Labour and the Basic Income: To make automation work for people, first the relationships between people and society, work and welfare, must be reframed

To tackle the problems of the future, first we need to rethink our approach to work and welfare. Photograph: Job Centre Plus by Andrew Writer (License) (Cropped)

In the passed few weeks, the Labour Party has been talking up it's determination to make technological advances work for ordinary people, rather than disenfranchise them.

For the party leader Jeremy Corbyn, the focus has been on the workplace. Corbyn has raised the question of how to use cooperative collective ownership of businesses by workers to put automation in the hands of people - rather than let automation be their replacement in the hands of their bosses.

Meanwhile, Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell has focused on the state role. McDonnell, talking at a Manchester anti-austerity event, spoke of a renewed drive for public investment as the first step to anchoring technology to people and their interests.

It was left to the Labour National Youth Conference to contribute the third integral component, with the future of the Labour Party backing a motion in support of the universal basic income.

The motion acknowledged both the problems with Britain's welfare system and the concerns for the future being raised by the rise of automation. To answer these, the LNYC motion presented the basic income.

The basic income is a universal form of welfare, a payment received - with very little bureaucracy - by all citizens. It is designed to cover the basic essentials of life, so as to end poverty and it's coercive power over how people choose to live.

Labour usually falls in with the same basic conceit, shared by most right wing liberal groups, social democrats and worker's parties: that life begins and ends with work - or rather, with wage labour. That work of this sort is a fundamental component and an axiom in the building of any social model.

Work, to 'earn' the right to live in exchange, is treated as a value. As a moral component essential to any social contract. But for progressives, this cannot be the last word.

If we are to have true social progress, we must start first with a base of no poverty and no homelessness. We must begin with the right to live. If we care about choice, about liberty and justice, we must not let coercion remain the starting point for engaging with society.

For the Labour Party in particular, embrace of that wage labour conceit verges on hypocrisy - the party of workers buying into the 'moral value' of 'working for a living'.

There has not been nearly enough scepticism of it, or recognition that it is a value of limited scope. Restricted to the specific benefits it delivers within a specific social system. A system in which even certain forms of work are prioritised above others, and were these forms of work are made nearly mandatory.

Right now there is a crisis in welfare - but not the way the Conservatives think. The crisis in welfare is one of dignity. Conservative cuts have strangled Britain's social security safety net.

That has left vulnerable people at the hands of an exploitative market and put through probing, demoralising, assessments by organisations with weak ethical codes and goals that run counter to the wellbeing of people who desperately need support.

If Labour are really going to reform this country, to tackle these kinds of injustice, they first need to get the foundations right. By no means is basic income a panacea. But it is a fairer and less coercive starting point for a society.

As more and more work becomes automated, as paid work becomes more scarce, we need that fairer starting point as a basis upon which to build a new kind of relationship between people and society - one that acknowledges, from the start, their basic right to live.

Conservative's callous attitude to disability benefits underlines the reasons to embrace principles behind universal welfare

Conservative policy is clearly to take away support from all except those in the most absolute despair - and to subject those remaining to demoralising assessments, pressures and sanctions. Photograph: Job Centre Plus by Andrew Writer (License) (Cropped)

The Conservative Party unmasked its own callous attitudes towards public welfare at the weekend, when one of Prime Minister Theresa May's aides took it upon himself to say that benefits shouldn't be going to those "taking pills at home, who suffer from anxiety" but to the "really disabled" (BBC, 2017).

After years of climbing uphill, campaigners have finally got mental illness - and the cause of giving it parity with physical illness - into the mainstream consciousness (Cooper, 2016). This comment, coming from a ministerial aide, is a huge step backwards.

It also underlines the inefficacy of the assessments regime, based always on the prejudices of particular governments and liable with its rhetoric, and in pursuit of budget targets, to set high the bar for access to support. And, right now, the Tories are running just such a harsh regime that is rolling back support further and further in the name of purse-tightening.

The compassionate alternative is universality. The idea behind a universal basic income is that everyone would receive a personal independence payment, as a basic safeguard against poverty and as a guarantee of their liberty.

The practical application of the idea, which is still only in the trial stage in a number of countries - where much can still be learned about how it might be shaped for real world use - might well be some time away. But the least we can do is learn from the principles underlying a universal system.

So what are the principles? The premier amongst them is personal freedom, which is hurt most by coercion - being compelled to make certain choices, or accept certain realities, by the absence of a true choice in the face of desperation.

Universality is an act of positive liberty. It seeks to enhance personal liberty by, not simply removing barriers, but reaching out to help people out of the pits that prevent their access - traps like poverty. It creates a welfare system that truly levels the playing field by creating a fundamental baseline.

Even in the modern world, a disability can prove expensive and mental illness, in particular, can be hard to predict and hard to manage. In a world of hyper-competition, that demands flexibility and only offers an insecure return, a person with a disability can easily find themselves out of despair coerced into making choices that are not right for them.

Conservative policy is clearly to take away support from all except those in the most absolute despair - and even then to subject them to neverending assessments, pressures and sanctions that demoralise people and rob them of their dignity.

That policy is an expression of an ideology of 'meritocratic' competition that rewards wealth with privilege and champions individual selfishness - in other words, believes that 'greed is good'. But those who do not 'win' and do not 'merit' privilege are left behind and blamed as the cause of their own failures.

It is that callousness that was revealed by Theresa May's aide. It is a must for progressives to make their voices heard in opposition to this selfish ideology that feeds privilege to the already privileged.

Progressive voices need to be heard too in support of a more compassionate way, that is underlined by the principles of universality - where we value our society based on how it empowers and liberates the least fortunate.

Basic Income is the first step to a more fair, just and free society, where all can enjoy the benefits of technological progress without the fear of dispossession and poverty

Thousands of protesters march the streets surrounding the Conservative Party Conference in support of trade unionists, and against austerity, in Manchester, 4 October 2015.

The basic income took a huge step towards being a reality in the UK last Tuesday night when John McDonnell mentioned that the Labour Party where considering a basic income policy (Sheffield, 2016). During a speech, at the latest stop on his New Economics tour (Sheffield, 2016{2}), in which McDonnell spoke of Labour's commitment to a more decentralised and democratic economy, the Shadow Chancellor acknowledged the interest Labour had taken in the policy - heretofore, only advocated for by the Greens (Wintour, 2015).

The basic income will be one step towards making society more fair, the economy more just, and giving individuals more liberty. Right now, with the European business community readjusting to technology, as well as competition from businesses employing workers for virtually no pay in other parts of the world, a defined shift towards fairness, justice and liberty is needed.

Certain principles, like the value of work in exchange for the means to live, continue to be imposed despite the possibility of a secure job, that pays a fair wage for a fair day's work, threatening to disappear (Foster, 2016). Zero-hours contracts are taking security away from the most vulnerable, eating into their lives in ways that leave them filled with stress and anxiety (Fleming, 2016).

