Accelerated by austerity’s inequities, the 20^th century income distribution system has broken down irretrievably in what is an era of global rentier capitalism. More and more income is flowing to a rent-extracting elite, returns from financial, physical and so-called intellectual property, bolstered by subsidies and an international architecture of institutions geared to rent-seeking. For various reasons, the returns to labour have declined and will continue to do so.

Real wages are stagnating across the OECD, not just in Britain, and are falling for the growing precariat, which is also losing non-wage benefits, access to the commons and from a punitive welfare system, fatally flawed by means-testing and the inevitable behaviour-testing that is being made vicious by the woefully misnamed Universal Credit. The economically illiterate austerity strategy has only made matters worse.

Millions of people in Britain are economically insecure and at risk of absolute poverty. Nearly two-thirds of those in poverty are in jobs or in households with someone in a job. It is a bad joke to say work is the best route out of poverty.

A new distribution system is needed. Real wages will not rise by much, full-time well-paying jobs will not become the norm, the precariat will continue to grow. Progressives should stop pretending marginal adjustments would rectify the trends and should offer a transformative economic strategy instead.

The key lies in capturing the rentier income for the precariat and others facing economic insecurities. Contrary to Keynes’ prediction of the ‘euthanasia of the rentier’, rent-seeking will not disappear in a global market economy, and stronger anti-trust regulations would only have limited effect given that much of the rent is going to multinationals. Instead, we must find ways of redistributing – or ‘recycling’ – the rent.

Sooner or later it will be seen that the only sensible way of reducing the widespread economic insecurity is by gradually building up a basic income as an anchor of a new distribution system. It is no panacea, and must be built alongside better public services and supplementary benefits for those with special needs. But the left has offered no alternative way of providing everybody with basic economic security. If it does not offer that, it will only win elections by default.

The primary reasons for moving in the direction of a basic income are ethical. If we accept private inherited wealth – ‘something for nothing’ – then we should accept the principle of ‘social dividends’ on inherited public wealth, created by many past generations. It would also compensate those without the lucky talents rewarded in a market economy, and compensate all commoners for the enclosure and privatisation of our commons. There are other justice rationales, discussed elsewhere.

It would also enhance personal freedom – something those on the ‘left’ should want, but which it allowed the ‘right’ to claim in the past century. The emancipatory value of a basic income would exceed its monetary value, unlike any viable alternative. It would also provide everybody with basic security, not only a human right but also a superior public good – you having it would not deprive me of it, and all of us having it would increase its value for all of us.

It is affordable. It should start at a low level, as the funding is built up. Unlike means-testing, which suffers from huge exclusion errors and is stigmatising, the progressivity should be ensured by clawing it back from the affluent by modest increases in income tax. By contrast, ‘targeting’ by means tests has notorious exclusion errors and is stigmatising. But the main funding should come from levies on all revenue from use of our commons, which are forms of rent, starting with a Land Value Tax, ecological levies and a wealth-transfer levy, plus rolling back the 1,156 tax reliefs paid out each year. The 209 principal tax reliefs, most of which are very regressive, amount to over £400 billion of tax revenue foregone each year.

As a long-time advocate, I am convinced there is a perfect storm of factors making it not only desirable to start building a basic income, but vital. The perfect storm includes economic insecurity, the suffering from the folly of austerity, the loss of freedom entailed in the vindictive Universal Credit that is creating incredible suffering across the land, the disruptive effects of the digital revolution and those impending robots, and the political dangers represented by a society in which growing numbers feel a sense of relative deprivation – ‘licking at the windows’, as the saying goes, of a consumerist society in which they cannot participate.

Unless progressives offer a vision of societal economic security, more people will either opt out politically or vote for neo-fascist populists like Trump, Boris Johnson, Victor Orban or the League in Italy. Fiddling with paternalistic placebos such as ‘job guarantees’ or regressive productivity-depressing tax credits will merely allow the fire to grow. It may take a journey of up to a decade to construct an adequate basic income. But there is no sensible alternative. If we are not scared by the forces behind Trump and Brexit, we should be.

And there is a lovely secret inherent to a basic income, as our pilots and other evidence have shown. A basic income would promote work that is not labour – ecological, community and care work – that we should all want, and which we need. If a basic income created a few free riders (which every transfer system does), that would be nothing compared with what exist now and it would cost far more to chase them down than let them be.

In short, I plead with friends on the left to took afresh at what would be an emancipatory policy. It would not be a panacea but should be integral to a progressive strategy to revive the Enlightenment values that are the hallmark of a good society.

This article is part of the ‘100 Policies to End Austerity’ series in collaboration with the Progressive Economy Forum. 

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From time to time, there is a surge in advocacy of a job guarantee for everyone, or for everyone ‘able to work’. It is happening again, this time from a slew of politicians and social scientists positioning themselves on the centre left, as social democrats. In the USA, several prominent Democrat senators and possible candidates for the next presidential election have said they support the idea, including Bernie Sanders, Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris and Kirsten Gillibrand. In Britain The Guardian has endorsed it unequivocally as ‘a welcome return to a politics of work’, joining the likes of Lord Layard, Blair’s ‘happiness czar’.

