Guy Standing: It's up to us, every single one of us, to not only be improving our behaviour towards each other, but to be demanding a different sort of politics, a different sort of social structure. And that I think can happen.
Dr Rupy: Welcome to the Doctor's Kitchen podcast with me Dr Rupy where we discuss everything to do with food, lifestyle, medicine and this week we're going to be discussing basic income as a measure that could alleviate societal suffering. Now in light of the evolving pandemic, I wanted to shift the conversation from reacting to the current scenario to considering what opportunities there are to grow from this. In the same way the British public and government created a universal healthcare system in the wake of World War Two, the NHS, perhaps our current scenario provides the foundation for even more radical thinking. And so this week's podcast, I actually speak with Professor Guy Standing, a professorial research associate and a former professor at SOAS University of London and world expert on the universal basic income. He's also co-founder and current co-president of the Basic Income Earth Network, BIEN, an international non-governmental organisation that promotes basic income as a right. Now, you might be thinking, what on earth is Dr Rupy doing talking about basic income and economical structure that doesn't exist anywhere in the world? But actually has an immense impact on livelihood, on lifestyle, on health, as we will get to in today's discussion. We discuss basic income as a reality that can actually alleviate a lot of problems that we see and I see personally in the healthcare system. And this has started years before the pandemic, but these societal inequalities have actually been accentuated and magnified as a result of the virus. What we understand more than ever is the inequality within our communities, the effects of which will last far beyond the closure of this health crisis and will probably continue unless we think more carefully and more imaginatively about how we structure our society. In today's podcast, we talk about the basic constructs of what universal basic income means, the ethical and economic arguments for basic income and the idea and culture shifts in politics and society that need to be in place for basic income to work. We also touch upon professor's experiences with instituting basic income in different communities across the world, ranging from Latin America, India, but also Alaska and other parts of Europe as well. I also want to bring attention to professor's book as well, the eight giants or battling eight giants and what we can do to alleviate that. And he is certainly of the opinion that basic income is a public good and should be a human right. Whether you agree with that or not, it's up to you and I'd invite you to make your own opinion and make your own decision by the end of this podcast. But I hope to have at least enlightened a different way of thinking and a radical way of thinking as well because I think this is exactly what we need at this moment in time. Please do listen to the rest of the podcast. If you are interested in the subject matter, I can certainly do more in this way. And I'd love to get your opinions on what you thought of this as well. Please do send any comments and do subscribe to the doctorskitchen.com newsletter where we give recipes every single week and other elements, lifestyle tips and tricks to help you lead the healthiest, happiest life. And do follow my guest on social media, the links of which are all going to be on the podcast show notes. There's also the video where they describe in detail the experiment that they did in India where they gave basic income to 2,000 residents and what they found with regards to literacy rates, nutrition and improvements in diet as well. It's quite, quite incredible. Without further ado, I hope you enjoy this. I hope this gives you a bit of a break from the doom and gloom and perhaps ignites in you something that you'd want to see in the future as well. Guy, it's a pleasure to speak to you and thank you so much for your time already. I came across you because somebody sent me some audio inserts of podcasts as well. And I thought this is absolutely fascinating and particularly as this shift in people's mentality mirrors somewhat after the World War Two where people really came together in community spirit and perhaps this is going to lead to something as incredible as the NHS. And as someone who works in healthcare and sees the benefit of universal healthcare free at the point of delivery, I was fascinated by this concept of universal basic income. Could we just kick off by, because my listeners are usually here to listen about food and lifestyle and how that translates into medicine. Can we kick off by explaining what we mean by universal basic income and where that already exists if it doesn't already?
