by Genevieve Shanahan | Feb 10, 2017 | News
John McDonnell, Labour MP and Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer in the UK, has revealed that the Labour Party has established a working group to investigate universal basic income. Guy Standing, cofounder of BIEN, will play a key role in drafting their report.
Speaking directly to Basic Income News, Standing explains:
“I have been invited to become an economic adviser to the Labour Party, and in particular to John McDonnell, the Shadow Chancellor (effectively, the Opposition finance minister). He has asked me to help prepare a detailed strategy report for framing a basic income and enabling the Labour leadership to present a plan for implementing a basic income as part of Labour’s long-term economic strategy.”
In an interview with the Independent, McDonnell explained that the Labour Party intends to use this report as the basis for a tour around the UK to discuss the idea with the public. In the interview, McDonnell highlights the parallels between the idea of basic income today and that of a universal and unconditional child benefit before its introduction in 1975:
“I was involved in the early campaigns many years ago on the development of child benefit – at that point in time there were all sorts of anxieties about whether you could bring forward a benefit for everybody that wasn’t based upon an assessment of need and we won the argument. I think child benefit is like one of the foundation stones of a future basic income.”
This development follows Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s announcement last September that his party would research universal basic income, and McDonnell’s own positive comments regarding the policy earlier that year.
Jonathan Reynolds, MP and Shadow Economic Secretary to the Treasury City Minister, has been named as the leader of the working group, a politically savvy move given that he himself identifies as a moderate within this currently sharply divided party. He wrote favourably about basic income for the New Statesman last February, and made the point that public support for state welfare could be bolstered by following the model of the much-loved National Health Service (NHS) – that is, by making sure that it “provides something for everybody”.
The basic income working group will present its results before the next general election, scheduled for 2020. While the Labour Party is currently trailing the leading Conservatives in the polls, not least due to divisions within the party since the election of Corbyn as its leader in 2015, the British political landscape is currently highly unstable given the unforeseeable effects of Brexit. Indications that some form of basic income might be included in Labour’s election manifesto, then, are significant.
Read more:
Ashley Cowburn, “Labour sets up ‘working group’ to investigate universal basic income, John McDonnell reveals”, Independent, 5 February, 2017.
Kate McFarland, “UK: Labour Leader to Investigate Universal Basic Income”, Basic Income News, 15 September, 2016.
Kate McFarland, “UNITED KINGDOM: Labour Party to look into Basic Income”, Basic Income News, 6 June, 2016.
Jonathan Reynolds, “How I learnt to stop worrying and love Basic Income”, New Statesman, 17 February, 2016.
Reviewed by Kate McFarland
Photo: John McDonnell; CC 3.0 by Percivale Productions
by Kate McFarland | Jan 7, 2017 | News
A major news outlet in India has claimed that Prime Minister Narendra Modi intends to introduce a universal basic income, inaccurately attributing the claim to an interview with BIEN cofounder Guy Standing (SOAS, University of London). In a statement to Basic Income News, Standing clarifies that he never made such an assertion.
On January 3, Business Insider published an article (“The Indian government is about to endorse giving all its citizens free money”) in which the journalist claims that the government of India is “set to endorse universal basic income”. The journalist based this assertion on portions of an interview with Guy Standing about India’s Economic Survey, quoting Standing as saying, “the Indian government is coming out with a big report in January. As you can imagine that makes me very excited. It will basically say this is the way forward.” (Adding later: “I don’t expect them to go the full way, because it’s such a dramatic conversion.”)
Other media outlets picked up on this report, including The Independent in the UK, fueling rumors that the Modi government plans to introduce a universal basic income. Significantly, on January 6, the popular Indian newspaper MoneyBhaskar.com published an embellished version of the story (in Hindi) asserting that the government would roll out a UBI. The article, which went viral, claimed its source as Business Insider‘s interview with Standing.
In comments to Basic Income News, Standing makes clear that these radical claims about the plans of the Indian government are false embellishments of his actual remarks:
“I never said Modi is going to introduce a basic income, and never said that I knew that. What I said to the Business Insider journalist who interviewed me for about half an hour on the phone, mainly on other matters, was that the pilots taking place in Finland and elsewhere were helping to legitimise basic income, that our pilots in India had helped legitimise the topic in India, that the Indian Government was contemplating introducing basic income and was issuing a chapter in its forthcoming Economic Report to be tabled in Parliament at the time of the budget. I am hopeful, I told him, but we will have to wait to see.”
Narendra Modi photo CC BY-SA 4.0 Jasveer10
Post reviewed and edited by Guy Standing
by Kate McFarland | Jan 4, 2017 | News
BIEN’s Scottish affiliate, Citizen’s Basic Income Network Scotland (CBIN Scotland), was launched in November 2016 at an event in Glasgow.
