To Security and Beyond: A Conversation with Natalie Bennett
Original image credit - Darren Lawrence
Speculative fiction, unladylike aspirations and colonial floorboards
Natalie was five years old when her grandmother broke some unfortunate news to her. “My grandmother told me I couldn’t have a bicycle because she did not think it was ladylike. ‘That’s not fair’, I thought, and that was my introduction to politics.” Children are free of the social-conditioning-goggles through which many adults view the world, so such double standards are starkly nonsensical to them. The indignation that five year old Natalie felt about the Great Bike Injustice formed the cornerstone to her personal and political beliefs, later solidifying into feminist values. In Natalie’s eyes, Universal Basic Income is a profoundly feminist project for many reasons. An example of how a Universal Basic Income system serves feminism more favourably than the existing benefits system is the difference in their underpinning values. Natalie explains that, after the Second World War, there was a lot of celebration about the welfare state in the UK; state pensions and the NHS gave people a level of protection and security they hadn’t had before. “The welfare state that was built in the 40s and 50s was designed by men, for men, and devalues the work that women typically did such as caring for people, raising children - the practical reality is that women bear the brunt of the work of caring,” she explains. “UBI makes it possible for people to perform that work without the huge financial pressures that come with it.”
“UBI makes it possible for people to perform that work without the huge financial pressures that come with it.”
More archaic points of view dictate that it’s just in women’s nature to provide care, thus the time and energy required isn’t viewed as requiring the same level of remuneration as labour typically performed by men. That inequality is perpetuated as an undercurrent in the welfare state, as is the case in many other areas of society. It’s almost impossible to prevent foundational imbalances from having wider systemic effects, which is why changing to a UBI system is a no-brainer when viewed through a feminist lens. The adult women in Natalie’s early life could be overheard without irony referring to themselves as ‘just a housewife’, acknowledging their lack of sway in society and the lack of acknowledgement of the labour that goes into keeping a home and caring for a family and community.
UBI is not a panacea solution to all of society’s self-injurious problems. It will not fix everything, but it would provide an essential foundation that enables us to move towards a society that values the physical and emotional labour that goes into caring for people, keeping a home and raising children, in turn providing an essential foundation for the women who do the overwhelming majority of that work. “That’s why UBI is the subject of the first chapter of my forthcoming book, Change Everything: Common Sense Politics for the Age of Shocks, to which people can now subscribe on Unbound.”
As with anything that aligns with historically radical movements such as feminism, UBI can seem wildly unrealistic at first glance. “We’ve come a huge way,” she says of where the UBI Lab Network currently stands in terms of political and practical progress. “When I was leader of the Green Party in the 2015 general election - the first election the party had pushed on the issue - UBI was seen as a really radical, 'out there' idea. About ten years after an idea is considered crazy, it tends to become mainstream - seven years on from that election, the UBI lab network is established and we’re seeing serious discussion of UBI and significant trials of it.” The crazy-to-mainstream timeline is reflected in the current attitudes to UBI, which has been part of the Green Party manifesto for 40 years, almost since the beginning of the party's history.
The 2015 general election would have been the first time the concept was introduced to many people. “We’ve made a huge advance on the idea of UBI, and behind that advance is the idea that where we are now cannot continue.” The need for change is being compounded and made more visible than it has been in recent years, and the Dickensian experience many will have over the coming winter really hammers home this point. The effect the cost of living crisis will have over this winter, if no serious intervention is made by the government, is going to be an atrocity.
We are living in historic times, but not for the right reasons. “History doesn’t necessarily go in one direction, it doesn’t always go in positive directions. To work for progression, things need to be built for the long term.” Record-breaking numbers of people attending food banks, record-breaking energy prices and record-breaking profits made by energy companies exemplify Natalie’s point that progression is not a naturally occurring process; in comparison to recent times, the last few years have seen some positively regressive developments. She believes that instability and chaos catalyse change; as bleak as the immediate future seems to be, Natalie offers a political long view that emphasises the possibility to be found in precarity. “The really key finding of trials, wherein people are given unconditional money, is that people’s wellbeing is considerably improved. I think that element is going to become unarguable.” In the light of the current cost of living crisis, people are looking around for answers, and UBI is becoming increasingly prominent in the landscape of potential solutions. A key part of getting more support for UBI is letting people know what it feels like to be without the fear of not being able to pay rent, for example. UBI takes away a lot of the fear that comes from people having no true foundation or support, because the existing support is conditional.
“The really key finding of trials, wherein people are given unconditional money, is that people’s wellbeing is considerably improved. I think that element is going to become unarguable.”