The Guardian claimed a job guarantee policy ‘would secure a basic human right to engage in productive employment’. Throughout history, the vast majority of people would have found that a very strange ‘human right’. Having a job is to be in a position of subordination, reporting to and obeying a boss in return for payment. Indeed, historically the words ‘job’, ‘jobbing’ and ‘jobholder’ were terms of regret and even pity, referring to someone with a bits-and-pieces existence. Subordination and alienation have also been at the heart of labour law, which is based on the master-servant model.

The newspaper added that the job guarantee ‘would only offer employment under-supplied by the private sector’, singling out ‘environmental clean-up’ and ‘social care’. These may sound appealing on paper but represent a narrow and unattractive range of jobs to be offered. They also bear more than a passing resemblance to the menial jobs convicted offenders are obliged to undertake under ‘community payback’ schemes.

The practical objections become evident as soon as the details are considered: what jobs, who would be responsible for providing them, who would qualify to be offered them, what would the jobs pay and for how many hours, who would pay, and what would be the effects on other workers and on the wider economy?

To start with, identifying jobs to be provided and administering the process would be a bureaucratic nightmare (witness the shambles of many ‘community payback’ schemes, even though they are on a small scale and the labour they offer is ‘free’). And, when asked what type of job would be guaranteed, proponents never suggest the guaranteed jobs would match people’s skills and qualifications, instead falling back on low-skill, low-wage jobs they would not dream of for themselves or their children.

Then other questions arise. If guaranteed jobs are providing desired services or goods, and are subsidised, there must be substitution effects – guaranteeing jobs now taken by others – and deadweight effects – putting people in jobs that would have been created anyhow. If somebody is given a guaranteed job at the minimum wage, what happens to others already doing such jobs? Would the job guarantee agency guarantee their jobs as well, with no decline in wages if they happened to be higher? If the unemployed were offered a job at a minimum wage subsidised by the state, this would increase the vulnerability of others, either displacing them or lowering their income.

Ro Khanna, a California Democrat congressman, has said firms would not be allowed to hire subsidised workers if they were substitutes for previous employees. Clever employers could find ways round that. However, it would also be unfair. Why should a firm coming into a market be subsidised relative to one that has been in it for a while, giving the newcomer an unfair advantage?

The Guardian further claimed, without citing evidence, that a job guarantee scheme would not be inflationary because ‘any restructuring of relative wages would be a one-off event’. This contradicts generations of research. If all were guaranteed a job, what would stop wage-push inflation? The only restraining factors would be fear of automation and more offshoring. But it would hardly be fear, as a job would be guaranteed anyhow!

The gross cost of a job guarantee might outweigh the net gain. If the government guaranteed the minimum wage in guaranteed jobs, those in jobs paying less (or working fewer than the guaranteed hours) might quit or find ways to be made redundant, so they could have a guaranteed job instead. Social democrats might like that, as it would mean better-paying jobs for more of the underemployed and precariat. But the fiscal cost would be daunting. For example, in the UK, over 60% of those regarded as poor are in jobs or have someone in their household who is. In the USA, the situation is just as bad. It is estimated that about half its 148 million workers earn less than $15 an hour. Would they all become eligible for a guaranteed good job?

At its unlikely best, a job guarantee would be paternalistic. It presumes the government knows what is best for individuals, who would be offered a necessarily limited range of jobs at its disposal. Suppose someone was pressed to take a guaranteed job on a construction site (‘infrastructure’, a favoured area for guaranteed jobs) and that person proved incompetent and was injured. Would the job guarantee agency be held responsible and pay compensation? It should, since it put the person in that position. How would that be factored into the costing of a job guarantee scheme? Similarly, if a person put into a ‘social care’ job was negligent and caused harm or distress to the care recipient, would the latter be able to sue the job guarantee agency for compensation?

In addition, a job-guarantee scheme would spring a familiar trap – the phoney distinction between those who ‘can work’ and would thus be eligible for a guaranteed job and those ‘who cannot work’. In Britain, this has led to demeaning and stigmatising ‘capacity-to-work’ and ‘availability-for-work’ tests, resulting in discriminatory action against disabled and vulnerable people, and those with care responsibilities.

Another failing of the job guarantee route is the mapping of a path to ‘workfare’. What would happen to somebody who declined to accept the guaranteed job? They would be labelled ‘lazy’ or ‘choosy’ and thus ‘ungrateful’ and ‘socially irresponsible’. Yet there are many reasons for refusing a job. Studies show that accepting a job below a person’s qualifications can lower their income and social status for the long term. As what is happening in the current UK benefit system attests, those not taking jobs allocated to them would face benefit sanctions, and be directed into jobs, whether they liked them or not. Jobs done in resentment or under duress are unlikely to be done well.