Right now the advances in technology are very much in the favour of business and those in positions of established wealth, enriching some few while most see their livelihoods taken away and their lives made more precarious. There seems to be a coalition, one part fearing for workers and the other an elite fearing a form of socialism that eat into their status, that takes the rather unflattering opinion that this third industrial revolution should be avoided for fear of "mass unemployment and psychological aimlessness" (Mason, 2016).

Discussing the earlier and more famous industrial revolution, which saw the rise of the machines in Europe, Oscar Wilde argued that it was not a matter of the emergence of the technology itself that was the problem, but rather the way it was being controlled (Wilde, 1891).

"Up to the present, man has been, to a certain extent, the slave of machinery, and there is something tragic in the fact that as soon as man had invented a machine to do his work he began to starve. This, however, is, of course, the result of our property system and our system of competition. One man owns a machine which does the work of five hundred men. Five hundred men are, in consequence, thrown out of employment, and, having no work to do, become hungry and take to thieving. The one man secures the produce of the machine and keeps it, and has five hundred times as much as he should have, and probably, which is of much more importance, a great deal more than he really wants. Were that machine the property of all, every one would benefit by it. It would be an immense advantage to the community."

To avoid this kind of dispossession, may mean accepting that it is time to reconsider social values relating to work (Srnicek et al, 2016), and to contemplate the possibility of a post-work society - where all could benefit from the technological automation of our age (Mason, 2016). That shift would begin with reductions in the length of the working day, embracing job sharing and introducing the basic income. In all, loosening the connections between work and the right to life.

British Liberals in the 1920s argued (Yellow Book, 1928), under the strong influence of David Lloyd George and John Maynard Keynes, that the aim of "political and economic action", wasn't to perfect or perpetuate machines and social orders, but so that individuals "may have life, and that they might have it more abundantly". Their methods were popular share-ownership and progressive taxation - in essence, cooperation.

Rising public interest in the Basic Income presents a chance to pursue those aims in earnest. Along with more economic cooperation and a better work-life balance, it is possible to use these ideas to build a more humane economy. An economy that is fair and just, that protects and promotes liberty, within which progress will be wired in to the general benefit.

Junior doctors strike ballot exposes reality of human cost behind Tory laissez-faire

Junior Doctors at Castlefields Arena in October, taking part in the People's Assembly Take Back Manchester protest march that was held in parallel with the Conservative Party Conference.

Last week ended with news that ballots had been sent out a for vote on whether doctors should go on strike (The Guardian, 2015). The decision follows the latest developments in the dispute between junior doctors and Conservative Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt (The Economist, 2015).

With Prime Minister's Questions as a back drop, Hunt attempted to see off possible strike action with an offer of higher pay to junior doctors (Campbell, 2015). Yet his offer of an 11% rise was heavily criticised for being massively offset by the redefining of working hours to run longer into the evening - cutting what could previously be defined as out-of-hours pay during anti-social hours.

A vote for industrial action will surely reignite the tense clashes between government and unionised public servants that have been so much a feature of the Cameron ministries. As with the tube strikes, fears over long shifts worked during anti-social hours have led to stand offs and tense meetings between public sector union leaders and Conservative government ministers (BBC, 2015; Cooper, 2015).

For the Conservatives, their response has been consistent. They have refused point blank to see the human impact of political and economic decisions. The approach of the Right over the last five years has been to simply dismiss or condemn public servant strikes as "irresponsible" and inappropriate (BBC, 2011; Wardrop, 2011; Evening Standard, 2015).

Yet Conservative decisions are having profound affects upon the lives of many people, not least public servants. There have been public sector and private sector job losses, a more frightening prospect for many as unemployment support has also been cut and restricted, and invasive pressures have been put upon public servants.

From doctors to tube workers, to low pay workers, the balance between work and life is being drastically tipped by a lurching grasping attempt by the market to snatch up the personal time of citizens (Jeffries, 2014; The Guardian, 2015). Hours are running longer and later, more temporary and more insecure. Refusal runs the risk of dismissal in favour of someone who will accept the conditions.

On the Conservative part, there is a denial of responsibility. As Conservatives shift the duties and burdens onto the individual, they stand by their laissez-faire position that it is not the place of the state to 'interfere' with how markets are shaping people's lives.

Yet the Conservative use of the laissez-faire approach does not seem to reflect its liberal origins. The difference between laissez-faire in the hands of the Liberals of old and the Conservatives of today, is that the Liberals saw work as a means to personal self-improvement and liberation.

In pursuit of those aims, of ensuring that "individual men and women may have life, and that they might have it more abundantly", Liberals moved away from laissez-faire - towards a more interventionist approach - when the realities of exploitation and poverty where exposed. The ideological and economic ground they abandoned has been occupied by the Conservatives.

In Conservative hands the high aims of laissez-faire look more like propaganda. The economy, as they're managing it, is hugely unequal. Their 'apparent' prosperity is built around the statistical distortion caused by the concentrated wealth of the 1% - through property and other assets holding inflated value - and through "competitiveness" - where investors and employers can be guaranteed cheap labour, from workers who live increasingly fragile and temporary lives filled with stress and anxiety.

This is laissez-faire within a strictly hierarchical, deeply unequal, conservatism organisation of society. A society where free time is treated as the privileged reward of success in a system based around wealth, assets and property. That system locks out the poor and the unfortunate, who have no chance of owning property at grossly inflated prices and for whom social progress requires some combination of debt, nepotism and extreme good fortune (Mason, 2015).

What the junior doctors are campaigning for affects all citizens. Safely run services and respect for the rights of citizens to lives outside of work. It isn't unreasonable to put alongside to those demands the right to some sort of security & consistency, and a guarantee against poverty, as demands on workers become greater and the safety nets to protect them become thinner.

The market may have competition but it is not fair, particularly in a society suffering from massive inequality. For a government to choose to stand by as people are stretched thin, used up & exploited, or cast recklessly adrift by market forces is for it to neglect its duty to social welfare. Whether they like it or not, Conservatives have to face to fact that the state has a duty to interfere and that it can do so for the common good.

Intervention doesn't have to mean state ownership. There are decentralised alternatives like co-operatives and a citizen's income that could empower workers and make them more secure. But what it does mean, is that a government has to be prepared to act and to look beyond the appearance of prosperity, as reflected in short term profits, to find better alternatives.

What kind of economy would Labour's new economic advisory council build?

Photograph: John McDonnell MP, with residents and supporters of Grow Heathrow outside Central London County Court in 2012, by Jonathan Goldberg/Transition Heathrow (License) (Cropped)

John McDonnell, Labour's new socialist shadow chancellor, has moved to rebuild the party's economic reputation by appointing an economic advisory council (BBC, 2015). The council is, by all estimations, a supergroup comprised of the rockstar economists of anti-austerity thinking: Thomas Piketty, Joseph Stiglitz, Mariana Mazzucato, Anastasia Nesvetailova, Ann Pettifor and David Blanchflower.

There are two clear aims to this move. The first is to show that, not only is austerity thinking flawed, but that there are clear alternatives. The second is win back for Labour the credibility on economic policy that they had lost, fairly or not, by 2010.

