All Change, Please!

          There are very few cars parked on the street in town these days so, seeing a line of four fancy models, each with a document displayed on the dashboard, made me curious. The document turned out to be a letter from a local stockbroking firm addressed “to whom it may concern” and stating that the cars belong to “keyworkers in the financial sector”. It was displayed, apparently, in lieu of a parking ticket. Merchant bankers, it seems, have not learned restraint from their 2008 debacle: in the midst of a viral pandemic they seek even small ways to profit. In our contemplation of the end of ‘lockdown’, the last thing we should be considering is a return to “business as usual”, a discredited system that, once again, stands exposed as being at the heart of society’s most intractable problems.

          Rutger Bregman’s Utopia for Realists was published in 2014. In it, he argued the case for a universal basic income or, as he put it, “Why we should give free money to everyone”. It’s not a new concept – President Nixon came close to passing it into US law in 1970 – but it has always faced resistance from economists of a neo-liberal persuasion, whose belief – despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary – is that it would be unaffordable and that paying people to do nothing encourages indolence. Pilot schemes have all proved these beliefs to be unfounded: administration costs for grudging ‘job-seeking’ schemes are an expensive waste of resource because the desirability of employment is about more than just wage-dependence. Yet, still, there is a wilful blindness to the facts when it comes to adopting a social safety net for all. Well, now that we are in a situation where governments are paying the wages of millions of citizens because their employers are unable to stump up, there is a chance to change entrenched opposition to the idea of a universal basic income. Of course, strictly speaking, government is not paying wages, it is redistributing taxpayers’ funds: government does not have any money other than that with which taxpayers entrust it for the benefit of society as a whole. And it is the principle of collective benefit that this viral pandemic has thrown into the foreground.

          The term “keyworker” is not new either, but when it comes to a crisis the true value of our nurses, drivers, garbage collectors and others on whom we rely becomes self-evident. And the fact that they are stuck on the lowest rung of the pay ladder is a travesty of social justice, given that they are truly indispensable: their work cannot be done by robots. And at the top end of that keyworker pay scale are the scientists, surgeons and researchers whose earnings may be good but whose ranks have been thinned out by the lure of higher rewards as stock market traders, corporate lawyers and bankers. These are the “bullshit jobs”, so-called because they extract value from commercial activities without creating anything of value in return. Their remuneration is vampiric and capitalism – especially since the Reagan era – has produced a slew of them that multiplies itself constantly, skimming off wealth and concentrating it in the accounts of ever fewer individuals.

          Neo-liberal capitalism, by sleight of hand, has privatised public wealth, hollowed out public services, belittled specialist knowledge (except in the field of financial gimmickry), commoditised education and left the world unable to respond adequately or collectively to a pandemic that affects everybody. No way should it be back to business as usual. Just for a start, we should teach bankers to be responsible members of society: they must pay to park like the rest of us. Then we should recycle all those bullshit salaries by taxing them, along with the bullshit financial transactions upon which they depend. If this pandemic doesn’t catalyse system change, what will?