A job guarantee would be a recipe for perpetuating low productivity. What would happen if a person in a guaranteed job performed poorly, perhaps because of limited ability or simply because they knew it was ‘guaranteed’? This was a fatal flaw of the Soviet system. If you are guaranteed a job, why bother to work hard? If you are an employer and are given a subsidy to pay employees guaranteed a job, why bother to try to use labour efficiently?

If subsidised through tax credits or a wage subsidy, a worker would need to produce only a little more value than the cost to the employer to make it profitable to retain him or her. This would cheapen low-productivity jobs relative to others and inhibit the higher productivity arising from labour-displacing technological change. If a job of a certain type is guaranteed, what happens if an employer wishes to invest in technology that would remove the need for such jobs?

Those calling for a job guarantee also ignore the fact that any market economy requires some unemployment, as people need time to search for jobs they are prepared to accept, and firms must sift applicants for jobs they want to have done. To adopt a job guarantee policy would risk putting the economy in gridlock.

Job guarantee advocates, such as Larry Summers, President Clinton’s former Treasury Secretary, argue that people without jobs ‘are much more likely to be dissatisfied with their lives’ and are more likely to be drug addicts and abusive than those with even low-wage jobs. This is bogus. I suggest there would be no correlation between life satisfaction and having a job if the comparison was made between those in lousy jobs and those with no job but an adequate income on which to live. Somebody facing a choice between penury and a lousy job will prefer the job. But that does not mean they like or want it for itself.

The polling company Gallup conducts regular State of the Global Workplace surveys in over 150 countries. In 2017, it found that globally only 15% of workers were engaged by their job, and in no country did the figure exceed 40%. One recent UK survey found that 37% of jobholders did not think their job made any significant contribution.

Summers ends his article by equivocating – ‘the idea of a jobs guarantee should be taken seriously but not literally’. He seems to mean government should try to promote more employment, through ‘wage subsidies, targeted government spending, support for workers with dependants, and more training and job-matching programmes’. In other words, he reverts to the standard social democratic package that has not done very well in the past three decades.

Besides being a recipe for labour inefficiency and labour market distortions, tending to displace workers employed in the ‘free’ labour market and to depress their wages, the job guarantee proposal fails to recognise that today’s crisis is structural and requires transformative policies. Tax credits, job guarantees and statutory minimum wages would barely touch the precariat’s existential insecurity that is at the heart of the social and economic crisis, let alone address the aspirations of the progressive and growing part of the precariat for an ecologically grounded Good Society.

The emphasis on jobs is non-ecological, since it is tied to the constant pursuit of economic growth. There are many instances, with support for fracking and for the third runway at Heathrow airport being recent examples, where the promise of more jobs has trumped costs to health and the environment. And a job guarantee policy could have a strong appeal to the political right as a way to dismantle the welfare state. Why pay unemployment benefits if everybody has a guaranteed job? In the USA, one conservative commentator chortled that ‘over 100 federal welfare programs would be replaced with a single job guarantee program.’

Finally, there is what this writer regards as the policy’s worst feature. It would reinforce twentieth-century labourism, by failing to make the distinction between work and labour. Those who back guaranteed jobs typically ignore all forms of work that are not paid labour. A really progressive agenda would strengthen the values of work over the dictates of labour. It would seek to enable more people to develop their own sense of occupation.

A job is a means to an end, not an end in itself. Economists tend to be schizophrenic in this respect. In the textbooks, labour has ‘disutility’; it is negative for the worker. Yet many economists who use or write these textbooks then advocate putting everybody in jobs. Why make a fetish of ‘jobs’? A job is doing ‘labour’ for others. What about all the forms of work that we do for those we love or for our community or for ourselves?

Many forms of work that are not labour are more rewarding psychologically and socially. A regime of putting everybody into jobs, in unchosen activities, would be orchestrated alienation. Surely a progressive should want to minimise the time we spend in stultifying and subordinated jobs, so that we can increase the time and energy for forms of work and leisure that are self-chosen and oriented to personal and community development.

There is one last point, to do with the claim that a job guarantee would be politically popular. Much is made of a US poll which asked people whether they would support a scheme to guarantee a job for anybody ‘who can’t find employment in the private sector’, if paid from a 5% tax on those earning over $200,000. The result was 52% in favour. Supporters thought this was ‘stunning’. With such a loaded question, one should be stunned by the bare-majority support. After all, most respondents were being told they would not have to pay, and that there were no alternative jobs available, an unlikely scenario.

Rather than jobs per se, the primary challenge is to build a new income distribution system, recognising that the old one has broken down irretrievably. The rentiers are running away with all the revenue thrown up by rentier capitalism, and real wages will continue to lag. Putting people into static low-wage jobs is no response.

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Theresa May told the Bank of England in a speech in September, ‘A free market economy, operating under the right rules and regulations, is the greatest agent of collective human progress ever created’ and is ‘unquestionably the best, and indeed the only sustainable, means of increasing the living standards of everyone in society.’

In short, the Conservatives claim they believe in free markets, that they have built an economy based on them and that it produces the best results. We cannot say for sure if the last claim has any validity, simply because they have not tried it. Their claims amount to a lie. They have been building the most unfree market system ever conceived.

