As a trade unionist and other things, I am part of the Labour Movement, even without being part of the same party as Tony Blair, Jess Phillips, Simon Henig, the persecutors of the Birmingham binmen, the Haringey Councillors who are going to refuse to hold tenants' ballots on redevelopment (Jeremy Corbyn is going to make it the law, duckies), or a London Regional Director who in his days up here used to call me a "mulatto" while trying to have me murdered.
The Labour Movement. The clue is in the name. I am all for Modern Monetary Theory, but I am uncharacteristically agnostic about the Universal Basic Income. I tend to think that people should have jobs. Still, it is a deeply held Tory principle that certain people should have the economy arranged to ensure that they had time for thought and culture instead of needing to work, however little thought or culture most of those people have ever produced.
If technological change is creating the possibility of extending such opportunities to people who might be rather more productive intellectually and culturally, then so much the better. And the Universal Basic Income could not possibly be any worse than Universal Credit. Or, indeed, any more expensive. Could this be an idea whose time has come?
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