 fetchon. I'r cyflwyll hynny sy'n ddigonadu hyn. So. Y ddechrau pawbheblu. Yw y dyna'r ysgol yw Saias. Gweith o aelod â gweithio'r cyflwyno mewn gwirioneddweith ymlaen ydy. SNF. Gweithio yr ysgol a'r profiad i fynd wedi eu cyfrannu, yr haes sydd yn ei wneud. Ry'r byd yn gallu bod y maedd nid bell usingo oherwydd ac yr ysgol a'r brosy. Mae'r ysgol yn gweithio'r cyflwyno. Gwydwch i chi ddweud o'r hiwn yn gyfnod ychydig yn ei gweld ar hyn. Rydyn ni'n gallu bod iawn. Felly, mae'n ddïlch yn cael ei gynhyrch o'r ffordd gyda'u gilydd, mae'n gweithio'r gweithwyr ar gyfer ymgyrch. Mae ychydig wedi gweithio'r gweithwyr. Mae'n gweithio'r gweithwyr ar gyfer y gweithwyr. Mae'n gweithio'r gweithwyr i'r gweithwyr. Mae'r gyffredin o'r gyffredin. Roedden nhw'n crossf Those. Roedden nhw'n dweud'r cyfaloedd Caerdydd ddyn nhw. Roedden nhw'n ddweud'r cyfaloedd iawn. Roedden nhw'n ddweud'r cyfaloedd iawn i'r Llywodraeth. Roedden nhw'n ddweud sy'n dweud i',r ddweud mwylo ei ddechrau'n gwaith. Roedden nhw'n ddweud i, oed, ym ysgolwch am gyfaloedd. Roedden nhw'n ddweud i ymwylo ei ddweud hyn? I will do that as well, and if there is a fire alarm, that means there's a fire. So you'll see this fire exits there, so if you hear a fire alarm please go in an orderly manner out of the building. I'm very pleased to preside over this inaugural lecture, it's the very last inaugural of a very successful 2012-13 inaugural lecture series. Professor Standing joined us last year, and he's been very quick to find his date for an inaugural. I like that. There are some professors, I shan't mention any names, who keep putting it off. They may be made a professor four or five years ago, and they've still not given an inaugural. So well done, Guy, for stepping up to the plate quickly. I'm greatly looking forward to his lecture this evening entitled Precaria and peasant reframing social protection for the 21st century. I'm sure it's going to be fascinating. My understanding will be introduced by Professor John Weeks. John is Professor Emeritus of Development Economics at SOAS, he's an Associate of the Centre for Development Policy. He's also a senior researcher for the Institute of African Economic Studies at Addis Ababa University. He has research interests in theoretical and policy-applied macroeconomics and development. He's published a very large number in his career of academic papers, books and policy reports in those areas. To maintain the SOAS theme, the vote of thanks will be given by Professor Nyla Cabeer, also from SOAS. She gave her own inaugural lecture not so long ago. That's Professor of Development Studies here at SOAS and an Associate Editor of Feminist Economics. She's carried out research, teaching and advisory work in the interrelated fields of gender, social exclusion, labour markets and livelihood, social protection and citizenship. We're very grateful to both of you for being here this evening and to making this event special, so thanks very much. Professor Nyla has given the vote of thanks. You'll be invited upstairs to a reception in the Brunai suite for some wine and canapes. Now, to pass on to the main meter of the evening, I'll pass over to Professor Weeks to introduce Professor Stanley over to your job. Normal practice is that the person who introduces the speaker is more distinguished than the speaker himself. In this case, it's quite the reverse and it is great honour to introduce a guy standing and assure you that you are in for an extremely interesting and intellectually challenging evening. I think the best thing I can do, given my modest claims to fame, is to be brief. I would like to bring out an aspect of Guy's work that is life really that is unlikely to be stressed and that is, as some of you may know, it is impossible to be innovative and controversial in a United Nations organisation. Guy's standing is the exception that proves that rule in spades because he has been both innovative and controversial in the best sense and, you might say, great cost to his time and effort because in any organisation, even more so in the United Nations, it is a day-to-day struggle. If you spend one day being innovative and controversial, you have to spend the other 364 apologising for it and Guy never has apologised for it. I'll just mention three major contributions that he made, all of which I know quite well. We've worked together closely a number of times, most concentrated form on a very well-known report on the labour market in South Africa, which, like so many things Guy has done, is pathbreaking. I'll only use that word once or I'll have it, or I will have said it many, many times. I would point out three things that are worth you knowing about. One is, beginning in the late 1970s and end of the 1980s, there began to be a change in developed countries in employment patterns in which the security of employment declined. Guy was, if he may or may not have been the first person to recognise that, that's not important, he was the first person to recognise how important it was and put it in context into this end. He turned out, I think, his many reports on labour flexibility in different countries. Second thing I would mention is, soon after the disillusion of the Soviet Union and the political changes in Eastern Europe, it began to get a hint that there were going to be major labour redundancies. Again, Guy may not have been the person who first recognised this, but he was the person who provided the standard analytical and empirical basis for discussing it in a series of books, a best known of which is Reviving Dead Souls, I think I got the title correct. And third, a constant theme, continuous theme in his work over decades has been various versions of the universal income schemes, which is now, I think it would be correct to say, matured or crystallised into what are called unconditional or unfortunately in other people's usage of it. Conditional cash transfers and this has become