It has been argued, seemingly endlessly, that without both credibility and a clear alternative, Labour's reputation - and so its ability to win elections - will not recover (Elliott, 2012; Kendall, 2015; Reid, 2015). So it is important to know what kind of alternative Labour's new advisors would have them construct.

The resumes of Labour's new advisors

Thomas Piketty is a French economist who had a large impact, in political and economic circles, with his 2013 book Capital in Twenty-First Century. In that work, he puts forward a simple premise and explores it in depth.

Piketty's thesis is that the concentration of wealth, resulting from the rate of return on capital being in the long term in excess of economic growth, is as much a political problem as an economic one. In his assessment, the access to capital brought by inherited wealth and the 'rentier' power it gives, prevents the competition and distribution for which the free market is lauded.

That is an assessment agreed with by the OECD, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. They argue that their findings show that income inequality in fact strangles growth, with countries that have a more even income spread actually performing better (OECD, 2014).

Piketty's proposed solution is for progressive taxes to be levied upon wealth and coordinated globally to suit the globalisation of capitalism. The failure to pursue this, in the French economist's eyes, means standing by as the rich consolidate control over society, crushing democracy in their wake by leaving the poor dispossessed and powerless (Naidu, 2014).

This concern with regards to inequality is shared by Joseph Stiglitz, former Clinton advisor and critic of the management of market globalization (Stiglitz, 2000). Stiglitz's work The Price of Inequality argued that inequality was as much the concern of the 1% as the 99%, as 'their fate is bound up' with how the other side live (Roberts, 2012).

To tackle inequality, Stiglitz argues that there needs to be a change in norms. He argues that free markets in fact need the protection of strong regulations and transparent accountability (Edsall, 2012), in order to break the monopolies on power that are used to influence selfish terms - to, in essence, reclaim capitalism.

For Mariana Mazzucato, reclaiming capitalism begins with reimagining the role of the state (Mazzucato, 2013). Mazzucato envisions the state as a risk-taking innovator, the creator and shaper of markets, and the natural agent to act in the 'common good' where privatisation is poorly suited and will not stop public subsidy (Mazzucato, 2013{2}).

She argues that this includes the provision of essential public services like education or health; investments in public infrastructure; investment and support for entrepreneurs, whether in business, for research, or for science and technology - all areas where steady, engaged, long-term investment commitments are needed.

Yet Mazzucato is not arguing for nationalisation or a growing of the state, but rather for a smarter state (Mazzucato, 2014) - bold and able to take risks. Quoting Keynes, she argues for a state that opens up new markets and regulates them:

"The important thing for government is not to do things which individuals are doing already, and to do them a little better or a little worse; but to do those things which at present are not done at all."

As for the others on Labour's select list of economists?

Ann Pettifor predicted the severity of the economic crisis with her 2006 book The coming first world debt crisis and, in a very Keynes-esque manner, has worked hard to make clear the dangerous role that debt has played in events (Cooper, 2015). She has also argued that the debt crisis exposed dangerous collusion between governments and the finance sector that broke the 'link between risk and reward' and so chained 'free' markets (Pettifor, 2014).

David Blanchflower, a former member of the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England, has spoken out against the idea that Labour 'caused' the 2008 financial crisis and against the economics of austerity (Blanchflower, 2015). Blanchflower was amongst the signatories of a letter during the Labour leadership campaign - along with Mazzucato - that argued Jeremy Corbyn's economic policy was in fact the moderate, mainstream response and it was instead George Osborne's austerity that was extreme (Blanchflower et al, 2015).

And finally there is Anastasia Nesvetailova, whose work Fragile Finance warned in 2007 of the fragility and instability of the finance-based economy, upon which the whole political and globalised economic house of cards was based (Nesvetailova, 2007).

The respectable face of economic opposition

So what kind of economy do these ideas combine to form?

In a definite stance of opposition to the dominant, and austere, conservative approach, the consensus running through Labour's new advisors is for the state to have a strong role - though not through nationalisation. The emphasis is placed upon the work the state does to create a framework for society - on infrastructure, on social security, on regulating market activity.

In fact, looking over the recommendations is almost like a review of German economics in the late twentieth century during the time of Germany's Wirtschaftswunder - its 'economic miracle'. The social market, so-called Rhine Capitalist, system that underwrote that economic boom was plush with public-private partnerships.

Inspired by German Ordoliberalism, the state was to act as regulator and facilitator in the Rhenist system (Guerot & Dullien, 2012). The aim was to ensure greater equality, and widely enjoyed prosperity, all while retaining an appreciation for free markets - so attempting to get the social aims and a vibrant market to go along hand in hand.

The ideas also bear some resemblance to those of Liberals and Liberal Democrats in the UK over the decades. Setting themselves apart from the Conservatives and Labour, their approach was to argue that it was not about a large or a small state, but about what the state is and what it does (Brack et al, 2007) - so Liberals might pursue the most efficient solution with the least interference with the individual.

In these similarities with liberal ideas, the approach of Labour's new advisors marks a kind of sharp change for the party, away from the centralised and overbearing managerialism it has pursued since the Second World War. But what stands out most is that, if we can accept that austerity represents a purely right-wing form of economics, the vision these economists are putting forward represent the mainstream - the democratic economics of the centre.

Building an alternative

With these very much mainstream, Keynesian-esque, ideas - based on broad analysis critical of austerity but friendly to markets - accomplishing the task of recovering Labour's credibility should not be such a long shot. Even reaching out to reintegrate the unhappy New Labour-ites should not be impossible.

For restoring their respectability, it is now a matter of building that model and presenting it to the public, which - if done right - could create the base from which the Conservative approach can be disassembled.

That would mean embracing Keir Hardie as Jeremy Corbyn did, in his first speech to the Labour Party conference as leader (Kennedy & Grierson, 2015). The existence of a credible alternative to the rigours of austerity allows the party to challenge the necessity of the suffering it has caused, and to try to 'stir up divine discontent with wrong'.

And yet, while the dry and balanced macroeconomic mainstream vision is the economist's dream ticket to government office, it is not hard to imagine these technical reforms falling short of progressive expectations.

There are radical ideas with not touched on here.

Citizen's income (Razavi, 2014), mutuals and co-ops (Webb, 2015), shorter working hours and the possibilities that automation are bringing (Mason, 2015) - these are all ideas tied closely to questions of equality, accountability and innovation.

However, there is likely more to come from the team of Corbyn & McDonnell - not least the pursuit of rail renationalisation (BBC, 2015{2}) and community owned energy companies (BBC, 2015{3}) - than is being accounted for here. Those extra measures are needed.

If we are to have more equality and accountability in the economy, there needs to be more co-operation. Which means more say for workers in the running of their workplaces and a greater mutuality of aims.

And if people are to enjoy full balanced lives, they also need enough time to embrace more than just their universal human rights to fair paid work and 'rest and leisure'. They need the resources and time to study, to raise families, to assemble, to debate and to act.

And if people are to have both of the above with freedom, from both want and coercion, they need the basic guarantee against poverty and homelessness afforded by a Citizen's Income.

As it says in the old Liberal Party's Yellow Book (1928), written under the deep influence of David Lloyd George and John Maynard Keynes:

'We believe with a passionate faith that the end of all political and economic action is not the perfecting or the perpetuation of this or that piece of mechanism or organisation, but that individual men and women may have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.'

