Universal Income
I don't know many Tories - at least, not many people that will admit to being Tory. But a friend of mine has attracted one to his Facebook page and this Tory pops up all the time, distracts everyone from the issue in hand and rants constantly about things that are frankly irrelevant.
He won't read this. And if he did he wouldn't comment. He doesn't seem to read anything I write on my friend's page. He will read and answer comments by my friend (male) and his male friends. But he ignores me. I'm not saying the guy's a misogynist but, as we say, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck...
Anyhow, today's topic for discussion was Universal Income. That's (sorry if I'm patronising you here) the plan to abolish all benefits and give people a personal income by allotting them a share of the national wealth on a weekly basis. Theirs to use as they see fit. No form-filling. It would be an entitlement. So much income for an adult, a lesser sum for each child in a family. No discrimination between working adults, pensioners and the sick. Thus closing a few unfair gaps and doing away with the poverty attached to old age and illness.
Some of the cost of Universal Income would be covered by no longer having to sustain a vast bureaucracy to police the benefits system. No interviews. No offices. No spying on women to see if they have a resident boyfriend. No bedroom tax. No child limits. No housing benefit - where you live would be your choice. No checking up to see if someone has a wee job on the side. People would be entitled (in fact, expected) to work to supplement the Universal Income. Their decision.
I believe it's been tried out in parts of - where else would dare? - Scandinavia. I haven't seen the results of the experiments. The UK media tend not to publicise radical social action like this...
(Aside: if you're still watching the horror show that is the TV news, I hope you've noticed the shocked look on UK journalists' faces when they visit Sweden, Taiwan and Switzerland and discover these 3 very different types of democracy are well run despite not following the USA/UK approach).
Our Tory friend was right in there. He can't get his head round this new idea. Instead of dealing with it, he gave us all a lecture about party politics, who won the December election and the evils of 'the left'. He doesn't mind 'the moderate left' (no definition of what that is) but he's dead against 'the barking left': commies, socialists, radicals, trade unions, anarchists, etc. He laid it all out in detail as if the rest of us were so dim we wouldn't know from Politics 101 what was traditionally meant by 'the left.' At every turn, he came back to his personal obsessions: party politics, how Boris Johnson is doing so well as PM, the evils of Jeremy Corbyn (you'll remember Corbyn hasn't been the leader of the Labour Party since December), etc.
It's like this man is stuck in the Thatcher era. The Bank Crash never happened (and runaway banking never had anything to do with the Thatcher laissez faire approach to finance anyway). There was no austerity. There is no Coronavirus - or if there is Johnson and co are handling it very well. We're not in a global crisis and, as a result, a global recession. There aren't 950,000 applications for benefit trundling through the system as I write - often from people who a month ago were planning their next holiday and never for one minute imagined this could happen to them. And, if that's where we are, Boris Johnson will handle it well.
And, of course, he's pretending capitalism hasn't had to turn to socialist principles - as seen in the Chinese People's Army, solidarity among workers, the restoration of a sense of community, the horror a lot of us feel at the sheer greed of food hoarders, etc - to save its own skin.
I always thought (because Tories always told me so) that Tories believed in opportunity. For any Tories around, opportunity isn't the same as opportunism. And there's been a lot of that around.
Like many a cockeyed optimist, I see the Coronavirus as a horror show that will uniquely give us an opportunity to stop, look around and work out if this extreme form of capitalism as practised in the USA and the UK is where we want to live.
Do we really want to spend money getting people to draw lines in a car park marking out spots where the homeless can live, as they're doing in Las Vegas right now? Couldn't we just talk about housing the homeless? Instead of getting misty-eyed about how many people in the USA have no health cover, couldn't we just give them health cover? And give them a Universal Income so they can look after themselves? Of course, some - like the poor sods who ended up on the streets because their mental illnesses went untreated - will buy drink and drugs with the money. That'll be their choice.
The same goes for the young people I see on Facebook who are now planning to sell their clothes to get some money together. Well, as one of them said, who needs 76 pairs of trousers when you can't go anywhere?
There will certainly be those just desperate to get back into the shopping-clubbing-pubbing way of life but maybe being stuck at home will allow them time to think it over: Is there more to life than this?
Aren't Tories all about choice? Well no, they're all about money.
In the UK at present, you may do an amazing job caring for the elderly and disabled. You may serve (and take abuse) in shops and pharmacies that the community can't live without. But don't think for a minute that you are worth anything in economic terms. You might as well be 'economically inactive' if all you can earn because you work in the 'public service' is £16,000 a year. A hedge fund manager wouldn't see you in his road, as we say in Glasgow.