Guy Standing: Okay, well first of all, good morning to you and the listeners. And let me say that I've always been a 100% supporter of the NHS and we really respect what doctors and nurses are doing at this terrible moment. A basic income is a concept that I trace back to 1217 in the Charter of the Forest, which accompanied the Magna Carta, November the 6th, 1217, when it said that everybody in England, as it then was, everybody in England had the right to subsistence in the commons, living, had the right to have the means to survive. Okay? And the essence of basic income is that everybody, every man and every woman equally, and every child, possibly at a lower level, should have the right to receive a modest basic income paid individually, not on a household basis, we'll come back to that later, paid in cash or the equivalent, and guaranteed as a right. In other words, non-withdrawable. You get it as a right. And it would be without conditions. In other words, you don't have to prove your particular work status or your particular marital status or household status or amount of income you've got. And that's the controversial aspect. But the idea is that everybody should have equal access to basic resources needed to survive, to be able to pay for your food, your rent, just enough to survive, not to be in luxury, but basic security. And of course, you could pay it to everybody because that's the simplest way to get it out. Don't ask detailed questions about what you're doing and all that stuff. And if you want, you could tax it back from the from the rich so that they are neither worse off nor better off. But it's much simpler to do it that way than to do what successive governments have been doing, which is targeting on people deemed to be poor, right? Once you target, you have to do means tests. And we know from generations of research in Britain and in every other country where they've tried them, that means testing, targeting on the poor has huge errors. It a lot of people don't apply for the benefits, they don't know about the benefits, they're fearful, they they are stigmatised, they're proud. And then you do the tests and if some someone might be poor one week and not poor another week, how do you do it? And of course, it compounds the problem because you have what we call poverty traps. If you say you will only give benefits to the poor, then someone who makes an effort to become non-poor would automatically be losing the benefits, right? That's precisely what happens with universal credit, with with all other means-tested benefits. And the Department of Work and Pensions itself, not Guy Standing, it's the Department of Pensions, Work and Pensions, have said that the marginal tax rate from someone going from benefits into the sort of low-wage jobs that the precariat can get is over 80%. In other words, taking a job would only give you an extra 20% compared with the benefits you get. But it's actually worse than that because there's also what I've called a precarity trap, which means you have to wait for your benefits if you become eligible, okay? Officially five weeks, but often 12 weeks, okay? And then if you took a short-term job paying that extra 20%, as it were, you would very quickly find you'd be out of that job again and have to apply and wait again to get back to the benefits. That combination is lethal. There is you'd be a fool to take that low-wage job. So you you have your existing system is both unfair and stupid. You know the word stupid? It's early morning, but I could use stronger words. But but essentially, it is stupid. Now, a basic income in the current circumstances has gone from being desirable for reasons we can discuss to being absolutely essential, absolutely essential. Because what has happened, and I discussed that in in the two books that that you know about, the new one just came out last month, it's called Battling Eight Giants, Basic Income Now. And it was written before the pandemic. And it basically the arguments in my book, books, because the previous one had done it as well, is that because of the nature of the reforms since the era of Thatcher and Reagan, we have a very fragile economic system characterised, I'm an economist, so excuse me for a moment for a couple of technical words, characterised by rentier capitalism, not free market capitalism. And what that means is that more and more of the income that is generated in Britain or in the United States or in Europe, more and more of that income is going to the rentiers, the property owners, physical property, as in land and houses and so on, financial properties, as all the financial assets, and intellectual property. And this in the sense of you're a doctor, you're a doctor, one of the scandals has been the establishment of the intellectual property rights system in the world, whereby a pharmaceutical company, if it has an invention, has a guaranteed monopoly profit for 40 years, so that they can charge what they like. And that has been entrenched by giving more and more people with more and more patents, they get higher and higher income. So what this, we'll come back to that perhaps later, but what has happened is that we have terrifying levels of inequality. That's the first giant, right? A basic income won't reduce all poverty, but it would reduce poverty. It would, if you give everybody a base, then you automatically reduce poverty because it represents a higher percentage of the income of a low-income person than a higher-income person. But the real problem we've got is that the inequalities are creating some of the other giants that I'm going to mention, okay?
Dr Rupy: Before we get into the to the eight giants, Guy, I just want to stop right there because I think this is really resonating with me personally because I understand being a general practitioner and someone who works in A&E, the inequalities and the vulnerability of a whole bunch of people. However, I believe that there is an idea that people who are trapped in the benefit system or choose not to go into low-wage jobs are purely lazy. Now, I don't believe that whatsoever, but I really do think that there is a an understanding that that is what is going on and that's why a construct like universal basic income doesn't exist and would not work. What do you say to those kind of sceptics?