A free market is one in which firms produce and sell goods and services in competition with one another, and in which government provides a so-called ‘level playing field’ and operates anti-trust rules to prevent monopolies blocking competition. A principle is that capitalist entrepreneurs take risks in making investments, and gain rewards in the form of profits commensurate with those risks. This is not what the Tories have pursued.

Let us start with the international architecture they have helped to build. Thomas Jefferson said in 1813 that ideas could not be made the subject of property. He would be aghast today, since ideas have been converted into the means of blocking market competition. The big change was the passage in 1995 of TRIPS, the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, as part of the World Trade Organisation.

Led by the USA and backed by the Tory government, TRIPS globalised the capacity of corporations to take production outside the sphere of market competition. The outcome has been dramatic. For instance, in 1995, fewer than one million patent applications were filed internationally. Last year, over 3 million were filed. Each patent guarantees the holder 20 years of monopoly profits from its use; in some sectors, such as pharmaceuticals, it can be longer. Whether or not one approves of this, it is the opposite of a free market. The income linked to patents has risen more than sevenfold since 1995, yet studies have shown that the spread of patents is not correlated with economic growth.

To compound its support for this market-restricting device, the government introduced the wheeze of the Patent Box tax break, meaning that any corporation coming to Britain with patents to produce monopolistic goods, and thus charge monopolistic prices, can receive a subsidy. In other words, firms with monopolistic products gain an extra bonus. This bribe has nothing to do with a free market, and is regressive. The Tories and Liberal Democrats in 2013 also introduced a measure to exempt multinationals from anti-tax avoidance measures, which amounts to another big subsidy.

Similar market-avoiding applies to copyright, which guarantees a monopoly income for someone for their life, plus 70 years or more. No free market there. Similar non-compete restrictions apply to corporate brands and industrial designs. All have multiplied and become more global in scope, cemented by over 3,000 trade and investment pacts that have entrenched monopolistic practices. The Brexiteers want more of those agreements once free of the EU.

All intellectual property rights restrictions limit the scope for free markets, and together account for a huge and growing proportion of income in Britain and elsewhere.

At the apex of the system, the Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) process gives multinationals unprecedented power, enabling them to sue governments if they introduce any reform that, in the corporation’s view, would hit their future profits. The ISDS is rigged in favour of the corporations, which appoint one of three judges and must approve the third. This reduces the investment risk to well below what would exist in a free market. We as citizens do not have such protection. The government has strongly supported the ISDS.

A derivative lie is that the IP system is designed to reward and encourage innovative risk-taking. But as many patents stem from publicly-funded R & D, it is the public that bears the risk, while the private patent holder reaps the benefits. Many patents are filed just to block competition. All this is as far from being a free market as one could imagine.

The Tories also preside over an edifice of subsidies that give privileges to favoured sectors, firms or individuals. Again, one cannot honestly claim this is consistent with free markets. Among the worst are subsidies given to large-scale land-owners, who are receiving millions of pounds.

The largest private landholder, the delightfully entitled Duke of Buccleuch, possessing 277,000 acres, which he gained by doing nothing (let alone dabbling in anything so grubby as a free market), received £1.6 million in subsidies in one year alone, based on the amount of land he owned, not on what he produced on it. If this is a free market at work, I am a duck.

The Duke of Westminster, reported to be the third richest individual in Britain, with merely 140,000 acres in the country (and 400,000 abroad), has received millions of pounds, simply because he owns land. Testifying to his faith in free markets, the late Duke told a reporter who asked what advice he would give to any budding entrepreneur, ‘Make sure they have an ancestor who was a very close friend of William the Conqueror.’

Excluding the six Dukes in the royal family, the 24 other Dukes own over eight million acres, none gained by free market means, and 17 of those for which information has been obtained receive over £8 million each year and gain a lot more from tax breaks. Surely these welfare payments would act as a disincentive to their working.

When other EU members tried to cap what large landowners could receive, the Tory government vetoed the proposal. That contrasted with what they were doing to state benefits. Ironically, the designer of Universal Credit, through his wife’s inheritance of 1,500 acres, without a free market in sight, has received over $1 million in agricultural subsidies. One crazy aspect of the agricultural subsidies received by the Dukes and their lesser brethren is that most of them are paid only if the land is bare, which has led to an obliteration of trees and wildlife over hundreds of thousands of acres.

Subsidies have been taken to absurd lengths by the fact that the government operates 1,156 forms of selective tax relief. According to Treasury data, the cost of the biggest 200 or so is over £400 billion in foregone revenue, in effect deliberately forgoing revenue that could easily cover the costs of the NHS and state education, and creating a budget deficit that has been used to justify the destructive austerity policy.

That little matter aside, the tax reliefs – for most of which, believe it or not, the Treasury has no estimates of public revenue foregone — automatically distorts market forces in favour of people like landlords, who do particularly well out of tax reliefs. Perhaps it is a coincidence that one in every four Conservative MPs is a landlord.