A true progressive alternative to conservative economics needs to embrace big ideas. It needs to reform, it needs to challenge and it needs to spark hope of a new way forward.

Ed Miliband failed in efforts to put the cost of living at the centre of the political debate, but it remains the big picture

Photograph: Ed Miliband gives his first keynote speech to Labour Party conference as leader, in September 2010. At Labour Party Conference, Manchester (License) (Cropped)

At a time when compassion for the suffering of others is at a high, even forcing Prime Minister David Cameron into accepting more refugees from Syria (BBC, 2015), it is worth remembering that compassion is needed domestically as well. Homelessness has increased even as housing costs have continued to soar (White, 2015). The rising cost of welfare has led to questionable actions to reduce the bill (Stone, 2015) and the proliferation food banks (Wintour & Butler, 2014).

These are all expressions of an underlying theme: the cost of living is too high. Before he became mired in the catastrophic miscalculations that were the Ed Stone and the mugs that boasted of closing borders to foreigners, Ed Miliband tried and failed to make the cost of living the centrepiece of his leadership of the Labour Party (Miliband, 2014).

Overcome by the media pressure to deal with the big issues facing Britain with stern and direct action, as well as party insider insistence on pursuing obsessively conservative methods (Glasman, 2011), Miliband's attempt to take the lead on the big issues of the day dissolved into populist political stunts. For just a moment the Labour leadership had grasped a single coherent theme that might have helped the party to form a distinctive position.

These two, big, long term problems facing the UK - that housing is too expensive and that welfare costs too much - have often been reduced to the result of 'migration problem' which, it is commonly believed, increases the burdens on both of the first two, so making them all the more expensive. Yet migration is little more than a scapegoat, or an exacerbation that exposes fears, and only distracts from the real issues moving beneath the surface. The fact is that the cost of living is too high - there is some dispute, however, as to why.

In the struggle to tackle the exorbitant cost of living, there are two schools. On the Right, the focus is upon so-called distortions of the market - instead of relying on market competition to set prices so that efficient marginal wages will go further, the Right sees government as interfering and managing in a manner that leads to distortions and corporate oligarchies. On the Left, the answers lie with income inequality - provoking a need for intervention to introduce regulation, maximum wages, redistributive taxation, all to ensure that workers earn a better share.

Cost of Living and the Right

On the Right, one of the big criticisms of Left-wing economics is its failure to keep minimum wages, and other measures that inflate costs for business, under control. From the pro-market perspective, a rise in wages increases prices. That wage inflation drives price inflation, which gives rise to wage inflation, in a vicious cycle.

The argument goes that minimum wages hurt employment - they increase labour costs artificially and put basic low paid work at risk of replacement by more economically efficient automation (The Economist, 2015). More complex assessments argue that tax credits are a superior welfare alternative, encouraging people to work by offering subsidy without driving up business costs. Employers can respond by paying more, as they might say, 'competitive' wages - low enough that they can have more staff and more staff of greater skill - with incomes of low paid workers being effectively 'topped up' by tax credits, with the government taking on the cost.

However, with the age of austerity in full swing and public debt being used as the rallying banner for cutting back state taxation and spending, governments have wanted to cut their own budgets (Money Talks, 2015). Tax credits, as a sizeable public expenditure, has become a target, with its cost being passed on to businesses in the form of increases in the minimum wage. That, of course, needs to be paid for out of business profits and so is passed on to customers in higher prices - resulting in higher wages not necessarily meaning relatively higher incomes, as the cost of living also goes up.

For the economic Right, the focus is on trying to find ways to reduce the cost of living without tampering with the delicate functioning of the market (The Economist, 2015{2}). That has led to calls for planning regulation reform to ease way to profits in the house building sector (BBC, 105{2}).

However, the cost of living presents huge challenges, such as the gigantic housing costs, that have no easy or cheap fix. Building houses to address housing shortages is necessary. Yet it is also expensive and the profits that can be derived from a project are as much a part of the problem as the shortage itself. Nor does building them alone tackle the other issues like the unfairness of ownership and the need for economies of scale in the rental sector. Previous attempts in the UK to thrust this task upon the private sector, under Thatcher, only helped propel the country into the present crisis (Gulliver, 2013).

Cost of Living and the Left

For the Left, the pro-market analysis is taken as tantamount to an attack on the life security of the poorest. Moving away from minimum wages is seen as a dangerous step further along the road towards the precarious lives filled with constant stress of zero-hours contracts (Fleming, 2015).

They would seem to have good reason to be guarded. There is evidence that suggests in-work poverty is climbing and the gap between the poorest and prosperity is widening (Pradella, 2015). The relative wage, the value retained by workers from the value they produced, is under increasing pressure.

The response of the Left, historically, has been to try and ameliorate these conditions through welfare. The most obvious and blunt force approach has been deficit spending on public sector projects, a Keynesian option to create more and better paid work - allowing workers to afford a more stable life. This is an idea that, with a new twist, is being considered again by Jeremy Corbyn (Peston, 2015).

For the broader economy, the benefits are proposed to lie in the Keynesian priority of propping up demand. The struggle has become finding a way of doing so within the dominant capitalist market system, without upsetting its balance. The Left's main tools for the task have been tax credits and minimum wages.

Corbyn, in particular, appears to want to turn back - for the duration of the crisis at least - to the more blunt approach with his people's quantitative easing. To make up for lack of income distribution into the pockets of consumers, which suppresses demand, Corbyn suggests turning to credit - much as Reagan and Thatcher did after the suppression of workers' bargaining power in the 1980s (Harvey, 2010). But in true democratic fashion, the burden of that debt falls of the state on behalf of all of the people, rather than on the head of any particular debtor.

So while the pro-market Right is interested in seeking ways to make it possible to do more with less, the Left's focus on giving people more to spend.

Cost of Living: The Bigger Picture

However, because Corbyn's QE for the People is just a correction for a crisis, sooner of later the Left will have to come back around to Ed Miliband's aborted project to tackle the cost of living head on, which, under pressure from the clamour to tackle public debts, shows significant crossover with the Right. Miliband's strategy included promises to tackle energy costs, to increase the housing supply, to tackle renting costs, to cut tax for poorest, to cut small business rates, to increase wages and clamp down on the illegal - and migrant-exploiting - practice of undercutting wages.

The pro-market groups on the Right also have to confront big questions. When the early free traders, like Richard Cobden and John Bright, wanted to extend free trade in the interests of peace, breaking the power of corporations and land owners, and making food cheaper for the people. Modern free traders are battling against the land oligarchies of their own times, but the power and influence of rentiers over the high cost of dwellings will not be shaken off by a laissez-faire cull of regulations. Rentiers own the playing field as well as the pieces.

If the high price of housing and energy could be tackled, then a debate over minimum wages or marginal wages would be held on a much clearer, unfogged, field. The discussion of the impact of wage levels - and how they set the 'purchase power' of the poorest, with their higher pay coming at the cost of higher business prices, potentially meaning higher prices and lower employment - would be substantially more straightforward.