Guy Standing: Well, I I I could come back to that later. I I think that perspective is theoretically wrong and profoundly wrong in fact. Okay? There's a lot of evidence to show that people want to work, people want to improve their living standards. There is no evidence that laziness or or benefit cheating has been pervasive. It's not true. There there are always been a few, but that's never been a pandemic itself. There there is plenty of evidence that we could perhaps come back to, plenty of evidence that if you give people basic security, they work more, not less. We've done pilots around the world. I've been involved in designing and testing it in various parts of the world. And when you introduce a basic income, people work more, not less. And moreover, they tend to be more productive because they're more cooperative, they've got more energy, they've got more confidence, they take more risks in being innovative. And and this is a profound prejudice that out there people don't want to improve their lives. Yeah, you can be dragged down into social illnesses and the sort of things that you know about so that you become incapable or or vulnerable in a personal sense, but it is not true that most of us don't want to improve our lives or improve the lives of our children and our families. So I think that is a profound prejudice which has been very convenient on the right because then you can justify cutting benefits and making it harder to get and the rest of it and you get end up with universal credit, which is causing homelessness, suicides, a lot of rising morbidity. So to me, that is pure prejudice. But let me go, let me go back to the story, why we now need a basic income desperately. And why I'm receiving emails from people all over the world. I cannot keep up with it, right? I just cannot keep up with it. And I'm telling myself that I have a duty to be talking about it now when for 40 years, most people would say you're mad, you know? And suddenly, I'm respectable. I'm really worried about that part, but we we'll leave that aside. Besides the inequality, we have experienced, and I'm sure people listening to us will understand this, a incredible growth of chronic insecurity. Millions and millions of people feel insecure. There's a a term I've used in my book on the precariat, it's called the bag lady syndrome, the bag lady syndrome. And it don't think it only affects women, but it's meant to be a common nightmare that people wake up in the middle of the night worried that one mistake, one illness, one bad decision, and they could be out in the street with all their belongings in two paper bags. And that is a phenomenon when I first wrote about it, I cannot tell you how many people have written to me saying, that's how I feel. That's how I feel, you know, or a variant of it. Insecurity is the source of illness, as you know much better than I do, right? It induces heart disease, it induces cancers, it induces alcoholism, it induces things that otherwise wouldn't reach us, cause problems to us, and shortens life. Okay? Now, insecurity leads to one of my ethical reasons for wanting a basic income, which is that basic security is a public good and a human need. It's a public good, as we economists call it, because you having it does not deprive me of having it. And in fact, if we all have basic security, the value to each and every one of us goes up because people behave better towards one another, they're more altruistic, they're more tolerant of the other, they tend to be less xenophobic, you know, all of these things have been shown by the psychologists, right? We need basic security. A society needs basic security for resilience. And I'll come back to that keyword later. The third giant blocking the road to a good society is related and it's debt. Now, debt for me is the trigger of the economic crisis we're going to be facing in the coming months and years. Because if you have a downturn like we're having, millions of people who have been living on the edge of unsustainable debt, suddenly will find they can't service their debts. They can't pay that flipping payday loan or the credit card or the unsecured debt. They can't. And companies can't either. And there will be a pandemic of bankruptcies and all the consequences of that. We have a higher level of private debt in Britain today than at any time in our history, any time in our history. And it's the same in the United States where private debt, total private debt is one and a half times the national income. Think about it. If you have a slight downturn, boom, okay? The fourth giant is related to the previous three, and that you as a doctor will also know much better than I, it's called stress.
Dr Rupy: Absolutely.
Guy Standing: We have a pandemic of stress. We have people suffering illnesses due to stress. Don't tell me we don't have it. And don't tell me that the politicians understand it and have been addressing it. Stress is a pandemic in itself. It is the one of the biggest causes for lost work days, for example. It is one of the biggest causes of domestic violence and other forms of social discord. It's a huge giant, right?
Dr Rupy: Absolutely. Just to pause on that point, I'm currently working in A&E, have been over the last couple of years now, and the number of presentations I see as a result of stress is quite frightening. And that can present in a multitude of ways, whether it be physical or psychological symptoms, but in more cases than not, people who come to A&E are complaining of physical symptoms, whether it be chest pain, shortness of breath, headache, vague symptoms of fatigue. And after excluding organic causes, obviously, we come down to stress in a lot of cases. And it's quite harrowing, and that's mirrored in general practice, no more prevalent than right now. So I think that is a huge, huge giant.