The housing market epitomises why the Tories do not believe in a free market. Consider their ‘help-to-buy’ subsidies, which have sucked up £10 billion, in spite of not actually helping house buyers. The money has gone into the pockets of developers, who merely put up prices. It sounds good – interest-free loans worth 20% of the property value if the person buys a new house – but has raised the price of new housing relative to old, while wholly benefiting developers. This was the conclusion of Morgan Stanley, hardly a bastion of leftist critics.[i]

Then of course there are the ‘buy-to-let’ subsidies, which have fuelled the growth of landlordism. What principle of free market economics is that meant to serve? The scheme began in 1996, and today about one in every 30 adults is a landlord, mostly amateurish, often letting sub-decent accommodation and relying on interest-only mortgages.

The latter mean that they are very vulnerable to any rise in interest rates. This has apparently distorted monetary policy, Because of fears that raising interest rates would cause a housing crash, the Bank of England has kept rates down to virtually zero, which amounts to a subsidy to the financial community.

Worst of all is the fact that property values have not been revalued since 1991, meaning that council tax is being levied on distorted low values. This amounts to a huge subsidy to house-owners, with more going to the rich with big houses. Now that the Tories have raised the inheritance tax threshold and given tax exemptions for capital gains on homes, they have effectively converted a large part of the property market into a tax haven for sheikhs and oligarchs.

We need to wage a war on subsidies. They are almost invariably regressive, distortionary and economically inefficient. If Theresa May really believed in free markets she would abolish all of them.

Some ad hoc subsidies are just bribes. Among the most egregious is the vast subsidy, which will haunt our children and grand-children with its cost, recently pledged to French and Chinese state enterprises (note, not private) to build a nuclear plant in Somerset. The frighteningly expensive and risky plant, set to cost £30 billion (or some multiple of that), will not be the outcome of a free market economy. In spite of dire warnings from the National Audit Office, May has guaranteed the French and Chinese a unit price that is twice the current and expected price, leaving future generations of taxpayers to be bewildered by the fiscal albatross.

Similarly, the government has promised over £21 million in subsidies to a Japanese firm, Toyota, to help pay for modernising their plant in Derbyshire. This will help them to increase their profits. Nobody should expect them to honour their stated wish to stay and expand. There are 800 Japanese firms in Britain. Expect many to emulate Toyota, and the government to be just as obliging.

Then there are the subsidies given to the privatised monopolies supposed to provide public goods, notably water, sewerage, rail, mail and energy. Those subsidies have continued even when corporations have demonstrably broken the law; Thames Water has been caught pouring millions of litres of untreated sewage into the national river while not fixing leakages and while giving its foreign shareholders over a billion pounds in dividends. Even though Thames Water has been making huge profits and has not paid any corporation tax, the government is giving it further subsidies, bearing the risk of its sewerage mega-project. If Theresa May was really against tax avoidance, surely she would not give subsidies to a firm known to be avoiding tax.

Similarly, the subsidies given to the privatised rail companies have exceeded anything given to British Rail beforehand, without much to show for it. Once again, this is not a free market, whether one likes what is being done or not.

Then there is the subsidy being given to the oil corporations to cut the cost of dismantling rigs in the North Sea. First, the Thatcher government gave them areas for drilling at well below market price; then they were given subsidies to help them make more profits; now they receive subsidies to cut their costs of winding up. This is totally inconsistent with a free market economy. Ironically, successive governments have allowed our national resource to become controlled by state enterprises from a communist superpower. It is not clear that this is a free market principle either.

Then there are the subsidies given via atrocious Public Finance Initiative (PFI) contracts that have locked state schools, hospitals and other public institutions into long-term debt traps, by which they have to keep paying for things that they do not want or that should be cheap. The PFI and the new PF2 are inconsistent with a free market, but are due in part to successive governments wanting to keep spending off their books.

Then there is the subsidy given to private schools. These are profit-making and serve the wealthy. It was revealed in 2017 that some 586 private schools, including Eton, have obtained charitable status and so are entitled to 80% relief on business rates. Eton is no charity. But it gains a nice subsidy from the general taxpayer.

Then there is a subsidy for the rich being phased in by stealth, whereby the Tories have cut inheritance tax by stages, raising the amount before tax becomes payable to £650,000 and now to £1 million, if a house is involved. This is an incredible subsidy to wealthy families, and has nothing to do with free markets. That £1 million received by wealthy offspring is pure unearned income, a huge something-for-nothing, to use a phrase favoured by Tory moralists. Studies have shown that while inheritances of less than £20,000 have no effect on labour supply, anything above £100,000 has a big negative effect. The beneficiaries become parasitic, if they were not so already.

In this, the Tories insult their original patron saint, Adam Smith, who was a passionate advocate for inheritance tax and said, ‘a power to dispose of estates forever is manifestly absurd.’

