by Nicole Teke | Dec 20, 2015 | News
As part of an electoral alliance, the Socialists and the Greens in the French region of Aquitaine committed to carry out a pilot with an unconditional minimum income, as a step in the direction of a basic income. They won the elections, now it is time to deliver.
French regional elections held this month received wide coverage by the international press because of the dramatic rise of the far right party Front National. Meanwhile, an interesting development the basic income movement went largely unnoticed. In the south-western region of Aquitaine, one of thirteen mainland French regions, major strides towards a basic income have been made.
Five months ago, the Aquitaine Regional Council – the elected regional parliament – adopted a motion to conduct pilots to test the implementation of an “unconditional RSA”. The Revenu de Solidarité Active (Active Solidarity Income), or RSA, is the means-tested national minimum income. The unconditional RSA would entail scrapping the work requirement, and would make the grant less discriminatory and less bureaucratic. A recent study shows that the RSA uptake is only slightly over half of the eligible beneficiaries.
While this is not an unconditional basic income, it is a major move in that direction. The motion notes that it is a “first step towards a universal basic income” (read the French text here). At the time, the Council had a left-wing majority, headed by the Socialist Party and including the Greens. The initiator of the motion, Green councilor Martine Alcorta, suggested that the pilots should be based on a proposal drafted last March by the French Movement for Basic Income, an affiliate of BIEN.
However, the fate of the basic income pilots depended on the results of the regional elections. Basic income supporters feared that if the left-wing coalition lost the region, the whole project might have been compromised. In the second round of elections on December 13, the Greens and the Socialists merged their lists to beat the right-wing coalition led by the Republicans, and the National Front, running separately. Just a few days before, the two left-wing parties agreed to renew their commitment to unconditional RSA pilots.
This was not an easy task, as the Socialist Alain Rousset, top candidate in the electoral roll and outgoing president of the Regional Council, had been strongly opposed to the pilots. The inclusion of the unconditional RSA experiment in the program means that measures that are closer to a basic income are gaining ground among other political parties. The Greens and the young anti-austerity formation New Deal already support a universal basic income.
Now that the left alliance won the elections, they are to go ahead with the pilots. Martine Alcorta was re-elected in the Regional Council, and the Greens are entitled to two vice-presidents as part of the deal with the Socialists.
If the newly elected regional councilors put their words into actions, a feasibility study will be conducted to come up with different designs for local pilots. The French Movement for a Basic Income has already offered its services to help the Aquitaine Regional Council with the project.
French Movement for a Basic Income, “PS et EELV s’entendent sur le revenu de base en Aquitaine-Limousin-Poitou-Charentes [Socialists and Greens in Aquitaine strike a deal on basic income],” December 12, 2015.
Stanislas Jourdan, “French Regional Council of Aquitaine to assess feasibility of basic income pilots,” Basic Income News, July 9, 2015.
by Toru Yamamori | Nov 5, 2015 | News
Fianna Fáil, the largest opposition party in Ireland, has proposed to establish a commission which examines the introduction of an unconditional basic income in Ireland.
Willie O’Dea, the party’s social protection spokesperson, reveals that ‘Fianna Fáil commits to the establishment of a government commission to further investigate the feasibility of establishing a Basic Income system’, in the outline of the party’s priorities over a five-year term including reforms to social welfare and pensions system.
Its media coverage can be read here and here (the latter is negative).
The related news in the past in this site is: https://basicincome.org/news/2015/07/ireland-fianna-election-manifesto/
by Citizens' Income Trust | Oct 5, 2015 | Opinion
John Clarke, Kathleen Coll, Evelina Dagnino and Catherine Neveu, Disputing Citizenship, Policy Press, 2014, viii + 214 pp, hbk, 1 4473 1252 9, £70, pbk, 1 4473 1253 6, £21.99
The authors of this book come from the UK, the USA, Brazil, and France, and in all of these countries they find evidence for their major contention: that there is so much conflict over the keyword ‘citizenship’ because citizenship is a focus for conflict within society – which of course makes conflict over the idea different in each of the four countries. Citizenship therefore has no fixed or ‘proper’ meaning, but instead has a diverse history of complex meanings – click here to learn more about citizenship and immigration laws.
In recent years, the broader definition of what it means to be a citizen of a particular location have changed. For example wealthy investors can now acquire Dominica citizenship by investment real estate. Other locations around the globe also offer similar citizenship by investment strategies and motives.
In their first chapter the authors ‘recentre’ citzenship to the margins of society where people do not experience the full benefits of their or others’ understandings of citizenship.