Guy Standing: Yeah. And and it leads to the fifth giant, which I've written about, I wrote a book called The Precariat, the New Dangerous Class. And I I it's really, it just took off. It's been translated now into 24 languages around the world. It gets me all over, you know, I've done more travelling than I dare wish to do. And and basically I've said that the new class that's emerged is the precariat. And the precariat are people who are living bits and pieces lives, with losing rights of citizenship, losing the rights, social rights, losing economic rights, losing civil rights. And they feel like supplicants. And the key word is supplicant, okay? It's not that they're living with unstable jobs, of course they are, mostly. It's the fact that you feel like a supplicant. You have to ask favours. You have to please a bureaucrat or a husband or somebody or an employer or a landlord. You have to plead. And that's undignifying and it's it it has all ramifications. And the sense of precarity is is really a giant. We have to confront it, we have to deal with it. The sixth, the sixth giant, I'll go quickly through them so we've put that at the back. The sixth giant are the robots. People fear being made redundant because of automation and the advancing robots and AI and artificial intelligence and and things like that. I don't believe that that is actually a reality. I don't believe we're going to be suddenly made all redundant and have nothing to do. We're a long way from that. There's plenty of work. We shouldn't be worried about that. But the technological changes are very disruptive. They they cause some of the insecurity, they cause some of the inequality, they cause some of the stress, etc. And we need to make people feel more comfortable with that technological change. And a basic income would help with that. The seventh, the seventh giant is the one that in my new book, which was written before the pandemic started, I said, I think will be the decisive one leading to general acceptance and desire for a basic income. The others, you can all see, they're all pushing us in this direction of needing something. But the threat of extinction, which is the seventh giant, could be the tipping point. We need to feel in control. We need carbon taxes. But carbon taxes increase inequality by themselves. So therefore, only only if we redistribute, recycle the money gained from carbon taxes in the form of basic income, will that be an acceptable way of dealing with global warming. But also, there's a positive sense. If we had basic income, we could spend more time doing the work most of us don't do enough, the work of care, the work of voluntary work, the work of ecological cleaning and looking after nature and interacting with nature because we could afford to do that more. It would tilt the balance towards reproductive activities rather than resource-depleting activities. And I'm very pleased that someone like Caroline Lucas, who's become a friend, who supports a basic income, she's an MP and a lovely person, and she supports a basic income 100%. And she does it from green principles, okay? So I think extinction still will be a a really determining factor, the threat of extinction. The young get it. The young educated people particularly, they care about the loss of the species, they care about the fact that we won't have enough fish to eat, we won't be able to interact with nature, we're losing good foods and so on. They care about that and they're getting very angry. Great. I give 100% support, 100%. No, 101%. I don't care. And the last giant is the one who's presence now today is particularly odious. And that's the threat of neo-fascist populism. We have, if you have people who are fearful, who are insecure, who are, particularly if they don't have a lot of education, they will listen to odious monsters. I called in my book, The Precariat, I said, we will see the emergence of a monster. And when November 2016, huge number of people emailed me saying, your monster has arrived. And it's a fearful prospect that simplistic promises of bringing back tomorrow, bringing back yesterday, sorry, bringing back yesterday, getting rid of the foreigners, the migrants, putting up walls, throwing them out, they're the problem, blah, blah, blah. All of that, all of that disgusting language is back, right? So here today, we have just had Donald Trump withdrawing the United States from the World Health Organisation. He has trying to blame the WHO, which is under-budgeted and is a small organisation and has been warning for a long time about the dangers of pandemics. Don't let him fool us. He's trying to blame the WHO for the fact that he didn't prepare the United States for this pandemic. So we have a populist trend in Britain as well. Let's not, let's not just focus on Trump. It's in Europe as well. And it's one of the eight giants. Now, in a sense, the pandemic, the coronavirus pandemic, is a trigger bringing the fragile system that I've just articulated crashing down. So if we don't have a basic income, I promise you we will see a 20% decline in our national income over the next 18 months. It's got to that dramatic point. Only if you have everybody supported will we all be strengthened. And that gets back to the sense of resilience. An individual knows what resilience means. I hope you have resilience, I hope I have resilience. In other words, if something goes wrong in one part of your system, your other part of your system is strong enough to be able to handle it, right? But if you are in a fragile state, and that's why so many people who have preconditions are dying, if you have other problems, and then along comes something like this, you die. In a sense, the system is like that. The economic system is as fragile as that. And if we have these selective measures that the government is introducing, millions of people will actually be left out. They will not get support. And if we have large groups in Britain or anywhere else not being able to be resilient, the whole system will suffer because they will continue to suffer from illnesses, they will continue to spread them, our immune system as a society will decline. So for me, it has become a an imperative. And it's up to you and me and anybody listening to us to be pressing our politicians to get rid of their spaghetti backbones and come out in favour. That's how I feel.
Dr Rupy: Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I mean, everything that you just said there regarding the eight giants and beyond really does resonate with me. Um, truly because I see the product of insecurity and fear. I know that description of that fearful patient who comes in, the the precarious, the precarity class, um, who are favour asking, who are the most vulnerable and sometimes don't present themselves in that way, debt, um, and all these things and how they translate into medical conditions as well as the condition of society that we have at the moment. I think a lot of people are fearful right now. Um, and this is quite, uh, empowering because it's encouraging us to think laterally and be a lot more imaginative than we usually allow ourselves to be.