Yet it is hard to shake the feeling that the wages debate would still mean buying into an economic rhetoric based on manipulation and coercion of people into certain kinds of 'productive' behaviours, and which ignores key ideas. Particularly, who benefits, how and how equally from the profits/net gains of an enterprise? There were elements of that idea in the debate that Ed Miliband tried to open up on the cost of living, in taking elements from both camps.

But it didn't go far enough, going only so far as to make a pitch to the middle class within present structures (Grice, 2014) - and was soon drowned out by populist support for closed borders and austerity toward welfare. Surely, the really progressive approach is to ask whether we can reconstruct the economy so that people can get a better relative share of the product of their work, see their relative share go further, and have greater social security?

The only way to achieve that is to tackle the cost of living holistically. Such an alternative approach to solving the cost of living crisis would need to be coherent, with a core idea and theme that would bind the various parts together.

It would need co-operation and mutuality in all sectors, to give people the power to ensure they receive a proper relative share. It would need guarantees of basic economic securities that would have a minimal distorting affect upon the costs of business, such as a citizen's income. And, it would need to tackle the oligarchic rentier control over the basic fundamental resources such as energy and housing that siphon off so much of a wage - particularly in the housing sector where, both in ownership and rental, costs have spiralled up beyond any semblance of reality under the inefficient system of private landlords that blocks the positive affects of economies of scale.

While presenting a progressive alternative would be a gigantic challenge, it also presents a clear and distinct path forwards. In a mainstream assembled around frustratingly similar politicians offering bafflingly similar ideas, a distinct and coherent economic alternative could be electorally popular as well as economically necessary.

The DWP's fake case studies are just the latest blunder in the Conservative effort to restructure welfare to be more coercive.

Ian Duncan Smith and the DWP are once more under fire as they attempt to make fundamental changes to how benefits work. Photograph: Job Centre Plus by Andrew Writer (License) (Cropped)

The discovery yesterday that the DWP, Department of Work and Pensions, had been faking case studies is just the latest blunder in the Conservative attempt to make a coercive shift in welfare policy (Rawlinson & Perraudin, 2015). It is the latest product of the destructive Conservative obsession with stamping out what they see as dependence generating collectivism, only to allow coercion to flourish.

The Conservatives have pressed along this course, even in the face of legal challenges (Neville, 2013), in pursuit of ideological aims. In the 1970s, the party began to adopt long abandoned elements of classical liberalism.

They absorbed these ideas - the free market, anti-state attitudes - to construct a modern conservatism. They have used low taxes, deregulation and the trimming back of the public sector to protect the interests of the modern establishment, which primarily consists of the finance sector and big business.

The general Conservative motivation is stated to be the discouragement of dependence and the encouragement of self-interest, all in order to spur innovation and individual excellence - in opposition to collectivism - that, in competition, they believe will lead to growth and advancement within the structure of, and beneficial to, the establishment (George & Wilding, 1994).

Within that structure comes the dismantling of the welfare system, even the privatising of it (Mason, 2015), all in the name of ending dependence - in this case by the introduction of greater coercion.

In these applications come the conservative twist on old liberal policies. They are made to serve a vast corporate structure, the UK as a PLC (Treanor & Elliott, 2015), an umbrella for other financial and business giants. In the process the liberist, laissez faire, economics lose whatever capacity they had to liberate and welfare loses its ability to act as a compassionate social security safety net.

Welfare, in particular, has a purpose, a social point, that is the reason it is provided by the public sector. It is supposed to be a common safety net, to which everyone contributes and from which everyone benefits. A kind of social bond, part of the thread that holds the patchwork of society together.

But as the Conservatives pursue their direction, shredding that social fabric, they replace the compassion and co-operation of welfare, with the a meagre and coercive social insurance (Mason, 2015) - based on individual contributions from individual work, highly personalised and so lacking the security offered by a social safety.

The Labour Party's unwillingness to oppose these directions hides the possibility of moving in a more progressive direction (Wintour, 2015). Society could do more to help, it could liberate the individual and end poverty. The means of achieving it is the Citizen's Income. However, only one party - the Greens - have taken it seriously, and even they had doubts about putting it front and centre of their election manifesto (Riley-Smith, 2015).

And yet, it is an idea that, at the very least, shows that a progressive alternative is possible. Citizen's Income shows that it is possible to reform welfare for the present and to do so without losing its social purpose: serving the common good.

Election 2015: Green Party and the Left

For 2015, the job of representing the radical left alternative has fallen upon the Green Party. They made a breakthrough in 2010 by claiming their first parliamentary seat at Brighton Pavilion, and took minority control of Brighton and Hove Council in the local elections of 2011.

The role they've taken on - largely seen to have been held by the Liberal Democrats in 2010 - comes with some benefits. Since their 2010 breakthrough the party has polled as high as 8%, seen its membership rising and secured a podium at the leaders debate. The party is growing and its support is typically younger (Williams, 2015).

The recent surge in support, particularly amongst young people, has come with a focus on social and economic policy, rather than environmental. The Greens' social liberalism and progressive anti-austerity economics, supporting a £10 living wage, the abolition of tuition fees and reintroduction of EMA, support for the NHS, and for a Citizen's Income, have been singled out as positive by young members (Gil, 2015).

There is, however, a price for those benefits. They come with greater pressures and scrutiny. There was heavy criticism for party leader Natalie Bennett's performance in a series of interviews (BBC, 2015{1}; LBC, 2015) and scorn has also been poured on the potential cost of some their more radically progressive policies - particularly the Citizen's Income.

Those criticisms have led to some in the party - particularly their only MP and former leader Caroline Lucas - to play down their support for a Citizen's Income in the short term (Riley-Smith, 2015). Yet there are those who think that the policy can be costed practically (Finlay, 2015), and the party has announced that the policy will be in their manifesto (BBC, 2015{2}).

While some of their more radical policies have courted controversy, other ideas have made it into the mainstream. Matching Green support for renationalisation of the railways has been talked about in Labour circles (Ferguson, 2013).

Yet, until we see those principles tested in practice, it is difficult to know how the party will respond when pressure is put upon its priorities. The only example we can really draw upon is the experience of Brighton and Hove City Council, which has been under Green Party minority control since 2011 (Bawden, 2014).

The record of the Green council is marked with some successes. The Greens have managed to promote the living wage in Brighton (Harris, 2013). But there have also been controversies. The party initiated the review of pay that led to potential cuts in the pay for rubbish-collectors and street-cleaners. Then, Green MP Caroline Lucas supported the workers when they went on strike against the council. The matter was eventually resolved, but not without marring the Greens reputation with imposing austerity and association with the Conservatives (Hadfield, 2014).

The disputes in Brighton have been suggested to have exposed fault-line splits within the party - between those instinctively leaning more towards Labour, cautious Centrist compromisers leaning towards the Lib Dems in attitudes, or those leaning towards Eco-Anarchism - although the seriousness of internal rifts have been played down (Chakelian, 2015).

