Speech given at Unison West Midlands Region meeting, 25 February 2016 by Barb Jacobson, Basic Income UK Thank you for having me. I realise that with so many attacks going on, it is very hard to lift our heads up out of the muddle and think about what we want for the future. First I […]
There was an almighty kerfuffle a few weeks ago over over the Green Party’s plans for Citizen’s Income. Many articles have come out both for and against, but all have missed the key question: can we afford not to have a basic income?
Consider the costs of poverty:
Britain’s richest people are wealthier than ever before, as the May, 2014 publication of Sunday Times Rich List, a list of the 1000 richest families in the UK, found. Almost 500 of the top 1000 richest UK families live in London, but just those families have almost a quarter of the wealth of the superrich […]
What would a world without “work” – those scare quotes are important – really look like? The following is openly utopian – hopefully in the best possible sense of that word – but its inspiration essentially boils down to the maximization of time and the minimization of worry. I assume a lot and there are certainly gaps, practical […]
(Cartoon credit: Stephanie McMillan 2011 http://stephaniemcmillan.org/) The following is a transcription of a speech Barb Jacobson gave at the Green Party Conference in Liverpool, on 1st March, 2014. Barb Jacobson, Basic Income UK First of all I’d like to give my thanks to Keith Taylor for inviting me to speak at this meeting, and my congratulations […]
Basic Income can be part of wider reforms to our financial systems that will increase the opportunities for commerce.
This past year has been the one when it finally came out in the open that we’re all under surveillance – on the internet, on the phone – 24 hours a day. It certainly wasn’t news to any who have had to rely at any time on means-tested, increasingly conditional benefits in order to pay […]
Channel 4 are facing criticism for their new TV series Benefits Street. Before the show was even aired the participants were complaining that they had been misled over the nature of the show and how they were portrayed. When the show was aired there was a flurry of death threats to the participants on twitter […]
An unconditional basic income could help reignite hope in a large group of young people’s lives who feel they have nothing to live for.
Will we ever have full employment again? I think it is pretty unlikely for a number of reasons. The most controversial reason harks back to an observation by Karl Marx that the capitalist society requires a reserve army of unemployed to provide cheap labour. There is certainly some evidence that there is no real intention […]
Recent Comments