Then there is the labour market, where government subsidises favoured firms, repeatedly shown to be providing little of value. For example, the government has been giving £158 million a year to Learndirect, the privatised provider of what are meant to be adult training and apprenticeships. The regulator, Ofsted, has found that much of the money has been spent on worthless training and on a Formula One car team. Some 84% of its profits have been given as dividends rather than used as investment, leaving the firm saddled with net debt of £90 million. None of this is compatible with a free market.

And there have been numerous subsidies in the form of tax exemptions on perks given to salaried employees, notably on private pension contributions, childcare and benefits offered on top of salaries. These are regressive, and because of their wide range encourage firms to shift compensation from money wages to non-wage forms of compensation.

Finally, there are those misnamed ‘tax credits’. Over three million people are recipients of tax credits of one form or another. Undoubtedly, they top up low incomes, and thus do reduce poverty. However, they are analogous to the Speenhamland system between 1795 and 1834. They help to depress actual wages.

They are a subsidy to firms paying low wages, since both employer and worker know that whatever the wage it will be topped up. Scandalously, even though successive governments have spent hundreds of billions of pounds on tax credits, and even though independent research has shown that a significant part of that goes to employers, not to low-income workers, there has never been an official evaluation of the impact of tax credits.

Finally, there is the government’s step-by-step extension of personal tax allowances, that is, raising the amount of income a person can earn before it becomes subject to income tax. It is sold as an anti-poverty device, and a boast by Theresa May is that she has taken several million people out of paying any tax at all. That is hardly a worthy objective, if she believes in her own stated mantra that ‘tax is the price we pay for living in a civilised society’. But in any case tax allowances for all are a very ineffectual way to relieve poverty.

If Theresa May really believes what she says, let her set up a Free Market Commission to evaluate all policies on whether or not they are compatible with a free market economy. Ridding the economy of those that are not would surely be consistent with Tory claims. It would free up money enough to fund the crumbling NHS (calling the bluff that the government is not intending to privatise it) and still have enough to fund a modest basic income for every legal resident in the country.

We can be confident that this Tory government has neither the desire nor the energy and competence needed to do any of this. The Labour Party and others, like the Green Party, should promise to do it, and promise a war on the scourge of subsidies as a start.

[i] P.Collinson, ‘Help to buy has mostly helped housebuilders boost profits’, The Guardian, Oct.22, 2017.

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This year is the 800^th anniversary of a founding document of the British constitution, and of other constitutions as well. Issued in the name of a ten-year-old King Henry III alongside the modified Charter of Liberties that had been sealed by King John and the barons at Runnymede on June 15, 2015 that became Magna Carta on November 6, 1217, the Charter of the Forest is among the first ecological charters in history and among the first to assert the rights of the common man and woman.

As it coincided with the first feminist advance, in a modified Article 7 of the Magna Carta, which could have been in the Forest Charter, it could also be called a first feminist charter. That new Article 7 gave widows the right to refuse to be remarried, to retain some of their husband’s land and to have the right to estovar on the commons, to take the means of subsistence, for the remainder of their lives. In effect, widows were given the right to a basic income. For the time and place, that was a remarkable advance.

The Charter has the distinction of being the most durable piece of legislation in British history, having only been superseded in 1971, with the Wild Creatures and Forest Laws Act, by when most of its principles had been embedded in other legislation, including the Commons Act of 1876, which ruled that enclosure should be allowed only if there were public benefit, and by the establishment of the Forestry Commission in 1919.

The legislation that chipped away at its principles turned it from being a fundamental assertion of common rights to a generalised plan to handle nature and turn it into resources, for production and commercial ends. From its origins as a great act of decommodification of commoners it gradually evolved into a body of legislation and institutions for the managed commodification of natural resources.

Yet the Charter is almost unknown, rarely mentioned in children’s history lessons. Almost certainly, this is because it is an assertion of the rights of ordinary people to the right to subsistence. Yet for hundreds of years after 1217 it was more influential than the Magna Carta itself; every church was required to read it out four times a year in designated services.

Some historians believe that it was the Charter of the Forest that carried the Magna Carta forward in the centuries after they both came into effect, not the other way round. This was partly because the commoners were obliged to struggle to maintain the rights to subsistence enshrined in the Charter.

Rights always begin with class-based demands made against the state. The Forest Charter was about restoring and preserving the right to common, the rights of commoners and their right to the commons. Of course, it was incomplete in all respects, and is hard to read, with words and concepts that have drifted into history, such as agistment (right to use the commons for livestock) and pawnage (right to pasture your pigs). Even the great verb ‘to common’ is scarcely recognised today, though users of it have a twinkle in their eyes in perceiving a revival.

The context of the Charter in 1217 was the aftermath of a period in which the monarchy, notably King John, had begun to use the forests to extract rents and fines, had curtailed the rights of commoners to use the land for their subsistence, and had imposed heavy sanctions on behaviour that did not serve the interests of the elite. Forests symbolised the land, since half the country was covered by them, but the idea of the forest covered much more than it conveys today. It included all forms of public, common spaces, including villages and towns.

