A Green Recovery
For a Green Recovery, we need attractive well-remunerated jobs in the caring sector, in the retrofit of homes, in agriculture and in nature restoration.
What Covid19 has taught us is that a lot of unpleasant unrewarding jobs are unnecessary. It has shown us who the true heroes are! It has also shown us that we are not resilient to food supply shocks. We need to become much more self-sufficient, importing 20% not 50% of our food in the UK.
We need to restore nature and our soils and that means organic agriculture, agriforestry, permaculture; those sort of approaches. They are more labour intensive than chemical farming.
To make this work we need a Universal Basic Income. People need to know that they can be agile about moving to better work without losing their living, receiving say £14,000 for every single adult and £7000 for each child, unconditionally. An example of the flexibility that unconditional payments provide comes from my son. He is training as a carpenter, has his unconditional furlough money, and can take on writing work from his previous career and earn extra money, providing a needed service without impoverishing himself.
Aside from an unconditional basic income improving jobs opportunities, this crisis has shown us how many are falling through the cracks. My nephew, a skilled self-employed carpenter, has had no money for 2 months, has had to ask me to guarantee his rent on a new flat as he would otherwise be homeless, and has had to go to food banks (pending his self-employment furlough money).
And then, there is the repurposing of factories such as the car industry, part of which is busy making ventilators just now. We should not be building cars at the rate we were, and these specialists would be perfectly placed to build the air source heat pumps that our 28 million homes desperately need.