in November 2016 in Glasgow, Scotland, CBINS is one of BIEN’s newest affiliates.
More information about the Kelty event is available here: https://www.facebook.com/events/1637025389924686/
See also the listing on BIEN’s event calendar.
Reviewed by Genevieve Shanahan
Photo: West Bucklay farm, in Fife near Kelty; CC BY 2.0 B4bees
by Dave Clegg | Dec 26, 2016 | News
A CBC news report offers a clarion call regarding the increasing demand being placed upon Canadian food banks who are attempting to address the hunger and nutritional needs of Canada’s most vulnerable citizens. Surely there is no better reason for a BI than the need for food banks in one of the richest nations on the planet?
Food Banks Canada, a national umbrella organization, has released its HungerCount2016 report on food bank use in Canada and includes numerous recommendations, the most crucial of which is the creation of a nation-wide Basic Income.
To accomplish this important goal, FBC has provided 4 policy recommendations in its report which the organization believes essential to accomplish this important goal namely:
1. a National Poverty Reduction Strategy by Oct 1. 2017
2. a Basic livable Income with steps leading to its creation
3. rethinking welfare towards a more supportive process
4. investing in Northern Canada’s food security.
Perhaps the most significant beneficiaries of a national BI would be the children who, the CBC report indicates, account for 35% of food bank use across the country. The CBC report also points out that the latest food bank figures show double digit spikes in food bank use in many parts of Canada.
While the CBC report indicates that Toronto is still the “…child poverty capital of Canada”, it also includes links to a number of related CBC items in which the Ontario government has recently announced a BI pilot program and Quebec has expressed interest in the feasibility of a BI, while three other links discuss what a BI might look like in Canada.
The Food Banks Canada full report can be found here: HungerCount2016.
Food Banks Canada has previously called for a BI in their HungerCount2015, which BIEN acknowledged here at that time as well.
by Guest Contributor | Dec 24, 2016 | Opinion
“Quatinga Velho, the lifetime Basic Income”
The nonprofit organization ReCivitas distributed a basic income to residents of the Brazilian village Quatinga Velho from 2008 to 2014. In January 2016, ReCivitas launched a new initiative, Basic Income Startup, which aspires to resume the Quatinga Velho basic income payments and make them lifelong.
A new initiative, the Basic Income Projects Network, aims to bring together other nongovernmental organizations that wish to start their own privately-funded basic income pilots.
Marcus Brancaglione, president of ReCivitas, writes this update:
The ReCivitas Institute is an NGO founded in 2006 that works to apply factual guarantees to human rights in independent public policies.
Since 2008, we have developed and sustained the Unconditional Basic Income pilot project in Quatinga Velho, Brazil, which is an internationally recognized project in Basic Income studies and research.
As of January 16th, 2016, Basic Income payments are now permanent, and no longer just a part of an experiment. For 14 people the Unconditional Basic Income has started to be for a lifetime. Now, with our enhanced peer-to-peer model, they also contribute, according to their ability to do so, to these payments.
The project is now called BASIC INCOME STARTUP, because for every 1,000 Euros donated, for no additional cost, a new person that lives anywhere that 40 Reais can make a difference (that is, a person that really needs that money) will start to receive the lifetime basic income.
And it bears emphasizing: for every 1,000 Euros that are donated, RECIVITAS will remove one person from the most abject conditions of primitive deprivation — the kinds of conditions that every Basic Income activist should never forget actually exists.
This project was designed during our last trip to Europe in 2015, while we observed the inequality between refugees and European citizens.
In Brazil, the Brazilian Network for Basic Income is being formed by local communities and independent institutions. The aim is to expand and replicate the model in the ghetto, forgotten places of the world, because poverty has a face and an address, therefore programs that fight poverty do not need focusing techniques or conditionalities, because the people who are in dire need of help already live in segregation.
ReCivitas would like to use this rare opportunity to invite other projects and local communities that are paying, or wish to pay, a basic income, to join us and form the Basic Income Projects Network.
Through partnerships with local organizations, the Quatinga Velho model can be replicated in any community around the world, including ones with the same difficulties: with small amounts of their own capital, no governmental support or support by private corporations, and some amount of international solidarity and support.
We have decided to propose this partnership, especially after the World Social Forum, for two reasons. First, because we have finally realized how much we have accumulated in shareable knowledge in these ten years— knowledge that must be shared with those who really want to accomplish things. Second, because we want to help in the construction of these new projects, especially the ones that are more open to those who really need them.
For more information about the network, including the terms of the partnership for participating groups, please see the “Basic Income Project Network” page on the ReCivitas website.
Marcus Brancaglione, President of ReCivitas
by Kate McFarland | Dec 24, 2016 | News
Catherine Clifford, senior entrepreneurship writer at CNBC, wrote the CNBC article announcing Elon Musk’s prediction that automation would make universal basic income (UBI) necessary. In a subsequent article, titled “Elon Musk says robots will push us to a universal basic income—here’s how it would work,” Clifford
In the article, Clifford portrays the automation of jobs as the main motivation for UBI, continuing to highlight Elon Musk’s remark that he’s “not sure what else one would do” but implement such a policy. (This focus on automation as the sole or main motivator is arguably misleading; many historically important arguments for UBI do not turn at all on worries about automation. Unquestionably, however, the threat of technological unemployment has recently been the driving force behind much of the media attention to UBI in the United States.)
Clifford goes on to note some highlights of the global UBI movement: the impending pilot in Finland, Basisinkomen 2018’s campaign for a basic income referendum in the Netherlands, and Switzerland’s vote on a basic income referendum earlier in 2016.
One passage in the article is especially noteworthy for BIEN: Clifford discusses the resolutions on the definition of ‘basic income’ made at BIEN’s 2016 Congress. In doing do so, she emphasizes that the definition of ‘basic income’ does not entail that basic income must be replacement for other programs and social services, and she point out that BIEN recommends that it not be viewed in this way–quoting BIEN co-chair Karl Widerquist as saying that UBI “is not ‘generally considered’ as a replacement for the rest of the social safety net”:
“Some see it primarily as a replacement. Others see it as a supplement, filling in the cracks. Some people who want it to be a replacement try to create the impression that it is generally considered to be so. But that’s not accurate.”
Reference
Catherine Clifford, “Elon Musk says robots will push us to a universal basic income—here’s how it would work,” CNBC, November 18, 2016.
Article reviewed by Ali Özgür Abalı.
Photo CC BY-ND 2.0 OnInnovation.