But what the disputes definitely show is a difference within the party between those willing to work within the established system, to negotiate and to compromise - most notably with austerity - and those who stand in a more stark opposition. It is the latter position that will undoubtedly be looked for by the new influx of supporters.

There is a wary parallel to be drawn here with the Liberal Democrats. Like the Lib Dems, they were not really taken seriously until 2010. They too are often dismissed as being too obsessed with a particular policy niche - for the Greens the environment, for the Lib Dems political reform. The big difference comes with the fact that the Lib Dems have always been committed to political compromise and Centrism. Even if they lose some voters who supported them in protest over specific issues or against the establishment parties, they will still have supporters well familiar with  consistent long term approach. It is unlikely that the Greens will allowed any such margins.

However, without a major upsurge in voters switching from the many minor left-wing parties, and others switching from Labour and Lib Dems in large numbers, they will likely only do to Labour what UKIP will do to the Tories - split the vote. In doing so, the Greens can still be consistent in their aim to pull Labour leftwards and put themselves in a position to benefit from those disaffected with Labour's drift to the right - a sentiment likely to increase if Labour get into government in May and prop up austerity.

That particular likelihood is considered credible enough that Labour has being warned against the risk of becoming like their Greek equivalent PASOK (Chakrabortty, 2015) - rendered obsolete by complicity with austerity, and surpassed on their Left.

In the present the Greens will focus on picking up seats where they can, finding support for their more moderate policies (Sparrow, 2015) - like an introducing a £10 living wage, support for rolling back NHS marketisation, and pursuing the creation of a progressive alliance, uniting the Green Party, the SNP and Plaid Cymru in a new progressive parliamentary group (Mason, 2015)

---

Prospects: 5% for 1 seat (no change).*

Potential Coalition Parties: Labour (271 seats), Liberal Democrats (29), SNP (53), Plaid Cymru (3).

Verdict: High turnout and low seats numbers will put the party on the map and in a strong position for 2020 - especially if Labour are seen to be toeing the austerity line.

---

And the rest on the Left

Beyond the Green Party, the biggest group of note is the Respect Party. Their most prominent figure is George Galloway, former Labour MP and previously Respect MP for Bethnal Green and Bow, who now holds the seat at Bradford West, won in a 2012 bye-election (BBC, 2012).

Respect was formed as a small alliance of minor parties - representing Democratic Socialists, Trade Unionists, Environmentalists, Anti-War activists, and general Leftists - which has achieved some small successes, in twice taking a seat in parliament.

The party has however had a history of splits and controversies, including an inamicable split with the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in 2008 - which itself has faced allegations of, and criticism over the handling of, sexual assault, sexual abuse and rape (Platt, 2014).

As for Respect, despite some continuing internal dissensions (Pidd, 2013), they are still around and likely to focus their attention on only a few seats. Polling suggests they will hold Bradford West, with Birmingham Hall Green being a possible additional target.

Other Left groups include the TUSC and Ken Loach's Left Unity.

Support for the Greens and the SNP is forcing change on the British Left

If the years since the 2008 economic crisis have shown us anything, it's that people are discontent with the old order. In the UK, as well as elsewhere, governments have struggled to manage sinking economies and it has led to crashing confidence in central national authorities (Nardelli, 2014).

In Britain this has shown itself in the slow but dramatic collapse of the two-party system. Across Britain voters first switched, in modest numbers, to the Liberal Democrats, as the largest left alternative to a Labour Party that had become a towering behemoth of establishment power (The Guardian, 2010).

That switch created the first true multi-party system in Britain since the Second World War. However, when the Lib Dems gathered too little support to achieve much other than mildly shackling the Conservatives in a coalition, their voting support fractured (Kirkup, 2014). Failing to defend certain of their key policies from Conservatives depredations have sent supporters fleeing to find new havens.

In Scotland, the SNP have been the main beneficiaries of the Lib Dems being sucked into the whirlpool of mistrust of establishment political parties, and of voter's loss of trust in Labour  (Carrell, 2014). The SNP have established a reputation as a more than just a single issue separatist party, and have attracted a number of left-wing voters looking for a new left alternative, with policies like nuclear disarmament, free higher education and progressive taxation (Brooks, 2014).

Across the rest of Britain, the Green Party has been slowly building support (Walsh, 2014). The party has persistently set itself apart from the other main parties, supporting policies like the citizen's income. Green parties are organised right across the European continent, and are close to being the first truly federal European party, but have yet to make the big breakthrough in the UK. In 2010 Caroline Lucas became their first MP (BBC, 2010), and since then they have begun to poll at similar levels to both UKIP and the Lib Dems.

The rising support, for both parties, is breaking open the old system. That break could well be a blessing for the British Left. The Greens and the SNP are opening a space to the left of the British mainstream, and it's a space where progressive ideas can make themselves heard. It is also the opportunity to reshape the left in a less centralised way.

Plurality, many voices and many perspectives, is the lifeblood of debate and is at the centre of progress. The Labour Party has tried to force those different groups to unite into a single faction with one voice, but in doing so has only strangled and frustrated the political left - even as they have achieved great steps forward. The emergence of a multi-party system, and the much needed democratic reforms that will allow it to thrive, should be seen then as an opportunity to be embraced.

Britain has seen elements of a multi-party system before, but not since the Second World War. The loss of multiple parties was not really to the benefit of the left, even as Labour managed to gather left-wing voters around itself. It meant an end to co-operation between social democrats and liberals that weakened both movements (Bogdanor, 1983).

The opening up the left by multiple parties could pull Labour back leftwards, and force it to embrace co-operation with other leftist groups. The fear is that a system with many parties will lead to division and therefore weakness - but it doesn't have to. If you can find common ground and find a way to present an allied front, you will be able to work together.

There is room on the left for the Labour Party, the Liberal Democrats, the SNP, the Green Party, the Co-operative Party and more, so long as they, and especially Labour, can learn to co-operate.

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References:
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+ Alberto Nardelli's 'A crisis of trust - and the rise of new political parties'; in The Guardian; 6 November 2014.

+ The Guardian's 'General election 2010: The liberal moment has come'; 30 April 2010.

+ James Kirkup's 'Only third of 2010 Lib Dem voters will back party again, poll suggests'; in The Telegraph; 7 March 2013.

+ Severin Carrell's 'Labour faces massive losses to SNP at UK general election, poll shows'; in The Guardian; 30 October 2014.

+ Libby Brooks' 'Who are the new members of the Scottish National Party?'; in The Guardian;13 November 2014.

+ James Walsh's '7 reasons why people are turning to the Green party'; in The Guardian; 14 November 2014.

+ BBC's 'Election: Green Party gain first MP with Brighton win'; 7 May 2010.

+ Vernon Bogdanor's 'Multi-party politics and the Constitution'; Cambridge University Press; 1983 [Buy Now].

Spain's Podemos party signals the rise of a new political left

Since the financial crisis erupted in 2008, Europe has seen a rise in co-ordinated leftist movements, such as Occupy, getting people out onto the streets to protest against the conservative economic orthodoxy.

