Shooting for Utopia: In conversation with the people Doing The Work for UBI
Original image credit - Johannes Plenio
“I almost can't see why we're not doing it.”
The first impression that Alison gives is one of an extremely sharp, passionate woman. During our conversation it clarifies that her expertise lies in combining political intelligence and interpersonal intelligence, pushing on metaphorical doors until there’s some give. Her love for the concept of UBI makes for a powerful current.
“I love it. I just found it really interesting and I really like the community, the people. It's just something that I feel really propelled forward to do, something within me that wants to manifest itself. It wants to happen.” There’s a great sense of possibility and potential, and excitement to see what happens next.
Alison’s first introduction to the concept of UBI was reading Rutger Bregman’s book, Utopia for Realists. “I was just blown away with the idea of it because it seems so simple. Why haven't we done this?”
The idea struck her as radical, too wild for anybody to be seriously considering, but the discovery that UBI was one of the Green Party’s policies brought the idea into the realm of possibility. Not only have they expressed dedication to the idea, the Greens have done the leg-work and presented the case for UBI in data. The Green Party Conference in 2019, in Scarborough, was Alison’s first encounter with the UBI Lab who were in attendance to give a presentation. “It’s hard to describe how excited I was that there were people out there who were actually talking about doing something, actually talking about piloting it. It wasn’t just an idea that somebody read in a book - they were serious about it.”
Later, it was a train journey over the pennines and an afternoon in the pub with UBI Lab Sheffield that set her on the road to where she is now. Alison became the caretaker of UBI Lab Manchester after the two founders were unable to sustain running the lab on top of careers; “I thought, I’ll kind of join [UBI Lab Manchester] and sit at the back and do a bit, you know - anyway, the original members decided they weren’t going to do it anymore because of their work commitments. So I was left, and UBI Lab Manchester was me.” Others eventually joined, and UBI Lab Manchester is now one of the most active labs in the network.
“The other day the osteopath was kind of beating me up, and I'm telling him about UBI and he's going ‘So, come on, you need to defend this idea here.’ So this is really good practice because, you know, now I have to defend the principles of getting UBI while in pain.”
Addressing the handful of monumentally popular arguments against UBI is par for the course as someone Doing The Work. The arguments are few, but each is extremely prominent and it’s almost impossible to avoid them unless you’re preaching to the choir. What would UBI do to inflation, for example? Not only is it often time consuming to discuss the minutiae of how feasible UBI is; Alison thinks that we need to admit when we don’t know things. There is a tendency to defend UBI as a possible and achievable utopian idea, but the reality is much more complicated. “People say, ‘Well, what would you get out of it personally?’ and that's not the point for me. The point is I've read The Spirit Level, I've read Scarcity, and if people don't have enough for the basics, then they can't do anything else. It just seems obvious to me that [UBI] is a much fairer way of doing things.”
There’s no guarantee that people won’t stop working; universal basic income isn’t the answer to everything. When asked if belief in UBI requires good faith and positive regard towards people, Alison points out a consistent feature of arguments both for and against UBI: moral judgment. “If you go down the kind of Guy Standing route of ‘it's just our right to have it’, does it matter if some people end up not working? The rich people in the Tory party seem to have plenty of income and do nothing, and nobody seems to worry about them. It's all very moral, whereas I like the idea that this isn't a moral thing. I don't have to earn the right to have a trial by jury if I go to court."
If trial by jury is considered a fundamental human right, morality be damned, what makes UBI so susceptible to morality arguments? "I do have faith in people, but I don’t need faith in people to believe in UBI.”
More about the author
AJ Whittle - Linked In
Mature student at University of Sheffield's School of English starting a career as a journalist with a deep interest in social issues.