a major area of funding for donors and I think the inspiration, much of the inspiration for it comes from Guy Standing. I'll finish by saying that it's been a great pleasure working with him and it is a great pleasure introducing him and it will be a great pleasure to you to hear him speak. Well, after an introduction like that, it makes you feel suddenly very old and that's the first thought and of course becoming a professor is a part of the right to passage that Paul mentioned. And this evening what I'm going to try to do is draw on some of my work and present a perspective for policy thinking about social protection going forward and I'd like to dedicate the talk to the brave people who are in Istanbul today resisting dictatorship and they will be seen in the future as part of the global precariat, which I was what I'm going to be talking about. So I dedicate my talk to them. Now an inaugural is a rare opportunity to be mischievous, say things that your friends and relations will nod and say, oh he's gone a bit far on that one. And your enemies nod sagely and look at each other and say, see I knew he was mad all the time. Chris Cramer asked me last week if I had a text because he looked forward to reading it. I have news for him, I didn't respond. There is no text and I think in that sense I would recommend this to all future professors. Don't have a text and then you will be able to say with nature, my memory says I said it. My pride says I didn't. My memory yields. Now what I'd like to do is start with a premise which I've used on many occasions with students and I still find it difficult to convince people in the social sciences and in politics to move in this direction. Every age has had its stupidity in what is work and what is not work. Our age is the most stupid of all. The ancient Greeks had it roughly right although there was a sexist society and hierarchical and many other defects but they understood the difference between labour which is what you do for exchange value and what was done by the non-citizens, the medics, the bannosoi, the slaves and work. Work was what you did in and around the home with your friends and relatives. It was reproductive activity, perfilia and in addition there a sense of time there was play and recuperation that everybody needed to become rounded human beings but the real objective of a citizen of ancient Greece was to maximise the amount of time and effort in scole or shole which we use the term leisure to imply but in those times it meant public participation in the life of the police including the vital activity of moral education through participating in theatrical life, the great tragedies of ancient Greece which taught people a sense of empathy and that theme of empathy is going to be the main one of my talk this evening. Now our age to go a long way forward from the ancient Greeks and through the stupidities of Adam Smith, the founder of economics who dismissed all service activities as unproductive, we get to the 20th century where literally work of all kinds that is not labour disappears from statistics, from political rhetoric and from analysis and it was epitomised by a pithys saying by Arthur Pigu who was a professor at Cambridge, my alma mater when he said that if he hired a housekeeper or a cook national income went up if he married her and she continued to do precisely the same work national income and employment went down. Now you can't get more stupid than that. Now I'll come back to the point a bit later but I think you can see the 20th century and all these social protection devices developed in the 20th century as fundamentally affected by labourism, tying entitlements and so-called rights to the performance and willingness to perform labour but not other forms of work and every feminist and every egalitarian should protest vehemently at that continued misuse of the language. The second point I want to make is something that all of us as students, if we've had a drink or two or whatever we've been doing, we sometimes ask but we forget as we go on through life, the grand questions. What is a good society? What is the type of society that behind a veil of ignorance, in other words you don't know where you are going to be in the distribution of outcomes, would you wish to leave to your children and your grandchildren? It's a good question, it's a vital question because it teaches us the values. The second question is what is it that should be equalised in that good society because every theory of justice believes in the equality of something and I believe that the answer to those two questions is that we want a society in which all of us can pursue our enthusiasm through our work and our leisure in communities in which associational freedom as developed by Aristotle and Hannah Arendt are preserved and strengthened. The two go together and that fundamentally the thing that must be equalised is basic security. Every human being of every society deserves and should have basic security. We've come a long way since anything like that vision was dominating our politics. Now I want to turn from that to the analysis. Some of you will know it from the books. Some of you will be bored to tears by it but I apologise briefly. When I left university social democracy was still triumphant. The battle between that and Soviet communism was still raging and they collapsed in the late 1970s. What emerged then was a triumph for the Mont Pelerin society which we subsequently called the neoliberals. A bunch of 36 renegades after the Second World War formed the Mont Pelerin society economists. And they went forward as renegades and when I was a student we laughed almost at their work. We regarded them as extremists of the far right whose time had long passed. But they had the last laugh in the 1970s when suddenly they became the gurus of Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and a host of others. And no