Universal Basic Income Projects Ready For Launch In Britain — If Labour Party Succeeds In General Election
On Thursday, the British public will vote in the third General Election in four years. And if — as is possible in these uncertain, turbulent times — Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party unseats the incumbent Conservatives, led by current prime minister Boris Johnson, it could signal the green light for a number of universal basic income (UBI) projects across the country.
For GoodDollar, an apolitical, not-for-profit foundation that is aiming to reduce global wealth inequality using blockchain and UBI principles, it is a thrilling prospect. Come Friday morning, if Mr Corbyn is able to gain power, a raft of UBI programmes could be activated.
On page 60 in the centre-left political party’s general election manifesto, published on November 21, just less than two-thirds of the way through, Labour’s commitment to experimenting with UBI is made clear — little surprise, given Mr Corbyn’s campaign mantra is “for the many, not the few”.
The manifesto promises that Labour, if elected to parliament, will “explore other innovative ways of responding to low pay, including a pilot of UBI”.
UBI Pledge
While many might have missed the sentence in Labour’s dense tome, it triggered great excitement across the UBI community in the United Kingdom, and further afield. There are plenty of groups across Britain that have been lobbying for UBI policy to be tested.
In July 2018, the shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, had hinted that UBI would feature in the general election manifesto and explored the possibility of pilot schemes. He commissioned a review of the policy. And in May 2019 a 81-page document, authored by Guy Standing, a SOAS academic and Co-Founder of the Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN), was published.
Mr McDonnell was satisfied with the report’s findings and suggested that UBI pilot schemes would be held in Liverpool, Sheffield and the Midlands, if Labour wins power. “I’d like to see a northern and Midlands town in the pilot so we have a spread,” he said.
“The reason we’re doing it is because the social security system has collapsed. We need a radical alternative and we’re going to examine that. We want to do it in areas that have been hit hard by austerity.”
Building Momentum
In recent times UBI has gained increasing popularity on both sides of the political divide, and trials have been run all over the world. The largest-scale pilot ran, between 2017 and 2018 in Finland, and saw 2,000 randomly selected citizens be given 560 every month. The conclusions were that UBI made people happier and less stressed, even though it did not have any effect on the occupation status of the recipients.
“If you look at the Finland pilot,” continued Mr McDonnell, “it says it didn’t do much in terms of employment but did in terms of wellbeing — things like health. It was quite remarkable. And the other thing it did was increase trust in politicians, which can’t be a bad thing.”
It is just over a decade since the last global economic crash, and some predict another worldwide financial downturn in the near future. All the while, the wealthy are benefitting, leading to a widening gap of inequality.
Consider that in January 2019, Oxfam research found that the world’s top 26 billionaires owned as much as 3.8 billion other people — more than half of the globe’s human population. In 2018, 42 billionaires owned that much.
Furthermore, a recent House of Commons Library report, Inclusive Growth research, calculated that the richest 1 per cent of people on the planet are on course to control as much as two-thirds of the world’s wealth by 2030.
UBI: A Brief History
Given that inequality is becoming more widespread, in developing as well as developed countries, it is no surprise that UBI is generating interest. Ironically, Britain is where the concept of UBI was spawned.
Progressive minds have contemplated the concept of UBI for over five centuries — Thomas More alluded to such a system in Utopia, his controversial masterpiece published in 1516 — but no large-scale applications of a mechanism to distribute finances equally have yet been put into practice.
UBI is a theoretical alternative welfare system whereby every member of society is granted a fixed allowance unconditionally. The concept of an unconditional one-off grant can be traced back to the 1790s, to English political activists Thomas Paine and Thomas Spence.
The clamour to explore UBI is becoming louder, with thought-leaders, economists, tech visionaries and politicians adding their voices to cause in recent years. For example, Andrew Yang, the founder of Venture for America and a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, has anchored his campaign to dethrone Donald Trump with UBI. “Let’s put humanity first,” he advises. “It’s time for universal basic income.”
Similarly, Andrew Ng, another young, influential American entrepreneur, reacted to Mr Trump’s presidential triumph in 2016 by posting on Twitter: “More than ever, we need basic income to limit everyone’s downside, and better education to give everyone an upside.” Mr Ng, Co-Founder of online learning platform Coursera, is one of a growing number of forward-thinking business leaders who propose UBI as a means to combat poverty.
Wealthy Support
Pierre Omidyar, the American billionaire Founder of eBay, has gone further and backed a UBI project. In June 2017 it was announced that his Omidyar Network had invested $493,000 (£386,000) in GiveDirectly, a UBI pilot giving out free money to Kenyans. On the GiveDirectly website, a long list of chronological testimonials highlights how a little money can go a long way, and is especially life-changing for those most in need.
For instance, Tusade, after accepting a second payment of $449, wrote: “Some improvement in the hygiene and sanitation has been realised in my family.” James, who received an initial payment of $467, said: “The biggest difference in my daily life is that I have bought a bull for ploughing.”
Meanwhile, both Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s Chief Executive, and serial entrepreneur Elon Musk — tech visionaries elevated to 21st-century pop-star status, and two of the most recognisable people on the planet — have espoused the virtues of UBI while acknowledging the unstoppable rampage of technology. They thoroughly understand the consequences and impact of automation and AI.
Elsewhere, support for UBI has even been expressed by famous capitalist and fund manager Bill Gross, Co-Founder of Pacific Investment Management Co. In May 2016 he urged the Federal Reserve to “print money and just hand it out to ordinary citizens, regardless of whether they are productive members of society or drug-addled bums”.
Whether the motivations are combating poverty, concerns about technological unemployment, or a need to redefine the meaning of work, UBI is gaining momentum and moving into the mainstream of thought leaders, across a range of industries. The number of luminaries promoting UBI as a bold social-economic paradigm is growing all the time.
It may have been a utopian concept to begin with, but UBI is now gaining traction and, in the 21 century, the potential of those initial, revolutionary ideas could be realised, finally. If Labour gains power in Britain, it could spark UBI pilots, and encourage startups like GoodDollar to collaborate to work towards our ultimate goal, which is to reduce global wealth inequality.
GoodDollar: Changing The Balance — For Good
Do you have the skills to help the GoodDollar project? We need builders, scientists and experts in identity, privacy, and financial governance, as well as philanthropists and ambassadors. Contact us at hello@gooddollar.org, via our social media channels (Twitter, Telegram, or Facebook), check out our community website, join the OpenUBI movement, or visit our GitHub page. Our YouTube channel is worth exploring, too.