Despite being highly visible, those campaigns, for welfare before wealth and people before profits, have found little traction inside the political mainstream. The failure of mainstream political parties to reflect public priorities in policy has led to collapsing support for those parties, and a corresponding collapse in trust in the political institutions (Nardelli, 2014).

However, that has began to change. In time for the European elections, while the world was justifiably worried about the rise of the far right, a new party emerged in Spain. Born out of the Indignados movement, which saw as many as 8 million people take to the streets across Spain in 2011 and 2012, a new party was formed, called Podemos (Jones, 2014).

Podemos, meaning "We can", marks an important transition. The leftist activists and protesters are shifting from campaigning to political democracy, from protesting to developing policy - trying to turn ideas into action (Pope, 2014). It is a beginning of a fulfilment of the promise shown by leftist campaigns across Europe.

People have shown they are active and engaged. But they're unhappy, and are now they're taking to proposing the solutions themselves, because the establishment hasn't listened, and hasn't reformed to suit the needs of the people.

That disaffection has elsewhere only fed the parties of the far right, who only offer narrow and restrictive responses to poverty and suffering. Those groups, like UKIP, do not break from political orthodoxies and fail to offer positive alternatives. Only the anti-establishment libertarian democratic group Movimento 5 Stelle, of Italy, has succeeded in taking popular support away from those far right groups... so far.

The rising polling strength of Podemos is a positive answer to that right-wing populism, and ought to be a huge boost to those on the left, from progressives to socialists to liberals. They are championing the causes of the left: poverty reduction, the basic income, reducing dependence upon fossil fuels, promoting small, medium and local producers and enterprises along with some sensible public control.

They represent the ideals of the left, backed by a popular movement, bringing activism and political policy together to challenge mainstream methods and orthodox ideas. That is a cause for hope for anyone who is looking for a better future, one oriented more towards people and their needs, than to endless, monotonous, accumulation and consumption.

==========
Reference:
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+ Alberto Nardelli's 'A crisis of trust - and the rise of new political parties'; in The Guardian; 6 November 2014.

+ Owen Jones' 'Viva Podemos: the left shows it can adapt and thrive in a crisis'; in The Guardian; 16 November 2014.

+ Mike Pope's 'The rise of Podemos and its People's Assembly'; on OpenDemocracy.net; 17 November 2014.

Tories are finding new ways to demonise welfare

To prepare the ground for the next phase in their ongoing obsession with cutting back the public sector, the Conservatives announced last week that they were spending £5m of public funds to send all taxpayers a leaflet breaking down how the tax they pay is spent (Mason, 2014).

This Tory presentation on government spending has been criticised, in particular, for presenting welfare spending in an incredibly simplistic, and so misleading, way (Moore, 2014). It has been suggested that the primary aim of doing so is to justify future cuts in welfare spending, by comparing its cost versus other popular priorities like healthcare and education (Ball, 2014).

These leaflets, with their presentation of the cost of welfare are just the latest assault. Yet, a more detailed look at government spending reveals much different picture. Of spending on welfare, 46% of it goes on pensions, with only 3% spent on jobseekers allowance. A further 8% goes to the disability living allowance, and 14% is spent on housing benefits (Moore, 2014). Furthermore, the 3% spent on support for the unemployed, while they look for work, is less than 0.6% of tax revenues (Ball, 2014).

Those figures make the Conservative government's pursuit of cutting back welfare, in order to reduce overall public spending, seem absurd. It also puts into context how heavily the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has been criticised for its zealous pursuit of this Tory ideological aggression towards welfare (Toynbee, 2014).

The DWP has even faced legal challenges over its 'workfare' policy, on the grounds that it constitutes forced labour - and has even refused to release information of where it is forcing people to work on the astonishing grounds that it would provoke protests (Chakelian, 2014). It's attitude has, however, provoked protests regardless, unsurprisingly, with people are being forced into work without pay in ridiculous situations (Malik, 2014).

These moves tie in perfectly with the Tory obsession with demonising welfare and demolishing public welfare safety nets. Their illiberal approach is undermining the wellbeing of the poorest, leaving them at the mercy of the market, mostly in the name of supporting capitalist free enterprise by saving the wealthiest the trouble of contributing to the common fund.

That approach, in pursuit of statistical success to justify the very unequal distribution of wealth that their economic approach requires (Watt, 2013), is crushing the real people behind the percentages and the entries in spreadsheets, and dividing the communities that bind them.

Welfare is all about a community coming together to ensure that, should any one of them stumble, everyone else will rally to help them back to their feet - and yet it is being replaced with a modern day workhouse for the poor, forcing the unemployed to labour unpaid in increasingly temporary jobs, in a job market that is being propped up on temporary workers. Throwing more obstacles in the path of those who find themselves at the bottom, or leaving behind those that falter, is an inadequate and unfair response to hard times.

Instead, we should be looking forward with ideas like a Citizen's Income, to engage with new ways to liberate people from poverty and provide opportunities. We need to provide better prospects, created by better investments in people, and the provision of better access to better opportunities - an unlocking of the doors barring the least well off from access to the connections and resources they need for a better life.

==========
References:
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+ Rowena Mason's 'Tax statements from George Osborne to show government spend'; in The Guardian; 2 November 2014.

+ Susan Moore's 'What the Tories won’t tell you in their ‘transparent’ tax statement'; in The Guardian; 3 November 2014.

+ James Ball's 'Osborne’s tax summary shows benefits bill is biggest drain. Is this fair?'; in The Guardian; 3 November 2014.

+ Polly Toynbee's 'Help to Work is a costly way of punishing the jobless'; in The Guardian; 15 April 2014.

+ Anoosh Chakelian's 'The DWP won't tell us exactly where it sends people on placements for fear of protests' in New Statesman; 4 November 2014.

+ Shiv Malik's 'DWP orders man to work without pay for company that let him go'; in The Guardian; 3 November 2014.

+ Nicholas Watt's 'Boris Johnson invokes Thatcher spirit with greed is good speech'; in The Guardian; 27 November 2013.

Economic Reform and the Ideological Defence of Capitalism

The latest failures of the capitalist system, the financial crash of 2008 and the subsequent worldwide recession, have led to calls for a rational reassessment, both of its theoretical value and of its practical application. There is rising discontent with what capitalism has offered, compared to the price it extracts in return, and people want to explore new ideas, and new possibilities and alternatives (Skidelsky, 2014).

In the beginning though, capitalism had all of the makings of a radically progressive economic system. As the merchants found resources and traded them, they broke the economic stranglehold held by the traditionally powerful landowning classes. Enterprising individuals could become wealthy, and free themselves from the strictures of social class, while also furthering the erosion of those class boundaries by creating paid work that distributed wealth.

Eventually, however, the power of the capitalists broke the power of landowners, and toppled their social order - but only to replace it. Capital has become the foundation of a new establishment, and its interests have become the new guiding motivation for the society that has sprung up around it.

Now, its failures have exposed it to criticism from which it was previously safe. While it continued to improve conditions for people in general, even in just a peripheral way, its excesses and inequalities where excused. But when those benefits cease to be generally seen, discontent swells and questions begin to be asked. Are there other ways we might go? Can we do better?

