The solution to the question of what to do for the self-employed, and for those whom the Department for Work and Pensions had kept either on JSA or on ESA, is of course the Universal Basic Income. Once that had been introduced, then there would be no politically feasible way of getting rid of it.
UBI would not be a disincentive to work in ordinary circumstances. Rather, it would put a floor under the Jobs Guarantee of the Modern Monetary Theory that has in recent days moved from being the stuff of controversy to providing the defining parameters of the debate.
We can do this. We are now within touching distance of it. Look what we have achieved in the last week alone. Above all, "we" have been the trade unions, who have been brought into government and who are making the most of if before things became more difficult again under a Leader of the Opposition who was more to the taste of most Labour MPs.
Next up, university admission after results, as in any sane country. And the end of the school league tables, which could not be taken seriously on the basis of teacher assessment alone, and which once gone for a year need never come back. Working-class pupils are twice as likely to be predicted an E grade, and black pupils' grades are staggeringly under-predicted, with only 39 per cent of predictions turning out to have been correct.
13 years of Labour Government did nothing to improve any of this. Quite the reverse, in fact. The people who make these mistakes are the backbone of the Labour Party's membership, and their children are the direct beneficiaries of the present system. The next Leader of the Labour Party is the Leader of the Opposition to the Government's programme of investment in the old Red Wall, he wants to reverse the working class's decisive vote for Brexit, and he was a viciously racist Director of Public Prosecutions, as if there could be any other kind.
No comments:
Post a Comment