directly.
We still have a virtual income or ‘social wage’ today, but it is much diminished and misunderstood. After the economic disruptions of the 1970s, government policies have chipped away at the post-war consensus and at the value of the social wage. They have done this by promoting a vision of economic success based on personal choice, private ownership, a small state and a free market, blaming the jobless and poor for their own troubles and urging individuals to help themselves. Since 2008, the effects in many countries have been ratcheted up by tax cuts and severely reduced public spending. Where the quality of free schools and health care has declined as a result, more people are encouraged to leave the public system and pay privately for what they need. Many services, including care for children and disabled adults, as well as housing and transport, have been stripped down to the bare bones, abolished altogether or left to the vagaries of voluntarism and philanthropy. This steady erosion of services, often combined with cuts to the value of social security benefits, has led to a deepening rift between rich and poor and to millions living in destitution in the world’s richest countries.
It doesn’t have to be like this. Our goal is to reclaim the collective ideal and rebuild the social wage. Let’s start by defining our terms.
‘Universal basic services’ (UBS) encapsulates three crucial concepts. What we mean by each of them is best described in reverse order. Together they sum up what we mean by ‘public services’ whenever we refer to them in the following pages:
1 Services: collectively generated activities that serve the public interest.1
2 Basic: services that are essential and sufficient (rather than minimal) to enable people to meet their needs.
3 Universal: everyone is entitled to services that are sufficient to meet their needs, regardless of ability to pay.
Central to our case is that UBS should be expanded in practice, both by improving the quality of existing services such as health care and education, and reaching into new areas such as care, housing, transport and access to digital information.
We are seeking radical change that builds on the best we already have. We don’t want to return to the ‘good old days’ or simply to have more of what we’ve had in the past. Our proposal is radical for three main reasons. First, central to our case is the collective ideal, which has been submerged and discredited by the politics of individual choice and market competition. We aim to reverse that trend, recognizing that what we do together and how we care for each other is the key to enabling all of us to meet our needs and live lives that we value.
Second, we aim for sufficiency and sustainability. Universal basic services form an essential part of an agenda for sustainable development, which we must embrace as a matter of priority to safeguard the future of human civilization.
Third, we are seeking to overhaul the traditional model of public services so that they are genuinely participative, controlled by the people who need and use them, and supported rather than always directly provided by the state.
We need these radical changes now, not just because we want to help make people’s lives better (which we do) but because we are convinced that this is the only way for modern societies to survive and flourish. Existing welfare systems are struggling to meet today’s needs. They haven’t adapted far or fast enough to demographic, technological and ecological challenges. They have come under sustained attack from political forces that seek to shrink the state and grow the market. People are being driven apart by an ideology that promotes individualism, competition and accumulation, which in turn have stifled aspirations, heightened insecurities, exacerbated environmental problems and accelerated political polarization. All these things undermine democracies, which depend for their health and strength on shared interests and goals, mutual understanding and cooperation.
We want this book to fuel a big debate about how to tackle today’s urgent problems, such as widening inequalities, crumbling welfare systems and unsustainable consumption. We focus here on a particular range of needs to illustrate our approach. But we certainly do not want to limit the scope of UBS, which could extend much further. As we shall see, it is not about applying a single plan of action to all of life’s necessities but about adopting a set of value-based guidelines and customizing them to suit a variety of different needs and circumstances.
The term UBS was first given voice in October 2017 in a report from the Institute for Global Prosperity, University College London.2 It offers an approach that is distinct from ‘universal basic income’ (UBI). The latter is a proposal to give regular, unconditional cash payments to everyone, rich and poor – ostensibly to reduce poverty and inequality, promote opportunities and solve problems arising from ungenerous, stigmatizing systems of income support. We wholeheartedly endorse the principle that everyone should have the right to a minimum income and that no one should suffer blame or stigma for falling on hard times. Radical reform of income support, although not the topic of this book, is extremely urgent. But the solution to the problem of inadequate social security is not ‘UBI’, universal, unconditional cash payments that are sufficient to live on, which is how it is defined by many of its leading advocates. We can find no evidence that UBI could ever live up to the more ambitious claims that are made for it.3
On the other hand, we are convinced that UBS holds out real promise for achieving similar goals. Instead of plugging into the neoliberal formula of individual consumption within a market-based system, UBS offers a collective approach that supplements – and reduces dependence on – individual monetary income. As we argue later, more and better public services can deliver far better results in terms of equality, efficiency, solidarity and sustainability.
Notes
1 1. A formal definition of a ‘service’, as distinct from a ‘good’, is a type of activity that is intangible, is not stored, does not result in ownership and is used at the point of delivery.
2 2. Social Prosperity Network (2017), ‘Social Prosperity for the Future: A Proposal for Universal Basic Services’, UCL: IGP.
3 3. A. Coote and E. Yazici (2019), ‘Universal Basic Income: A Briefing for Trade Unions’, Ferney-Voltaire, France: Public Services International.
1 Why We Need This Change
No one should have to pay for emergency health care or endure a three-week wait to see a local doctor. Every parent should feel confident that their children will be happy and well educated at the local (non-fee-paying) school. There should be no need for food banks or rough sleeping, no graphs showing widening health inequalities or rising levels of mental distress.
These are not outrageous imaginings, just reasonable expectations of anyone living in a modern democracy. Yet too many live with basic insecurities, too few parents are confident about local schooling, and too many doubt they will get decent health care when they need it. And while these worries are shared by people on average incomes, it is much worse for those who are poorer. Homelessness, extreme poverty and despair are all on the rise.
When the United Nations sent a Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights to the United States in 2017, he found that none of its manifestly superior wealth, power and technology was being ‘harnessed to address the situation in which 40 million people continue to live in poverty’. He concluded that the persistence of extreme poverty was ‘a political choice made by those in power’.1 When the same Rapporteur
