The Neoliberal Writing on the Wall: Ontario's Basic Income Experiment
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- Published on Sunday, 25 June 2017 22:30
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A Socialist Project e-bulletin .... No. 1438 .... June 26, 2017
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The Neoliberal Writing on the Wall: Ontario’s Basic Income Experiment
John Clarke
Since 2010, the UK has endured a political regime that can be considered a cutting edge of the austerity agenda. Through the film, I, Daniel Blake, people around the world have become familiar with the institutionalized cruelty of the Country’s warped system of providing social benefits to those in need.
To those who endure sub-poverty misery, the humiliating intrusion of the Work Capability Assessment (WCA) and the ever present threat of the sanctions regime, the conclusion that anything must be better than the present set up is an easy one to arrive at. Disabled people who deal with a state bureaucracy that labels them scroungers and seeks at every turn to abandon... them, can be forgiven for concluding that no alternative to the status quo could possibly be worse than that which they face today. The sheer brutality of the regime operated by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) can only make the notion of a secure and adequate system of universal income, freed of bureaucratic intrusion and moral policing, extremely alluring. This does much to explain the high levels of receptiveness to the notion of a Universal Basic Income (UBI).
In the UK, Basic Income (BI) is being considered in the context of a political break with the austerity consensus and the posing of an alternative to the agenda that flows from it. BI pilot projects have been called for in Fife and Glasgow and the Labour Party has established a working group to prepare a proposal on the concept, with a view to its being adopted as policy. Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, John McDonnell, is very much behind this development. The emergence of a left leadership in the Labour Party and all the gains that it has made is looked to internationally with huge respect and admiration and there is a great deal of moral authority attached to the social policy proposals that it advances. For that very reason, a critical look at the implications of the basic income approach to reshaping systems of social provision is of particular importance. Very frankly, I must argue that it would be a profound mistake for the Labour Party to take that direction and, as an organizer with the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP), dealing with an attempt to develop a decidedly neoliberal local brand of BI, I’m going to set out my case for this position.