Guy Standing: I I I think that's a silver lining in the tragedy. It is forcing more people to be more innovative in the way they think. And and just as you you mentioned, you know, the Second World War led to the beverage report and the NHS being created, and it wouldn't have been created had there not been a previous set of terrible conditions. Uh, this I feel is going to be transformative in this respect. Instead of supporting the financial markets, for example, which the governments have done straight away, when any crisis, they support the financial markets. So the financiers make more bonuses and more billions and and they go off quite happy. Instead of doing that, we've got to remember everybody needs resilience. Everybody needs resilience. And and I think we'll be able to drag the political establishment in this direction, but it's going to be a struggle because they won't do it willingly. It's going to be a struggle.
Dr Rupy: I feel like the generation C that's been coined at the moment for the babies and the young kids of today who are going through this pandemic are really going to be the drivers of change in terms of political system and perhaps even the inception of universal basic income. Um, what I'm trying to get my head around, and forgive me for, you know, being as methodical and practical thinking as I can, because I understand the ideology behind universal basic income, but within the construct that we have at the moment, what other things need to exist for this to actually become a reality? I.e., do we still have a welfare system, a free at the point of care healthcare system, um, security and all the other things that we take for granted in the UK in addition to universal basic income? And and what levels would taxation have to be set in order for this to exist?
Guy Standing: Let me make it absolutely plain. I'm a total believer in good public services. 100% supporter of NHS, been a brilliant service, one of the most innovative things Britain has ever done. But if you look, as I've done and written about it in in another book called The Corruption of Capitalism and Plunder of the Commons, what has been happening is a steady privatisation of the NHS. Okay? We don't have the same public services today as we did at the beginning of the century. We have seen a gradual erosion of our public services. There are many places in Britain today, towns and cities that don't even have a police station. I mean, you know, we've had a whittling away of the social state and it's disastrous. Parks being closed or privatised, all sorts of things that have been done, okay? And I think that has to be reversed. And it's gone with a systematic policy, strategy of cutting taxation, particularly taxation on wealth, on corporations. Britain does not have a wealth tax. And yet wealth inequality has been growing much more than income inequality and is huge by the comparisons of 30 years ago, for example, or 40 years ago, it's huge. If we just had a 1% tax, a 1% tax on wealth, you could virtually pay for a modest basic income for everybody, okay? But you don't have to stop there. You also, we need a carbon tax. If we had a carbon tax, we would be penalising the excessive use of fossil fuels. We need it desperately. But as I said earlier, it's only a good thing if you can recycle the money because otherwise the poor person tends up paying proportionately more than the wealthy, but we need a carbon tax, all right? And we need, we need a land value tax. It's ridiculous that you have people, you have a Duke, I love to say this, so please excuse me, you have a Duke of Buccleuch who inherited 277,000 acres of land, a lot of something for nothing, I think you would agree. Um, and only because he's the 10th descendant of an illegitimate child of Charles II. Okay? And to make, to make the situation slightly more annoying, he's received millions of pounds from the government in subsidies to enable him to look after his land. I'm not making this up. This I've documented in the books. You have a lot of things like that. Iain Duncan Smith, who was the architect of universal credit, inherited through his wife 1,500 acres of land. He hasn't done a single day's work for that. But he's received, as I've documented, he's received over 2 million pounds in subsidies from the government. Now, for me, that's indefensible. And it turns out that the Treasury itself, not me, not Guy Standing, not you, the Treasury itself puts out a spreadsheet each year calculating the number of tax reliefs that exist and the amount of income foregone by having them. And for your information, there are 1,156 forms of tax relief, and the Treasury can't estimate how much tax income is foregone for having those, except for the top 209 of them, okay? And it calculates that this results in the loss to the exchequer of over 400 billion pounds a year. That's not me, that's the Treasury estimate, okay? If you used half of that, you could pay everybody 150, 200 pounds a week. So anybody who says we can't afford it is lying through their teeth or doesn't know what they're talking about, okay? We can afford it. The good thing now is we must afford it. So I think that those things will come under scrutiny. It's crazy, for example, if I'm a landlord, I'm not incidentally, not or ever likely to be. If you're a landlord, maybe you are, if you're a landlord and you you spend on gardening, you get tax relief, okay? If I'm with my little garden, I spend the same amount of money, I have to pay it out of my post-tax income, okay? But if you're a landlord and you pay it and you say you're on the upper tax rate, 45% tax rate, just given an example, that means 1,000 pounds spent, he can save 450. Now, where is the equity? Where is the economic rationale? There isn't any, okay? So when people say, how are we going to afford it? I say, F off. In polite terms, I'm sure, because we can afford it and we need to look at our priorities and the privileges that the elite get. And I think this pandemic is going, it is, I think, having a positive effect on solidarity and community spirit. You know, even Boris Johnson is trying to take credit for that, but he's voted for all these other policies for the past 10 years, he voted solidly for them, and now we're getting, we're now getting it back in the eye. But but solidarity is something that people are appreciating today probably more than any time in their lifetime, right? We all appreciate, we we contact our family as much as we can, we're looking after our community, we're worried about our neighbours, we're worried about ourselves. Uh, it there there's a sense of coming together, but that's going to be accompanied with anger. And it should be accompanied with anger because the inequities that have been built up, which I've documented and others have documented, are now shouting at us. And and I, I mean, by by all means, people should question, um, question things, but for me, I'm happy to give the answers because I think we've got answers.