The keynote address was delivered by Guy Standing, BIEN cofounder at Professorial Research Associate at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London.
Standing argues that the growth of the precariat–a class of workers with unstable employment, no benefits, and unsustainable debt–provides the best argument for the need for a basic income in the United Kingdom and other countries.
CBIN Scotland’s next public event will be held in Kelty, Fife, during the last weekend in January, with a keynote address delivered by BIEN’s co-chair Karl Widerquist.
Photo CC BY 2.0 Moyan Brenn
by Kate McFarland | Dec 27, 2016 | News
The 2017 Davos meeting of the World Economic Forum is to include a panel on basic income, in which BIEN’s Guy Standing will be participating.
Guy Standing (credit: Enno Schmidt)
BIEN co-founder Guy Standing (Professorial Research Associate at SOAS, University of London) has been invited to speak at the next meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, which will take place from January 17 to 20, 2017.
The editor of The Economist will interview Standing on the precariat on January 17. Additionally, Standing will take part in a session on basic income on January 18.
By invitation only, the WEF’s annual Davos conference brings together over 2000 CEOs, political leaders, distinguished academics, and other “notables”, and has come to be regarded as one of the most elite economic and political conferences in the world.
World Economic Forum blog contributions
In connection with his invitation to Davos, Standing has authored an article on basic income for the WEF’s blog (“The precariat, populism and robots: is basic income a political imperative?“). In it, Standing presents a series of justifications for basic income.
First, and most importantly, Standing argues that a basic income is owed to all as a matter of social justice: “Land, natural resources, and ideas that become ‘intellectual property’ are all part of society’s collective wealth, created and nurtured by generations of our ancestors. So, it is reasonable to argue that everybody should have a modest share, a social dividend, in the form of an equal, modest, individual, unconditional basic income.”
Standing contends that “all assets, including intellectual property, are resources to which all of society has legitimate claim”–recommending, for example, a “special levy on income generated by patents, copyright and other forms of intellectual property” to pay into a sovereign wealth fund.
Additionally, Standing argues that a basic income promotes individual freedom and security–noting that economic security is a requirement for rational decision-making–and removes the poverty and “precarity” traps in current welfare systems. (A precarity trap exists when a would-be worker decides not to accept short-term employment due to delays in benefits processing or other complications that encourage avoidance of temporary changes in benefits status. In this way, existing welfare systems often discourage temporary work.)
Standing also points out that a basic income would be seen as remunerating unpaid labor–and that this, in turn, could encourage more environmentally sustainable lifestyles.
“Care work, voluntary work, community work and the ‘work’ many do in retraining are all statistically unrecognised today, but they are socially valuable, and are not resource depleting, unlike many forms of labour. A basic income would tilt the economic system towards socially and ecologically sustainable growth.”
Finally, although he seems to regard it as a comparatively weaker argument, Standing concludes by claiming that the automation argument–that is, that a basic income is necessary as insurance against a robot job takeover–“should not be dismissed”.
“The precariat, populism and robots: is basic income a political imperative?“ (December 20) is the final article in a three-part series:
The first, “Meet the precariat, the new global class fuelling the rise of populism” (November 9), describes the characteristics and structure of the precariat.
The second, “The 5 biggest lies of global capitalism“ (December 12), discusses “rentier capitalism” — a system in which increasing shares of wealth accrue to those who hold property from which they can extract rents — and explains how (in Standing’s view) it sits at the heart of contemporary economic inequities.
Reviewed by Genevieve Shanahan.
Davos photo CC BY 2.0 WebRatio Communications.
by Kate McFarland | Dec 12, 2016 | News
Photo: “Thomas Heatherwick – Thames Garden Bridge” CC-BY-2.0 準建築人手札網站.
The controversial Garden Bridge is a proposed privately-owned bridge over the River Thames in London, intended to open in 2018. According to the “Lady of the Future”, its construction was a triggering event to the Precariat Revolt; listen to the lecture below to learn more…
As previously announced in Basic Income News, BIEN cofounder Guy Standing (SOAS, University of London) was invited to speak on the “politics of utopia” at Oktoberdans, Norway’s most prestigious contemporary dance festival, on October 25, 2016.
He was asked to speak without notes and standing atop two pallets, creating the feel of a speaker’s corner:
Standing framed his talk as the received word of the “Lady of the Future”, who informed him about the precariat revolt of 2017, which eventuated in a series of reforms beginning with basic income. Throughout his talk, he stressed the importance of the arts (e.g. their “subversive potential” and thus capacity to effect political change). Although adapted to the unique setting and audience, Standing drew from material in his latest book, The Corruption of Capitalism, as well as his previous works on the precariat.
Watch Standing’s complete performance, including Q&A, above.
