The Universal Basic Income Will End Britain’s Crisis of Democracy
Come to think of it, only a few Brits would agree with me that Britain is mired in a crisis of democracy. Brits are typically quite proud of their country. They are even prouder of its democracy. But, I hate to break it to you, this country is mired in a crisis of democracy (I would say “the likes of which it has never seen before”, but I’d be full of shit if I said that. This country’s democracy is healthier today than at any other time in its history, but that is not to say it is healthy). The crisis is deep indeed.
One prominent iteration of this crisis is the economy. Of course, I am not referring necessarily to the economic stagnation that has had this country in its grip for some time, even before Brexit struck. CNBC recently thought it was necessary to remind people, in their typical lackadaisical style no less, that the “UK economy was struggling before Brexit vote.”
But Brexit has deepened this crisis even further. Check out these graphs.
On GDP growth:
On the Pound:
On Inflation:
On average earnings:
Of course, the picture here is more mixed than it appears at first blush, but the trends are looking bad for the UK overall.
The crisis of democracy in which I am interested, however, isn’t about this dire economic image. Or, at least not necessarily. You see, what people often lose sight of is that economies are not important in and of themselves. They are not just lines on a graph or numbers on a chart.
Economies are supposed to serve the interests of human members of society; all of them, not just a few. And, in terms of this, the current economic setup in Britain is a massive mess.
Let me just get this out of the way, economic systems are primal. Humans have always found ways to exchange the things they value, for other things which at any given time they value even more. So, on the question of whether we could just choose not to have an economy, the answer is a big fat NO. We can’t. We gotta have it. However, on the question of the form of exchange, that is, the kind of economy we as a society should permit, we have active political choices to make. And, allow me to let you in on the secret, if you (ordinary struggling people currently at the middle and lower stratas of the economic order) don’t strive to influence those choices, the rich will. And, they have and are doing exactly that.
What are the effects of this? The top 1% owns twenty times the amount of wealth held by the bottom 20%. About 5.4millions Brits, according to a 2014 study, live below the living wage. Meanwhile, on average, each member of the top 0.1% takes home nearly a million Pounds a year. Employer-employee income ratios have only grown. According to some numbers, at present, a CEO ‘earns’ 149 times more than the lowest paid of their employees. I could go on, but am sure you get the picture I am trying to paint.
To be sure, grave inequality is not morally reprehensible and unjust in every imaginable system of organizing society. If you live in an absolute monarchy, where the king or queen rules by divine right, as is the case in Saudi Arabia, for example, inequality would not be immoral. In fact, it might be immoral to have equality. This is also true if you live in a secular authoritarian society. But, if you live in a democratic society, you probably have a nagging impression that there is something morally reprehensible and unjust about inequality.
For starters, the lower you are on the economic ladder, the less able you are to participate in the democratic process. Let’s take the only year for which I could find numbers (I am sure more numbers exist; I was just too lazy to find them): the 2010 general election. According to the think tank IPPR, ‘only 53 per cent of those within the lowest income quintile voted, compared to 75 per cent of those in the highest income quintile. This meant someone in the richest quintile was 43 per cent more likely to vote in 2010 than someone in the lowest income quintile, with clear inequalities of influence between rich and poor at the ballot box as a result.’
I mean, think of it. It should be obvious why this is the case. Say you were a single mother, who works two jobs (since the poverty wages currently allowed make it impossible to survive and bring your kids up on just one full-time job), and barely have time to do anything else, isn’t it clear that you are less likely to register and vote, because you are preoccupied by more immediate concerns? But even if you registered and voted, isn’t it also the case that you would be less informed about who’s really fighting for your interests, which means you could sometimes vote against your own interests? Hence in the same report quoted above, the IPPR also found that
‘only one in four voters in the lowest social-economic group (DE) believes democracy addresses their interests well, half as many compared to those in the highest social-economic group (AB). Almost two thirds of voters in the lowest social-economic group say that democracy serves their interests badly.’
Essentially, the wealthier you are, the more of a real vote you have in our democracy, on account of the economic inequality that exists in Britain.
There are other ways in which the wealthy gain an advantage (using their wealth) in the basic workings of our democracy. They contribute to political parties, who then pursue policies that privilege the interests of those donors.
But don’t get it twisted, politicians don’t come out and tell us they are seeking some policy because it will favour their donors. No. These wealthy donors create think-tanks that produce ‘analyses’ which ‘mysteriously’ (wink! wink!!) ‘find’ that those same policies will benefit ‘everyone’. The politicians then quote this ‘analyses’ in making their arguments. And the media, owned (for the most part), run, produced and anchored by members of the same class which these policies will benefit, helps them make the case. Over and over again, the British media has been found guilty of favouring the interests of the wealthy over those of the poor.
All these suggest that our democracy is broken.
So what to do then?
I argue that instituting a basic income will effectively end this inequality, or at least short-change its effects on our democracy. But the level of the income will eventually have to be pretty high in order to eliminate the advantages which current inequality has created for the rich. This is not to say we couldn’t start small though. This also does not mean that every member of society will now have the same amount of money in the bank (although that would be nice indeed). My supposition is that there is a level of income, at which having more does not make too much of a difference to one’s well-being and to one’s ability to participate equally in the democracy with everyone else. Everyone should at least be given a basic income that reaches that point.
What’s a basic income? It’s the idea that every individual member of society should be entitled to being given, by the government, on a frequent basis, an income that is non-taxable, and that does not depend on whether they work, where they live and who they live with.
Every week, The Basic Income Guy blog will discuss some aspect of this idea and how it can solve our democracy’s malaise. I will also address economic questions you may have about how to fund it, philosophical questions about freedom, property rights and the value of work, and psychological questions about whether I am crazy or just dumb. I hope you enjoy reading every week.