Dr Rupy: Absolutely. And it's it's interesting that we're having this conversation now because I feel like, um, a basic income, although it's a financial measure, it's also a small measure to sort of, uh, contribute to all the eight giants that you talked about earlier. Um, not alone, it's not a panacea, it's not something that's going to completely rid ourselves of all those different ailments that are so pervasive in society today, but it's certainly a step in the right direction. The the the the sceptical side of me playing devil's advocate is my understanding of human nature is that we enjoy relative wealth and we enjoy the relative happiness. So if you gave everyone a basic income today of whatever it might be, let's call it 100 pounds per week, how many times does that need to increase or change over the course of the next five or 10 years for that for it to remain novel and to remain appreciated? Because I feel, uh, and this is getting into my my perspective on the NHS, that the longer something is accepted as given, the less people would appreciate it. And I see that within the NHS with people, um, anecdotally, uh, not abusing the NHS, but taking it for granted for sure. And it's it's taken a pandemic to make people actually step up and understand, you know what, the NHS is absolutely amazing. And just a few years ago, as a product of mass media, people were thinking about junior doctors as money grabbing because we had issues with our pensions and our working hours. And so there there is definitely a shift in the mindset today and that's a result of the pandemic and that's what I'm worried about with basic income as it goes, let's say it was started tomorrow, as it goes forward, how much does that need to change to maintain its novelty?
Guy Standing: Well, first of all, I I think people had just some justification for a sense of frustration with what was happening to the actual NHS relative to what we were brought up to think of the NHS. We all know that junior doctors in particular, nurses, auxiliaries have been stressed because their incomes have been cut in real terms. Their benefits have been cut. Their hours of work have been ridiculously long, arduous. And actually, as we know, and I've seen the statistics, the absenteeism due to sickness is higher among medical people than among people in general, but they have a higher incidence. So because they're exposed to so many risks. And the privatisation has channelled a lot more of the money that's put into the health system to these private, actually mainly American corporations, United Health and so on, they're giving these very lucrative consultancies and contracts, starving the actual NHS, the people on the front line of resources. So it's not, it's actually correct that people had a growing sense of dissatisfaction, queues, waiting lists, etc. Okay? And how are they to, how they to express that? Of course, they express it in saying that the NHS isn't what it's meant to be or not as good as it. And they're right because we need pressure on a system to improve. And I think now, even Boris Johnson after his hospital trip, uh, now we will not see so much talk about privatising the NHS. And we will see more talk about raising salaries, increasing benefits, reducing stress, even, even, even allowing a few more foreign doctors and nurses in. Ooh. This the debate is going to be changed, okay? And that's great. It's the same with other public services. I think we're going to have a sea change in in that. And and that's good. I, let me get back to your point though, about will people get used to it and take it for granted? I think the opposite will take place. There's a famous book written by Albert Hirschman, a sociologist who died a couple of years ago, very good book. And what he did was he looked at every social reform that he could identify and looked at the initial reactions of the majority or the politicians or whatever in different countries. And initially they said things like you you you've characterised as the devil's advocate. They've said things like that to all and every reform, family benefits, unemployment benefits, they said the same, pensions, they said it'll, you know, it'll be a disaster and blah, blah, blah. And then they say it will destroy other things, it will make other things like other services will go, blah, blah, blah. And as soon as it's introduced, then suddenly those those objections fade and the same people who were attacking it before tend to say, well, it's common sense. I always supported it, blah, blah, blah. I always supported it. Oh, yes, yes, yes, I always supported it. And then it becomes part of the social furniture, as it were. Now, the good news is that with our pilots, I've done a big pilot in India, for example, where we provided thousands of people and different communities with basic income. Once people got linked to having it and getting used to it over years, they found their behaviour changed and they became better people. They said so at the end, we did a whole lot of questionnaires. And there's a very useful example of what I call in my books, the accidental pilot. And it was in North Carolina, hardly a radical place. And what happened was the Indian community in a stroke of genius decided that all the profits of the casinos were going to be turned into basic income payments for everybody in their community. And by chance, a local