“Politics these days splits two ways, centrist politics leaves things as they are which is clearly unviable so you get two sides; a message of hope, of finding solutions, and then the far right which advocates for a dog-eat-dog, hoarding, protecting-your-own mindset that comes from fear.” The most significant through-line of our conversation is her desire to facilitate a fair and stable life for people. Naturally, Natalie became consciously involved with feminism as a young woman after finding that her ideas aligned with a whole movement. “Politics should be something people do, not have done to them,” is one of her most impactful and most commonly deployed phrases. Politics has historically been something that ‘common people’ are subjected to, and it would be remiss to think that the modern political era is free from feudal carryovers. In the past, the people without power were at the mercy of those who had it, and the decisions made by rulers were often made with total disregard for what might benefit the masses. It can sometimes feel like it all happens somewhere above our collective heads, and decisions are made for us and not always to our benefit. It’s this political myopia and sense of exclusivity that Natalie does a lot of work to combat.
Original image credit - Inspira Studio
Meetings with school, college and university groups are one of the biggest ways that Natalie opens up a dialogue with people, particularly young people, and she stresses that meeting people where they physically are and having a conversation is vitally important. “British politics are ridiculously Westminster-centric, with so many resources put into Westminster. We need to take ‘meet people where they are’ literally and go to people where they live and work. Dialogue is far more valuable than monologue, so going to see people, answering their questions and engaging with them has enormous value.”
The highlight of her day or week will be a meeting where people ask some really challenging questions, and someone comes up at the end and says that they felt pretty bad about the state of the world to start with but they feel better now, and like they can make a difference. Combating feelings of helplessness and despair that many people experience is one of the biggest barriers to getting engagement and action towards solutions. “I've met climate strikers from age 10 upwards who had really strong ideas, very clear perspectives, who made me think about things.” She relays a time when that was questioned by a primary school girl of about 10. “The idea that you could get together and work with a group of your peers to change things hadn’t occurred to me at that age. I would rage against things, but I hadn’t learnt that it was possible to co-ordinate and work towards change, to participate in politics.”
The amount of work that lies between where we are now and that milestone, however, is staggering. As with any endeavour towards significant change and progress - in the case of UBI, a from-the-ground-up overhaul of existing systems - doing the work can feel like an uphill battle. How do those on the front lines fend off becoming overwhelmed or disheartened? “In the terribly Victorian chamber of the house of Lords, on the very same boards from which the Empire starved large parts of India, I face up to all these former cabinet secretaries and scions of industry who aren’t terribly open to changing their minds or thinking differently. It’s great to score a point and make them think. I do have moments where I think, you know, I'm the daughter of an apprentice carpenter and a homemaker from a one bedroom flat in Australia, fifty-six years ago. You could never predict that I'd end up here, but it is a lot of fun shaking things up.”
Knowing about the difficulties people face and the problems in the world is one of the main causes of people developing apathy and feeling helpless. Any politician or activist has to know in detail about the needlessly perpetuated injustices, the seemingly endless layers behind each societal problem; I asked her what keeps her going day-to-day.
“Pretty well every day I encounter people doing astonishing things with very little resources. Creative, innovative people with really tough lives and circumstances achieving truly amazing things. I’m continually inspired by the capacity of the human race to be creative and innovative. Green political philosophy is most important in education - we need a system that genuinely allows people to flourish, and universal basic income is absolutely crucial to that.”
It’s understandable that people burn out or that their compassion runs dry, or that they simply can’t see that they could do anything to solve anything. From the outside, the amount of work that has gone into getting UBI as far as it has come seems inefficient. It’s time, energy and money-intensive work with a degree of payoff that could appear to be disproportionately small, but that’s why seeing differences and finding hope is so vital. “A good day for me is one where I have managed to spread hope.”
UBI is unconditional - the emotional argument needs to be won to make all the data and facts matter. “UBI is the antidote to fear”, she offers as a slogan. She expresses some doubt about how snappy it is, but the sentiment alone holds water.
“UBI is the antidote to fear....with UBI we can all work together to create something different.”
So what lies on the other side of the change that Natalie’s gunning for? What could a universal basic income society look like? “It’s not easy to paint a picture of what a UBI society looks like, but in my mind it’s a more creative one.” A bad thing about universal basic income society is that you would get a lot of bad poetry, she jokes - because people have the time to make bad poetry rather than slogging away in a call centre for 45 hours a week and coming home exhausted, with no energy to do anything. “With UBI we can all work together to create something different.” A lot of speculative fiction depicts dystopian visions of the future, with collapsed societies and the onset or aftermath of near-extinction events. This stuff might be exciting, but there's a serious lack of speculative fiction that's neither dystopian or utopian. "Stop making zombie movies and apocalypse novels, make pictures of the world in 30 years time when things are going OK and we’ve sorted out a lot of the problems." She describes a vision of the future that is stable, with 3 day working weeks and everyone on a livable wage and in stable housing. Natalie calls for a Hollywood rom-com where the conflict is all relationship-based, not born of environmental and economical collapse or political tyranny. Novels and movies capture, reflect and influence the cultural imagination. Art is a powerful vehicle. Natalie’s vision of the future seems impossibly good from our current position, but with the right kinds of progress, it’s completely achievable.
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.