less than eight of that original 36 went on to receive Nobel Prizes in Economics. They have become hegemonic. I won't go into their theories other than to say that what they wanted was an individualised market society that was open, liberalised to the world through masker modification of everything that could be subject to market forces. But most fundamentally and least noticed by analysts is they didn't believe in deregulation. On the contrary they believed in re-regulation in favour of powerful interests and in the systematic dismantling of all institutions of social solidarity that stood against the market. You cannot understand neoliberalism without understanding that fundamental tenet of all their work. And there is a famous remark made by that woman who was prime minister whose name I do not wish to repeat who said there is no such thing as society. It wasn't a slip except in one respect. What she really should have said to be completely honest is that there should be no such thing as society. Because fundamentally if you go back to the early writings of Frederick Hayek, Milton Friedman and the others they wanted to dismantle all the institutions of society that were collective and that provided social solidarity. You cannot understand the neoliberal juggernaught that has come to dominate globalisation without understanding that basic fact. Now what we had then in the 1980s is the beginning of a Pollanian global transformation in which liberalisation meant the most fundamental change in our modern history that almost overnight there was a tripling of the world's labour supply. But the extra billions who came on to the global labour market were prepared and habituated to earn 150th of what any British person would begin to tolerate. Now if you liberalise its basic economics, you don't expect to be a professor to know this you are going to lead to downward pressure on wages and benefits in the rich countries long before the Lewis tipping point emerges where wages and benefits start rising in the emerging market economies. But as I've said before, this induced a Faustian bargain by governments of left of centre, right of centre, all over the world. Because they had to introduce more flexible labour market. When I first started writing about the growth of labour flexibility, I remember the unions and labour parties refusing to discuss it. They said we're not going to allow it to happen, it won't happen and it should be stopped. That was a terrible error. The error should have been corrected and I'm proud to say that I said that at the time they should have accepted flexibility as the inevitable consequence of globalisation and liberalisation of markets. You can't be king conute stopping the waves, the waves are going to wash your way. The Faustian bargain that was then made by the neoliberals and by the new labour and social democrats elsewhere was that as we allow wages to fall, as we allow benefits to be chipped away, as we allow those labour securities that have been built up in the previous area to get weaker, we will give you cheap credit, we will give you tax credits, we will give you labour subsidies to prop up the system. But like every Faustian bargain it had to come to an end and it did so in 2008 and we know the consequences with austerity. They didn't need to make that Faustian bargain, they could have made a Faustian bargain of a completely different kind. They could have said to financial capital and big capital, we are changing the rules and as a result of changing the rules your incomes are going to shoot up not because you're suddenly more clever but because we're changing the rules. Therefore it is only just that we have a sharing process of all that financial capital with the people. We didn't do that. Now what happened then is that as flexibility spread inevitably the old Bismarckian and beverage systems of social security collapsed because the contributory base faded and not enough people were getting entitlements to decent state benefits. So the second historical error was made. Country after country led by Australia, by this country and by United States but then by Sweden and others moved means testing social assistance. Now means testing social assistance means literally that we're going to target the benefits on the poor, the poorest of the poor, all these euphemisms that emerged. But to do that of course you have to have tests because supposing you say you poor over there are poor because of your own fault, you're a lazy bum or you haven't trained enough so we have to have tests to determine whether in fact you are a deserving poor. Surprise, surprise that is exactly what has happened in the ensuing period. Now the means testing and the flexibility led to the great class fragmentation that has engulfed my own life as an academic and as an activist. I predicted I looked back at some work and one doesn't like to say told you so too many times but back in the 80s I said that the flexibility insecurity paradigm is going to lead to a multiple form of class fragmentation with different groups having a different relations to the state. What we've seen is the emergence of a plutocracy and an elite way off the stratosphere, a celeriat shrinking in numbers but with lovely employment security and bonuses and access to capital etc etc alongside a group of profitions who have got burnout written all over them every day of the week and the old working class for which the welfare state was built shrinking everywhere and underneath that the precariat. Now the precariat is an emerging class in the world. Millions and millions of people are entering the precariat and it is providing a new ffulcrum for political action. The precariat has a few distinctive characteristics, I'm not going to go into them in detail, the books do that but I'm just going to list them so that it gives you a picture of who they are and where you are in relation to them. I dare