university began a child development project, which was over 20 years. And the 20-year pilot looked at child development and health and issues in families over 20 years. And the basic income payments went at the same time, by chance, right? And what happened is that it turned out, one of the findings, there are other findings which I summarise in the books, one of the findings was this, that after 16 years, children who had been born in the households which received the basic income, compared with other communities where they didn't receive the basic income, the children on average were one year ahead in school. Their performance in school was one year better on average. Remarkable finding, right? And they had the data to look at why this was happening. And it turned out that the major factor was that it had created a better intra-family atmosphere. Less family stress, less argumentation, and and it created a better atmosphere for learning. It's the same with with healthcare and the incidence of ill health. They went, ill health went down, healthcare went up. So in effect, people learned and behaviour changed and attitudes changed. Another example is in Alaska. A man who joined our network became, he was a bit of a strange man. His name was Jay Hammond. And he he was quirky, but he he he joined, he was really a strange buddy, he was fun. But he became, he became a Republican governor of Alaska. And this back in 1980s. And he said he was going to introduce the Alaska Permanent Fund, which he did. And it started paying out annual basic incomes to every Alaskan resident in 1982, right? And over the years, as the fund grew, the amount paid out rose. And to start with, people were saying, is this a good idea? Anyhow, then another Republican governor came along and he tried to use the fund for other purposes to cut taxes and so on. And therefore, channel the fund to paying for the tax cuts. And they had a recall, a public recall, if you know the American practice, he was recalled, sacked, thrown out, and another governor has promised to restore it because the people of Alaska love the scheme. They find that it's really helped reduce inequality, reduce poverty, um, make them have a better lifestyle, be able to afford consumer durables. And it's part of the institutional, so they will not destroy that ethos. They have, the governor has made a complete mess of it, so they've got to rebuild it again. But the people of Alaska love that scheme. And those are just two examples, three with my Indian examples. I believe that once it's introduced, no government of any persuasion would dare take it away.
Dr Rupy: In that way, it's definitely a parallel with the healthcare service that we have in the UK, for sure. And it's almost like, you know, this pandemic is creating equal suffering across the board. Everyone is in this globally, but also nationally. And I think that equality, even though it's an equality in a negative way, is allowing kindness and community to flourish. Like the number of schemes, the number of people pouring out to the hospitals, the number of people volunteering for the Nightingale, putting themselves at direct danger. You know, it's quite incredible to see. And yes, I'm I'm sugarcoating it and obviously there's there's the negative aspect with the rising crime and and a whole bunch of other things, but it's it's definitely the great equaliser and it's that that notion of equality, whether it be financial or otherwise, that can actually have benefits to our whole community and how people function in society.
Guy Standing: Yeah. I agree. I think I think that's going to be one of the, I mean, small, uh, compensations for the loss of life we're we're experiencing and the rising morbidity. I mean, most of us, if we're not directly hit, uh, know friends and relatives who are directly hit. And that sense of solidarity and a sense of anger that this has been allowed to happen because it's not just from China, it's something that has been made worse by the by the lack of care in for our system, our society, our our care system. Look at the huge number of deaths in our care homes. That is that is not accidental. It's the fact that we've had a privatisation of our care system, we have a huge care deficit, and we haven't been building up for the longevity that should otherwise be a blessing on society. And and therefore, you know, you're having a huge decimation of our elderly population. I mean, I live a lot of time in in Italy, basically they've had they've had a generation wipe out. And because the Italians are family oriented, they feel it, you know, really strongly. And we in Britain are feeling it increasingly strongly. And by the time this is finished, we're going to see it much more and that anger should be translating in demanding we do not want to go back to the what was before, the ex-ante. We want a different type of society and a different set of priorities. And I I I think we will get it, but it's going to be a struggle. We won't get it automatically. And that's a key message I'm saying to to friends and and everybody that it's up to us if we want to get it. An opinion poll has just been conducted where it showed for the first time ever that 84% of Britons support a basic income. It's incredible. But we will only get it if we put pressure to have it. I think it's coming and it's it's up to all of us to do it. That's my message.