What the Charter did was nothing less than provide a legal foundation for living, by asserting the commoners’ usufruct rights, the right to subsistence, on common land and water. It also asserted the right to reparation, if the high and mighty encroached on the commons, through commercialisation of its products, enclosure or encroachment.

The Charter of the Forest has been integral to class struggle throughout British history.  Tweet This!

It has influenced class struggles in many parts of the world. For many years after 1217, it carried the Magna Carta forward, rather than the other way round. It provided the basis for riots in defence of common rights. But it has been abused throughout its history, with the Tudors being egregious spoilers. For centuries, commoners protested against the threat to the commons, most notably in the 17^th century in a series of riots that helped to precipitate the Civil War.

Although formally superseded in 1971, the ethos of the Charter has been preserved in several institutions. The closest it came to defeat was the Coalition Government’s plan in 2010 to privatise the Forestry Commission. The plan was withdrawn after concerted public protests. But those who wanted to implement it are still in government or in the circles of influence supporting it.

Now, its values are under more surreptitious attack, through the micro-politics of privatisation. The government is deliberately running down the management of the commons, to the point where more and more people will not care whether it is privatised, commercialised or simply lost. We are at a critical point.

We must use this anniversary year to revive and to defend the Charter’s principles, including its assertion that every commoner has the right to subsistence.  It is a wonderful opportunity to organise a series of events to celebrate, defend and revive the commons, thereby exposing the ideology behind the ongoing plunder of the commons and the micro-politics behind it.

In short, a tragedy of the neo-liberal era (roughly since 1980) is that, as rentier capitalism has grown by the extension of private property rights, the state has orchestrated a plunder of the commons, against the spirit of the Charter of the Forest.

We may divide the commons into five types – spatial (or natural), social, civil, cultural and intellectual or educational.[i] The spatial commons are the foundation – land (and what is on or under it), water and air. They are natural assets that belong to all of us, as citizens. They do not belong to any government, just as they do not belong to any individual owner. They convey an array of common rights, including the right to roam. They are ‘nature’s bounty’ handed down to us by our ancestry. They were either never privatised or at some time became part of the commons. They belong to us collectively, and belong to nobody. Parts of the commons were improved by the labour of numerous people put to work in a public cause.

The social commons consist of amenities created and paid for by generations before us, including public libraries, public hospitals and clinics, public transport systems, public roads and squares, and parks and public gardens that are a combination of spatial commons and the efforts of numerous people who have shaped their design and their character.

The cultural commons include public art, for which we as society are stewards, not owners with a property right to buy and sell. One ugly aspect of the austerity era has been the stealthy selling of art works from public museums and public places, the most symbolic of which has been the tussle over Henry Moore’s statue, Old Flo, which he bequeathed to the borough of Tower Hamlets to give beauty to a public space.

Other works of art have been sold under duress, in a buyers’ market, in response to budget cuts forced by central government, so that the latter can continue with its policy of cutting taxation for affluent groups and its donors. If we knew the full extent of what has been done and what is planned, perhaps we would riot. We should.

The fourth form should be called the civil commons, encapsulated for eternity in the Magna Carta of 1217. These may be defined as a universal and equal right to justice, with respect to due process, affordable and accessible legal representation and so on. It is insufficiently appreciated how far those principles have been eroded in the past three decades. The current Government is merely continuing what New Labour and the Coalition accelerated, which is perhaps why there has been little parliamentary opposition to its erosion. If the right to legal aid is lost, the civic commons is eroded.

Privatising social and employment services has also been a means of shredding the civic commons. There is no due process in welfare sanctions and benefit denial. We should demand it, in the name of the rights of commoners.

The final form is the educational or intellectual commons. Think of our great universities and colleges. They should not be commodities to be bought and sold, or turned from bodies for nurturing learning, scholarship and research, and a culture of reflection, into an industry for maximising profits by churning out breadwinners, degrees and commodified academics. The educational commons must be rescued by reversing the commodification of education

The several types of commons – spatial, civil, social, cultural and educational – are integral to a good society. They have a value in themselves and contribute disproportionately to the social income of low-income groups in society.

The primary tragedy of the commons is not what is usually regarded as the depletion by over-use by commoners. It is that successive utilitarian governments, wedded to neo-liberal economics and private property rights, have seen all forms of the commons as resources and as capital, to be turned into revenue. The austerity rhetoric has been used to accelerate the plunder of the commons. Under the guise of decentralisation, the Government has made local authorities more responsible for the commons, and then cut their budgets, leaving under-funded authorities with painful choices. Most have buckled.

This is a wilful ideologically-driven campaign to privatise, enclose and commercialise the commons. Consider just a few examples. The iconic Sheffield public library is to be sold to foreign capital, so that it can be turned into a five-star hotel. That library belongs to the people of Sheffield, and not just today’s people, who are the stewards of the commons for the generations to come. In the same city, the authorities have turned the care of public trees along roads to a private firm, which has promptly cut down thousands of trees, on commercial grounds.