say most of us in this room are pretty close. The first characteristic is that they have distinctive relations of production in marxian terms. They're casualised, they're outsourced, they've got all sorts of euphemistic names to give them chronic labour insecurity. Now I don't know what's happened to the circular that that I produced for this talk but those of you who are interested in this will be able to get it on email afterwards if you haven't got it now but what you can do in fact is by looking at all these complex forms of insecure labour. You can work out that the number of people in a country like the UK who are in labour slack situations, underutilised in labour terms and in insecurity has grown up massively and the difference between the standard unemployment rate and the rate of labour slack taking account of all these under employment categories including zero hours contracts. 23% of all firms in this country today have some people on zero hours contracts. Reminds me of the Soviet system those dead souls who are on the books but not given any employment. They count as full-time labour so the statistics look wonderful but hundreds of thousands are on such contracts. Now I think that is a feature of the precariat but is not the most important. We also find that the precariat has distinctive relations of distribution by which I mean that the structure of social income of people in the precariat has become much more oriented to money wages. Ironically because they are losing entitlement to enterprise non-wage benefits to state benefits to all forms of community support which means that makes them much more insecure and subjects them to the most peculiar feature that we have to address in thinking about social protection which is that the precariat suffers from chronic uncertainty not the classic labour risks that were looked after by beverage and Bismarck. Uncertainty is when you don't know the probability of an adverse event hitting you. This uncertainty is fundamentally important for understanding what we need to do in the future. The next feature is that the precariat consists of denizens not citizens. A denizen is an old concept which we need to revisit which refers to people who have a more limited range of rights than the citizens around them. This is the first time in history when more and more people are being deprived of rights. They've been deprived of civil rights, cultural rights, social rights, economic and political rights and you can document this. This is a strange phenomenon when we're turning people into denizens. The next feature and anybody who deals with people in the precariat or who is in the precariat will understand this point is that the precariat has a very high ratio of work for labour to labour. You have to fill in endless forms, you have to network, you have to retrain, you have to learn bundles of new tricks, you have to do this, you have to do that. Using up much more time it's all work but it doesn't get counted as work. This produces what I've called the precariatised mind. Now there are other features but I won't go into those but I want to end on that point by saying that the precariat today is a more dangerous class than it was when I was first writing about it and it has been split into three categories. The first category consists of people falling out of old working class communities. They don't have a pride in any occupational identity. They look back atavistically and they see their parents who are dockers, were miners or something. They could have pride in. These people are tending to be atavistic politically and are listening to the sirens of the far right. That's the tragedy. The second group consists of migrants and minorities who have to keep their head downs to survive, they're alienated and every now and then as we saw in Stockholm a couple of weeks ago there will be days of rage when it gets too much. And the third group is where the great hope lies. It consists of people who are educated. They were sold a lottery ticket when they went to university and they know that that lottery ticket is worth less and less and the debts are higher and higher and millions of people are experiencing chronic status frustration. This is the first class in history where the level of qualifications is expected to be higher than the quality of the labour they're expected to perform. That is a remarkable feature. Now this part of the precariat is the part that I find myself addressing in many places at the moment and I could be summed up beautifully by a piece of graffiti. Graffiti is always very useful for us humble academics with a beautiful piece on a madrid war which said the worst thing would be to go back to the old normal because this part of the precariat doesn't look back nostalgically and wanting to have 30 years of stable labour in some boring job that stretches into the future until they retire with some golden watch or something. They want to work, they want to develop their capabilities and they want to create and recreate communities around an ecological perspective. Everywhere you go you find the same sort of elements. I must mention in this passing point peasants, it's in the title and you'll see the relevance later. Peasants have some similarities to the precariat in the sense that Richard Tawny famously said they live with their heads just above water. What marks them out in most countries and particularly in those countries where I've worked is they experience chronic debt and they're faced by monopolists of the scarcest resource of all which is called money and as a result the money lenders and the landlords and the ration shop owners can charge for tiny loans, loan shark rates of interest to put them further into debt and into bonded labour. What characterises most peasant communities is chronic uncertainty and we wrote a book on Gujarat where we did a huge survey and what we found was that the way