Dr Rupy: That's my pleasure. Before I end, um, I'd love to share with you my wacky idea.
Guy Standing: Okay.
Dr Rupy: So as someone who, you know, has been part of this movement and has been ridiculed perhaps for, you know, decades and thought, you know, this is mad, it would never work. My idea, which is perhaps small in comparison, is to make food free as a particular construct of our healthcare system and a preventative manner. I think the right food should be free for people. Um, at the moment we spend something around 5% in prevention in healthcare. That means 95% of our healthcare is reactive and that's not to the detriment or me saying anything negative about our A&E system, our primary care system, secondary care, etc. But certainly, if we want to be more pragmatic and uh, preventative in a manner with healthcare, we need to make food, which is a fundamental part of preventative healthcare, free. And I think a lot of people based on insecurities, both financially and educationally, um, are not privy to access those types of foods, particularly when we think about the millions of people using food banks today. And so, yeah, my my idea is to make food free. Um, I think it should be a a human and public right.
Guy Standing: Well, you can tell by my silence that I'm I'm I'm not persuaded and I'll tell you why. I fully understand uh the motivation and I support the motivation in the sense that we need to eat better, the sort of things that you're promoting in your your program and your books. I I believe in those. I you know, I strongly support what you're doing. But I think anything that's free induces wastefulness. Okay? If it's healthcare, we need healthcare, right? I mean, whether it's free or not, we're desperate to get it, right? But if you have, and I've seen systems where they give free food, right? And it leads to incredible wastefulness. It leads to a lack of respect for the resources because if I can get, I can get free food, I mean, I can get as much as I like and throw it away and buy some more and throw it away and the rest of it. And it leads to a lack of respect by the suppliers as well. I I had the dubious pleasure of working for a while as as director in the in the United Nations, director of a big program, working in the Soviet Union and and Russia. And I saw what heavily subsidised food resulted in. It resulted in lousy quality, lack of respect by the suppliers and the purchasers. And I've seen it in India where there's what's called a public distribution system, the PDS, where they give heavily subsidised rice, uh, sugar, um, and oil, and in the in the villages or in the communities, okay? And it leads to terrible deterioration in quality, lack of uh, respect for um, who gets it, and most people don't get it. And it actually doesn't improve the quality. What we found in that pilot I was describing earlier is that once people got their basic income, one of the first things they did was they stopped taking the free food. They stopped taking it because the quality was so lousy, they wanted to get fresh food, buy it in the local market, right? And I would agree with subsidy, you know, so that you make certain foods that are known to be nutritionally better and lifestyle better, cheaper relative to processed foods and whatever. I'm agree with that. But if you have a basic income system, then people can learn to find their their thing. There was a huge improvement, something I didn't mention earlier, in diets. Okay? There was a a sharp improvement in eating fresh fruit and and vegetables rather than than just paddy or something, okay? There was a sharp improvement in in nutrition. I think the problem you are addressing, which you're doing in your programs and your books, is partly educational. People need to be taught. We all need to be taught. I mean, none of us are too clever, you know? We all need to be taught about what is good food, what is really. And I think, you know, it's another little thing that's coming out of this pandemic. There are lots of negatives, so we shouldn't be too joyful, is that people are learning to go back and cook decent food and experiment and grow things in allotments and and their little plots or whatever, which is the best, the essence of good food. I have a small plot and I've planted more potatoes this year than any. And and you know what I mean? You the the getting fresh vegetables that that you pick and you eat within an hour or two, you can tell me much much better, the nutritional value is much greater than if you get it in processed in a in a supermarket, right? And I think what will happen is that localism, local markets, local shops, local barter between us, you know, you grow tomatoes, I grow cucumbers or something, and we exchange. I think it might induce improvements in diet because you are 100% right that we need to improve the way we eat. And I, you know, my nose tells me that this is one thing that might in a funny sort of way be happening as we sit here around Britain.
Dr Rupy: Guy, this was an absolute pleasure to to speak with you. Um, we're going to link to your your incredible books as well, particularly the the latest one that I think couldn't have come out at a better time right now. Um, especially to spark a movement. Um, if there was one parting message in a couple of sentences or so to give to the listeners, what would you say to them right now?
Guy Standing: I would say it's up to us if we want to get it. And an opinion poll has just been conducted where it showed for the first time ever that 84% of Britons support a basic income. It's incredible. But we will only get it if we put pressure to have it. I think it's coming and it's it's up to all of us to do it. That's my message.
