Patrick Hurley from UBI Lab Liverpool interviews Guy Standing
On 18h July 2019, we had the pleasure of attending a discussion on Universal Basic Income in our home town of Liverpool, UK. Amongst others on the panel was John McDonnell MP, shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer and Professor Guy Standing, co-founder of the Basic Income Earth Network and attached to the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. The event was being held to promote Professor Standing’s report to the UK’s Labour Party on potential pilots of Universal Basic Income in the UK should it come to power after a General Election.
In a wide-ranging conversation between Professor Standing and our Patrick Hurley prior to the event, he spoke freely on his influences, his worries for the future, and the values that underpin his politics; he also told us what happened the time he got locked in a room with Boris Johnson…
You can trace my radical politics and world view back to the 1960s, and Liverpool was of course a very central point in helping my generation to feel liberated and more radical because we had lived in, and been brought up in the post-war era of drabness of Labourism and of a sort of social consensus built around industrial society. And it wasn’t a golden age of capitalism. It was an age when many of us were questioning what was happening in our name. I was in Paris in May 1968 and I was in Greece shortly afterwards and saw the colonels. Those were radicalising events which have shaped my whole thinking. I trace my eco-socialism to the great figures of the late nineteenth century around William Morris. William Morris, I found, has a very attractive form of socialism. He lost out to the Fabians and to the communists and so on. But his idea of a socialism grounded in crafts, grounded in rural living, grounded in a conviviality and local communities, I’ve always been influenced by that perspective.
Over the years I’ve become far greener, more ecological. I love growing fruits and vegetables. I love the idea of allotments. I love the idea of nurturing and interacting with nature. One of the greatest thinkers influences that in a sense I’ve underestimated and underplayed in my books was Alexander Von Humboldt who was the first ecologist and was a very influential figure on the thinking by Marx and by Morris and others. And he understood the need for integration of an aggressive agenda with respect and an integration with nature.
And I think the balance that you get from that is – and this is in my new book on the commons – the feeling that the commons defines society. The commons gives us our humanity. And what the Tories have done since Thatcher when she came into office as Leader of the Tories in 1975 onwards, they denigrated the whole notion of society, they denigrated respect for the values of nature. And her infamous statement that there is no such thing as society, for me is an antithesis of what we should be about. Society defines us, community defines us, the commons defines us. Ever since the Charter of the Forest of 1217 we have integrated into our constitution a respect for the need for the commons and a right to subsistence and a need to preserve our commons.
And I think that has been lost. It was lost under New Labour as much as it was under the Conservatives and the coalition government and then the Tories have continued to tear apart the commons. For me, this part is very integrated into my love of nature, my respect for the sea. I’m a fisherman. But I always put the fish back but I love fishing because it connects you with nature. And I think that side of me I’ve come to appreciate as quite an important thread which keeps you grounded.
I’ve been very fortunate in being able to do a number of different projects, different type of projects but I suppose I have to look back at a real unique opportunity when I was able to put into practice a basic income pilot to test out the effects that I believed and advocated for 25 years up to that point. And to do that in India against considerable opposition where we were able to provide thousands of men, women and children with a modest basic income and trace the effects over several years was a wonderful experience, especially as the results actually turned out even better than we had hoped. Improvements in nutrition, in health and schooling, in sanitation, women’s status, status of the disabled in those communities, all of those improved and it vindicated what we tried to do. We had a very unbiased approach, the data were gathered independently and so on, and I think that has to go down as something positive. How many people get the opportunity to put into practice something that they’ve advocated and believed? We took a risk because it could have backfired, when in fact it turned out to be even better than I thought. And those communities have been transformed as a result of just a short experiment.
I have thought about the advice I would give my younger self if I could. It’s difficult but I think you can avoid platitudes in a question like that. I think you have to say “Look, always take the bolder course, particularly in your thinking and action. Don’t make compromises for commercial gain.” It sounds platitudinous but it’s so easy when you’re going into university or going into the labour market to become opportunistic and lose those radical views. I happen to have come out into adulthood at the time when many others were in the same sort of vein. My own children have had to come out in different circumstances and I’ve seen them because they were staggered, taking a more radical approach as they’ve grown older. And I think I’m proud of that because I think we have to say to the next generation it’s up to you to fight. That’s why I’m so excited by the Extinction Rebellion at the moment. The teenagers are suddenly saying, “Look, it matters to all of us and the future of our own children when they come.” And I think that my 18 year old self would be well-advised to stay radical, devote time to community action, devote time to social action, political action. Don’t focus just on the self.
My life has been full of interesting developments. There are negative things and positive things. One negative thing that happened to me recently was being locked in a VIP lounge in Delhi for most of the day with one man as an argumentative companion - Boris Johnson. That was interesting in the sense that we disagreed on practically everything and I became convinced that he was completely unsuited to be Prime Minister. I was asked what question he should be asked on the rostrum later in the day. And I said to the man who was going to moderate his session, I said, “Ask him does he hope to become Prime Minister.” And Boris overheard me say that and he came up and he said, “I have less chance of becoming British Prime Minister than does Narendra Modi, the Indian Prime Minister. And I said, “Well, you’ve said something that gives me some pleasure today, Boris.” And of course now he, as we’re talking, is quite likely to suddenly become Prime Minister. And I think it’s a frightening prospect. It was certainly an interesting day because I gained insight into what sort of man this is.