But at least with Universal Income, you would start from the same basis as everyone else - and have some sort of fallback in the event of a disaster, like the one we're about to go through when the Coronavirus finally passes through.
He won't read this. And if he did he wouldn't comment. He doesn't seem to read anything I write on my friend's page. He will read and answer comments by my friend (male) and his male friends. But he ignores me. I'm not saying the guy's a misogynist but, as we say, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck...
Anyhow, today's topic for discussion was Universal Income. That's (sorry if I'm patronising you here) the plan to abolish all benefits and give people a personal income by allotting them a share of the national wealth on a weekly basis. Theirs to use as they see fit. No form-filling. It would be an entitlement. So much income for an adult, a lesser sum for each child in a family. No discrimination between working adults, pensioners and the sick. Thus closing a few unfair gaps and doing away with the poverty attached to old age and illness.
Some of the cost of Universal Income would be covered by no longer having to sustain a vast bureaucracy to police the benefits system. No interviews. No offices. No spying on women to see if they have a resident boyfriend. No bedroom tax. No child limits. No housing benefit - where you live would be your choice. No checking up to see if someone has a wee job on the side. People would be entitled (in fact, expected) to work to supplement the Universal Income. Their decision.
I believe it's been tried out in parts of - where else would dare? - Scandinavia. I haven't seen the results of the experiments. The UK media tend not to publicise radical social action like this...
(Aside: if you're still watching the horror show that is the TV news, I hope you've noticed the shocked look on UK journalists' faces when they visit Sweden, Taiwan and Switzerland and discover these 3 very different types of democracy are well run despite not following the USA/UK approach).
Our Tory friend was right in there. He can't get his head round this new idea. Instead of dealing with it, he gave us all a lecture about party politics, who won the December election and the evils of 'the left'. He doesn't mind 'the moderate left' (no definition of what that is) but he's dead against 'the barking left': commies, socialists, radicals, trade unions, anarchists, etc. He laid it all out in detail as if the rest of us were so dim we wouldn't know from Politics 101 what was traditionally meant by 'the left.' At every turn, he came back to his personal obsessions: party politics, how Boris Johnson is doing so well as PM, the evils of Jeremy Corbyn (you'll remember Corbyn hasn't been the leader of the Labour Party since December), etc.
It's like this man is stuck in the Thatcher era. The Bank Crash never happened (and runaway banking never had anything to do with the Thatcher laissez faire approach to finance anyway). There was no austerity. There is no Coronavirus - or if there is Johnson and co are handling it very well. We're not in a global crisis and, as a result, a global recession. There aren't 950,000 applications for benefit trundling through the system as I write - often from people who a month ago were planning their next holiday and never for one minute imagined this could happen to them. And, if that's where we are, Boris Johnson will handle it well.
And, of course, he's pretending capitalism hasn't had to turn to socialist principles - as seen in the Chinese People's Army, solidarity among workers, the restoration of a sense of community, the horror a lot of us feel at the sheer greed of food hoarders, etc - to save its own skin.
I always thought (because Tories always told me so) that Tories believed in opportunity. For any Tories around, opportunity isn't the same as opportunism. And there's been a lot of that around.
Like many a cockeyed optimist, I see the Coronavirus as a horror show that will uniquely give us an opportunity to stop, look around and work out if this extreme form of capitalism as practised in the USA and the UK is where we want to live.
Do we really want to spend money getting people to draw lines in a car park marking out spots where the homeless can live, as they're doing in Las Vegas right now? Couldn't we just talk about housing the homeless? Instead of getting misty-eyed about how many people in the USA have no health cover, couldn't we just give them health cover? And give them a Universal Income so they can look after themselves? Of course, some - like the poor sods who ended up on the streets because their mental illnesses went untreated - will buy drink and drugs with the money. That'll be their choice.
The same goes for the young people I see on Facebook who are now planning to sell their clothes to get some money together. Well, as one of them said, who needs 76 pairs of trousers when you can't go anywhere?
There will certainly be those just desperate to get back into the shopping-clubbing-pubbing way of life but maybe being stuck at home will allow them time to think it over: Is there more to life than this?
Aren't Tories all about choice? Well no, they're all about money.
In the UK at present, you may do an amazing job caring for the elderly and disabled. You may serve (and take abuse) in shops and pharmacies that the community can't live without. But don't think for a minute that you are worth anything in economic terms. You might as well be 'economically inactive' if all you can earn because you work in the 'public service' is £16,000 a year. A hedge fund manager wouldn't see you in his road, as we say in Glasgow.
But at least with Universal Income, you would start from the same basis as everyone else - and have some sort of fallback in the event of a disaster, like the one we're about to go through when the Coronavirus finally passes through.
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