Citizenship is both exclusionary and aspirational, the object of desire and the product of dispute, as well as a dispute in itself. (p.49)
In the second chapter they ‘decentre’ citizenship by showing how its connection to a variety of social actors decentres it from state governments and bureaucracies. Citizenship therefore becomes less of a legal status and more of a discourse about the relative strengths of different political and social actors. The authors might usefully have mentioned the Scottish independence referendum as a location for conflict over citizenship and – whichever side had won – as a decentring of citizenship from Westminster.
The third chapter shows how diverse the many locations of citizenship discourse are, and how this means that the concept is always under construction and never in any sense fully defined. The UK in particular represents a patchwork of levels at which citizenship is exercised and contested: the UK, its four separate nations, local government, and such institutions as schools: and here we see most clearly the authors’ understanding of citizenship as a social process rather than as a legal status (which for most people living in England it is only in an ambiguous form anyway, because we are the subjects of a monarch and without a legally defined citizenship – except for immigrants who have passed the citizenship test and attended a town hall ceremony and are therefore in some ways more ‘citizens’ than the rest of us).
Given the authors’ agenda it is no surprise that the book is ‘undisciplined’, by which the authors mean that it does not fit neatly into such disciplines as political economy, but instead wanders across disciplinary boundaries in order to understand the conflicts around citizenship and the context-specific nature of understandings of it. Where the authors do find coherent theories of citizenship (for instance, Marshall’s), they show that such theories are as context-specific as the conflicts around citizenship.
This book is seriously interesting to those of us committed to debate on the desirability and feasibility of a Citizen’s Income – whether or not we call an unconditional and nonwithdrawable income for every individual a Citizen’s Income or a Basic Income – because a nation state’s definition of citizenship will influence who in that state’s territory (and outside it) will receive a Citizen’s Income, and the granting of a Citizen’s Income will affect that nation’s understanding of citizenship. Means-tested and contributory benefits systems fragment the population of a country. A Citizen’s Income would go to every legal resident (and perhaps in some cases to people living abroad), so citizenship at every societal level would inevitably become more inclusive.
The ways in which benefits systems are determined by a country’s diverse understandings of citizenship, and the ways in which a benefits system in turn contributes to understandings of citizenship, would be a fascinating future project for the authors of this book.
[This review was first published in the Citizen’s Income Newsletter, 2015, issue 3.]
by Tyler Prochazka | Sep 13, 2015 | News
On the 26th and 27th of June 2015, in Badia Fiesolana, Florenza, Italy, a conference in Italy attempted to answer one complex question: what is the future of Basic Income (BI) research? The conference at the European University Institute approached this question through a variety of lenses, from philosophy to economics, and attempted to intersect these various disciplines.
Max Weber Multidisciplinary Conference @ Florenza, Italy
“Moving away from purely normative justifications, there has been an increasing attention to topics at the intersection of philosophy and economics within the literature”, the event topic summary reported.
The event was organized by Max Weber Fellows Robert Lepenies and Juliana Bidadanure, as well as other professors interested in the BI concept, according to the conference schedule.
Other covered topics included the political feasibility of BI and the implications of BI activism on research about the subject.
The conference included papers that were selected from a competitive call for abstracts. In total, there were 22 papers discussed. An abstract of an accepted paper entitled “Basic Income, Direct Cash and Normative change” argues that the BI model empowers the poor.
“Several studies and experiments show that DC is a cost-efficient way of ensuring long-term improvement of living standards, as the monetary support is invested in housing, health, education, improves employment prospects, and supports positive and peaceful political transformation. The novelty of DC lies however also in the way it treats aid recipients: as autonomous, not passive beneficiaries”, that abstract resumed.
On the second day of the conference Philippe Van Parijs and Yannick Vanderborght’s new book on basic income was discussed.
European University Institute Florence, “The Future of Basic Income Research“, Max Weber Multidisciplinary Conference, June 26-27, 2015.
by Toru Yamamori | Aug 9, 2015 | News
Seongnam city is considering implementing a ‘Youth Dividend’, based on the idea of a basic income. If it happens, it will be the first case in Korea.
The city（성남시 城南市）is located about 20 km south from the centre of Seoul, and has a population of around 980,000 in its 142 square kilometers of land.
The mayor, Lee Jae-myeong (이재명) has been keen for poverty reduction. With his initiative, the city considers an introduction of a ‘Youth Dividend’. Although the idea is inspired by a universal and unconditional basic income, the detail of a ‘Youth Dividend’ is not decided yet. The city commissioned to an external agency for research on feasibility of implementation of it last June.
*This news is written based on the following news and information from some Korean Friends including Smila Youhyung Park (스밀라): https://www.yonhapnews.co.kr/bulletin/2015/06/19/0200000000AKR20150619178800061.HTML
The image of map is from https://www.seongnam.go.kr/EN/