I find it interesting the fact that someone like me who makes no bones about being radical on the left has been invited three years in a row to speak at the World Economic Forum. In that time, I’ve been able to talk about basic income and so on. And I’ve interacted with some of the wealthiest and most influential characters in the world economy. One of the things that always should strike us is just how little different in fact these characters are from any man or woman in the street. Some of them are extremely conceited and arrogant but it’s very interesting to interact with them because you can, you pick up the particular prejudices, the particular things that they think about and it gives you a certain confidence to be able to say, “Look, they aren’t better than the rest of us, they aren’t cleverer.” But they tend to have the ability to make money which the ordinary human being should not regard as uppermost in the human capacities that we all develop.
I think the most interesting thing that ever happened to me was to be asked to address the Bilderberg group. The most interesting in this respect - to ask to speak to the Bilderberg group which is the far right of the world, and to speak for forty minutes on how they were ignoring the precariat and not understanding the precariat and sitting in front of me was none other than Henry Kissinger.
Now, Henry Kissinger, when I was a student back in the late 60s, he was our public enemy number one. And public enemy number two. And public enemy number three. And I had this wonderful experience, because I talked to him after my presentation over a drink, of putting my hand on his shoulder and saying, “I’m making a citizen’s arrest.” Now, I mean how many people have such a sort of moment that they can look back and say that. So for me, there are certain things and what these, meeting these characters, it gives you a certain resilience and a certain humility to say, “Listen, they’re no better or any different. They are useless in many respects and we should not be frightened of them.” And that says to us, that says to us we must stand up, we must not be cowards. And I think that’s the key message that we have to have today because too many people feel that the power is so strong against us that we should just give up. We should just give up. And I think that that is completely wrong. I think actually they are weak.
I recently was invited to speak in Canada at the Canadian Trade Unions. They were celebrating a great strike in Winnipeg of 1919 which was a defining moment in the development of the Canadian labour movement and trade unions. And I began by saying, “Well, this, as it happens was the anniversary of a great momentous event in Britain 100 years before that, the Peterloo in Manchester.” And Peterloo and the Winnipeg strike and then various movements that we can mention always should remind us of Shelley’s fantastic poem, The Masque of Anarchy, which he wrote in anger after the massacre of Peterloo. And his famous last line ‘Rise like lions, ye are many, they are few’ and that line I think we have to teach ourselves again because we must not give up our progressive politics. We must reinvent.
That’s why I’m delighted to be working as an advisor to John McDonnell, and I think we do have a chance to have a new transformation in the next future. We can still be defeated, we could defeat ourselves. But we have to give our utmost energy and commitment in this moment because it’s crucial. It could happen. We could have another neo-fascist era coming in, rushing towards us, or we could have another progressive era coming. But, in a sense, it depends very much upon how much effort we’re prepared to make.
I can’t really recommend a single book for people to read because different books at different times are relevant to your own perspective. But I still find that one of the greatest books that every progressive thinker should read is Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition of 1958. Hannah Arendt recognised, as I’ve tried to recognise throughout all of my work, the distinction between work and labour. This is the distinction about use value, working on our enthusiasms, our passions, caring, our voluntary work and the difference between that and “labour for a boss”. The social democratic tradition in our progressive politics made a historical error in the 20th century in putting labour, the performance of labour in jobs on a pedestal. And implicitly downgrading work in the same way they downgraded leisure in the ancient Greek sense of scholarly participation in life in the public domain. And conflated that with recreation and play as if time that is just spent just sitting in front of a television or watching some football match which is critical, it’s part of life, it’s great, but that should be distinguished between real leisure and I feel that we’ve been squeezed in terms of leisure in that public participation sense.
And Hannah Arendt’s book The Human Condition was very, very much recognising we needed to go back to the ancient Greek traditions where public action is the height of being a citizen. Public involvement is a vital part of life. And Hannah Arendt also recognised the need for citizenship rights and the right to have rights. And for me those agendas of hers back in the 1950s, it’s very important. I’m sure if she were alive today she would not be writing exactly the same book - it’s very academic. And then of course you could go back to the works of William Morris and Ruskin and so on. But I think that flow of thinking has to be revived and I’ve tried to do that in my own books.
An edited version of this interview first appeared in Ethos Magazine in 2019.
Professor Standing’s 2017 book, Basic income: and how we can make it happen, is available from Pelican Books, and his new book, Plunder of the Commons: A Manifesto for Sharing Public Wealth, is due to be published in late Summer 2019.
More about the author
Patrick Hurley - @patrick_hurley
Chair and founder UBI Lab Liverpool
Elected member of Liverpool City Council for Mossley Hill. Bangs on a lot about grassroots business, community development.