The call for new ideas

Economics students around the world have led the call for a fresh look at economic theories. They want broader studies of the impacts and flaws of present theories, and the freedom to study new or alternative economic ideas - and with good reason (Skidelsky, 2014). Inequality, failure to predict catastrophic crashes and the subsequent fallout all demand answers.

Andy Haldane, the Bank of England's former Director of Financial Stability, and the present Chief Economist, supported their announcements (Inman, 2014), saying:

"The crisis has laid bare the latent inadequacies of economic models. These models have failed to make sense of the sorts of extreme macro-economic events, such as crises, recessions and depressions, which matter most to society."

But the concerns of students go beyond theoretical and practical accuracy (Husnain & Parekh, 2013). There is also a belief that economics can be about more than exploiting conditions for immediate selfish profit. That the study of economics can be used to increase our knowledge of how systems work in order to develop more effective and more sustainable ways of supporting people, without flaws like massively unequal social stratification.

The Gift Economy

Lily Cole, through her website impossible.com, which promotes a vision of an economy based around gifts and reciprocity (Cole, 2014). Using the internet as a medium, Cole's site allows people to post the things that people need or want, and allows others to answer those needs for free - for nothing other than a thank you.

The idea of a reciprocal economy tie in with certain anthropological views on the role of reciprocity and exchange in human societies (Green, 2014). It seems that, rather than barter, early human social groups completed tasks and exchanged their product with others as needed. These exchanges were conducted on the understanding that, through gratitude and debt, they built trust and social cohesion, leading to those positive actions later being returned in kind.

While our communities are far less personal, and far more widespread, the internet certainly does have the potential to break down those barriers and distances. Lily Cole's approach is none the less, however, still a fairly extreme example and utopian in nature. As an overnight alternative to the capitalist economic orthodoxies, it would be outright revolutionary. In the short and medium term, simply reforming the present systems is the more practical alternative.

The John Lewis Economy

Back in 2012, Nick Clegg announced Liberal Democrat backing for what he called a John Lewis Economy (Clegg, 2012). Clegg vision has workers as stakeholders in a business, with an active shareholding that gives them a tangible investment in the well-being of the organisation. There is a hope that, through these means, the wider economy might benefit from the stability, productivity and long-term sustainability of employee-owned businesses (Ashton, 2012).

And yet, this is only a limited form of co-operative or mutual. Through the offering of a stake, the form of a material benefit, it only offers to include - at arm's length - the workers into the present system without the requirement of a major change in systemic habits. To find a fix for inequality and exploitation, co-operative and mutual models would have go further, and really embrace the right of individuals to autonomy.

In an economy where paid work is essential for survival, it is of the utmost importance that people receive a truly fair portion of the product of their own work. Part of that means protecting autonomy, and the right to an equal say in their working conditions, who their management are and how they behave, and in how the organisation's profits are used.

However, even the level of autonomy offered by co-operative and mutual models fails to address an essential lack of autonomy within mainstream market societies.

A Basic Income

One way of addressing the most fundamental lack of autonomy - the necessity of paid work for survival - is to introduce a Basic Income. At present, out of mainstream UK political parties, only the Green Party is offering the Basic Income as a real possibility (Fearn, 2014). Basic Income, also known as Citizen's Income, represents, within market economies, an expression of a belief in a person's essential right to live - counter to those value systems that demand people earn the liberty to live.

It offers to citizens a universal safety net to guarantee that, no matter their living conditions - working, retired, student, teacher, single parent or 'traditional' family - they will have the ability to support their most basic needs. In principle it eradicates poverty, and raises the baseline standard of living that we have a right to expect up from nothing, to the basic capacity to interact with the world, and to survive it.

Such ideas do however have the tendency of running into ideological barriers.

Economy & Ideology

The primary issue facing reform of capitalism has been ideology. In particular, conservative ideologies have defended the competitive and their segregation of society into 'strivers and skivers' (Coote & Lyall, 2013), with others going further still, to even praise greed (Watt, 2013).

These ideological views have protected capitalism from the attempts of students to study and test new theories, and from the attempts of reformers to change its selfish, greedy and accumulative motivations into more socially constructive attitudes. Economic theorist Thomas Piketty has criticised mainstream economic thought, stressing that rather than being a broken element, inequality is in fact an active feature of capitalism (Piketty, 2014).

Capitalist theories are usually defended against these attacks by pointing to its certain elements - stressing that it is a 'natural' system that replicates efficient 'natural orders', or by stressing the idea that capitalism represents the 'end of history', the end point to which progress has been heading. That capitalism has found the essential elements of society and economics, and that our material pursuits within its framework represent a pure and distilled lifestyle, of which other ideologies are only a distortion.

These are, however, extremely materialist views. A more idealistic perspective might demand a search in a different direction than financial accumulation for a societal focus. In the opinion of Oscar Wilde (1891):

"For the recognition of private property has really harmed Individualism, and obscured it, by confusing a man with what he possesses. It has led Individualism entirely astray. It has made gain not growth its aim. So that man thought that the important thing was to have, and did not know that the important thing is to be. The true perfection of man lies not in what man has, but in what man is. Private property has crushed true Individualism, and set up an Individualism that is false. It has debarred one part of the community from being individual by starving them. It has debarred the other part of the community from being individual by putting them on the wrong road and encumbering them."

Breaking through these barriers to reform is a vast challenge, of which reforming the study of economics is but one aspect. Other reforms will need to follow. Getting there will require understanding how economics works, but also how it can, and how we want and need it, to serve us.

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References:
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+ Phillip Inman's 'Economics students call for shakeup of the way their subject is taught'; in The Guardian; 4 May 2014.

+ Robert Skidelsky's 'Economics faces long needed upheaval as students demand right to dissent'; in The Guardian; 18 June 2014.

+ Mahim Husnain & Rikin Parekh's 'Economics students demand an education that reflects post-crash world'; in The Guardian; 13 November 2013.

+ Lily Cole's 'Lily Cole: welcome to the gift economy, where the kindness of a stranger rules'; in The Guardian; 19 March 2014.

+ John Green's 'Money & Debt'; Crash Course World History 202, on YouTube.com; 17 July 2014.

+ 'Nick Clegg calls for a 'John Lewis economy'' on the BBC; 16 January 2012.

+ James Ashton's 'Nick Clegg set for 'John Lewis' economy'; in The Independent; 28 October 2012.

+ Hannah Fearn's 'How about a 'citizen's income' instead of benefits?'; in The Guardian; 8 April 2014.

For other information on a basic income:
http://www.citizensincome.org/
http://policy.greenparty.org.uk/ec.html

+ Anna Coote and Sarah Lyall's 'Strivers v skivers: real life's not like that at all'; in The Guardian; 11 April 2013.

+ Nicholas Watt's 'Boris Johnson invokes Thatcher spirit with greed is good speech'; in The Guardian; 27 November 2013.

+ Thomas Piketty's 'Capital in the Twenty-First Century'; Harvard University Press; 2014. [Buy Now]

+ Oscar Wilde's 'The Soul of Man under Socialism'; London, 1891.[Buy Now]