What is happening to our parks is scandalous. For instance, with its budget slashed, the authorities in the Lake District, an iconic part of our commons, have put prime sites up for sale to private buyers. In the Royal Parks, bequeathed to the nation by Queen Victoria for the use by rich and poor for rest and recreation, commercialisation is being allowed, rationalised by a need to raise money for their upkeep because of government budget cuts. A result is ‘eventism’, commercial events that shatter the calm and leave the grass needing months to recover, thus denied to the commoners.

Allotments, that wonderful legacy of commons for growing fruit and vegetables, and for connecting people to nature, are under commercial siege, some being converted to car parks or sites for supermarkets. The privatisers and their rich clients have no moral right to take it away. And yet they are being allowed to do so.

Then there is fracking, denuding our spatial commons. The Energy Secretary said before the General Election in 2015 that there was ‘an outright ban’ on fracking in national parks. Immediately afterwards, the same Minister said drilling would be allowed around and under them. Shamelessly, the Government has also hastily politicised the granting of drilling licences, bypassing democratic processes. It has no right to do this. Whether or not we favour fracking (and most of us do not), this year we should make it a matter of fighting to preserve the commons.

Then there is the farce of the Garden Bridge over the Thames in London, mercifully killed by the Mayor of London. The national river is part of the commons. A bunch of privateers, orchestrated by a well-connected actress, should not be allowed to build a private bridge, much of the time to be closed to the public, and to receive millions of pounds of public money and loan guarantees to enable them to do so. That is what happened. Happily, the new Mayor has killed the project. But one would be naïve to think it will be the last of its kind.

Meanwhile, the erosion of the social commons is extraordinary, with social housing, libraries, public toilets and much else quietly being lost. Thousands of routes of public bus services have been closed, which were used predominantly by low-income people. When libraries, bus services, allotments and parks are shrunk, the social income of the precariat falls, because low-income people, particularly those in and out of short-term jobs rely on public spaces and amenities much more than the affluent, who have their private cars, gardens and second homes.

Taking away the intellectual commons has been a globalisation trick. In 1813, Thomas Jefferson said that ideas cannot be property, and yet in the current era institutional and regulatory mechanisms for privatising so-called intellectual property have been built into a fortress since the passage of TRIPS (Trade-Related Aspects of Property Rights) in 1995. Patents, copyrights, trademarks and other wheezes have proliferated, all giving monopoly income flows for many years, sucking up rental income for those perceived to own ideas.

Supposedly a return to risk-taking, many patented ideas are actually the result of generations of ideas produced by numerous people. Many result from publicly funded research, in public universities, colleges and research institutes. Many are filed with the intention of just being artificial barriers to entry, not for actual use. They are the base of rentier capitalism. In this year of the Charter that established the rights to the commons, there should be a campaign to roll back so-called intellectual property rights. They enrich plutocratic corporations that are patent hoovers, buying up thousands of patents and stringing them together to earn billions of dollars, pounds or euros.

What should have priority in this momentous year? Let us demand that every local authority identify and produce an inventory of all commons under its stewardship or the stewardship of central government. Let us demand that no piece of the commons should be enclosed, commercialised or sold without public knowledge, proper public debate and adequate time for contestation. Instead of having referenda for complex issues that people cannot be expected to understand, let us have them around simple acts of plunder of the commons.

Let us expose the false vocabulary that conceals the plunder. To call a government body the National Capital Committee is a provocative, ideological trap. The commons are not capital. The fact that the Committee was set up by a ‘business-led Ecosystem Markets Task Force’ designed to ‘harness City financial expertise to maximise revenue streams’ tells us of the commercial priorities, a shield for a plunder that must be resisted. The voice of the commoners was excluded.

Let us demand an inventory of the POPS (privately owned public spaces) that are being spread surreptiously in cities and towns, demand to know why they are being allowed and demand that they be stopped. No POPS without representation by commoners! Why should a Malaysian business consortium be allowed to turn an iconic part of London into a mock Malaysian jungle? It should be part of London, embedded in the traditions and culture of generations of its commoners.

Let us demand our urban spaces back. Think of the implications of an injunction issued barring protesters from the Broadgate Estate covering Bishopsgate and Liverpool Street. It said pompously and arrogantly, ‘The are no public rights over the common parts.’ More of our cities and towns are being denied to the commoners.

In sum, now that an ill-judged General Election has ended messily, in the second half of this year of its 800^th anniversary, let us launch events across the country to celebrate and revive the values of one of the great charters of British history.

Among them, a group of us are hiring a barge to go up the Thames to Runnymede on September 16, holding workshops on critical issues en route and then a public event under the majestic Ankerwycke yew, over 2,500 years old, surely the finest tribute to the forest and the commons one could imagine in the country. There we hope to expand on a demand that the government, of whatever complexion, should organise a Domesday Book of the Commons, to be drawn up by 2020, listing all the commons that still exist. It would act as a defence line and a point from which to advance.

[i] This typology is developed elsewhere. G.Standing, The Corruption of Capitalism: Why Rentiers thrive and Work does not pay. London: Biteback.

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