commercialisation was restructuring social income of people was making them more uncertain and removing many forms of social support that were informal but at least reliable in adversity. The uncertainty of those communities has grown dramatically. Now let me reflect on how social protection policy has evolved in this period of globalisation because I think the fundamental truth is that we have become much more utilitarian. This is the triumph of utilitarianism in a way that Jeremy Bentham could not have predicted with any sense of certainty when he was writing at the end of the 18th century. And what we've seen with utilitarianism or majoritarianism if you wish is a sense in which we, the virtuous people, the majority who must be made happier, can be allowed to grow happier while making the lives of the minority who, those inconvenient them, less and less pleasant. Jeremy Bentham, as you probably know, also wrote the panopticon papers which every student of social science should read because they are chilling and highly relevant today. The panopticon papers was basically to say that people must be given the appearance of having a choice but to have no choice and if they made the wrong choice which was not to labour they would be punished. That's the essence of the panopticon papers. Now we have seen a modern version of this developing since the 1980s. The latest euphemism by which the panopticon state has been taking shape is called Libertarian paternalism. I always say at this point and I'll say it again without apology which is that if you have a bath regularly like I do it's the sort of book nudge written by these two American authors which you should take into the bath because it will keep the bath water hot, will raise your blood pressure. If it doesn't you're well on the right. The irony is that Obama when he was elected president appointed one of his one of the authors of this book as his chief regulator in the White House and when David Cameron was elected prime minister one of the very first things he did was appoint the other author I suppose he got the second author you know the cheapy and set up in Downing Street a little shadowy unit called the behavioral insights unit which has since been called the nudge unit and the idea of the nudge unit is to steer people to make the right choice so they're using all sorts of techniques all sorts of tests to get people particularly people who are in the precariat to make the right choice and guess what comes with that if you don't make the right choice watch it now this model of utilitarianism believes in insecurity it believes that insecurity motivates people to labour to save to invest to take risks it's almost a crude Darwinian model it rejects any sense of social solidarity and I've written an article which didn't make me many friends with my religious friends as it were pointing out that a remarkable fact about those who've been pushing the work for agenda the utilitarian agenda is their incredible religious convictions that drives them. Ian Duncan Smith is a converted Catholic Tony Blair who led the way a converted Catholic. The man that David Cameron introduced to Downing Street as his first advisor on social protection reform the man I've crossed sword with several times in my own career Larry Mead. Now Larry Mead has written a number of texts in which he said religious people should be the social policy people and what we need to do is to induce the unemployed and the benefit claimants to blame themselves they must blame themselves he has written that and said it so instead of a world in which we see people drifting into disadvantaged situations and needing compassion and needing our empathy we are to get them to blame themselves a lot stems from that. Now I think there should be a prize an annual prize maybe we would call it the SOAS prize poor for the most toxic political speech of the year last year there was only one candidate that I could think of it was a speech by our esteemed prime minister in a Kent supermarket arcade in which he made in his own words 17 proposals for welfare reform. I advise anybody who thinks they may be near the precariat to read that speech on 24th of June last year because essentially it was about punishing people who are in the precariat punishing because that was the way to their reform to their redemption it's very very clear if I were giving a long treatise and it was in a text I wouldn't say it quite like that but essentially that is what is happening and underneath this is the single most important aspect of the precariat which has not been given sufficient attention which is the people in the precariat are supplicants they are supplicants in the sense they're reduced to begging expecting discretionary charity either from a private or a public or a semi private commercial company dealing with them and that discretion gives the bureaucrats whether private or public tremendous power which induces anxiety and all the other things that I would like to talk about whatever what because the end game of the utilitarian model and I predicted this in 1990 because it seemed to me obviously an evident if you go for flexibility and you go for means testing and then you look for the deserving and the undeserving and you go down that road you have to end up with work fair now work fair literally means compelling the losers in society to do labour that they would not otherwise chew to do I'll come back at briefly at the end now what would a progressive alternative look like because that's where we are today the utilitarians are hegemonic I'm cutting out a bit of my speech on that but I assure you you can document it in great detail but what would make a progressive social protection model I think we must start by saying we need to resurrect the sentiment of compassion you feel the suffering of other people and you say those people are humans as I am and it's unacceptable when you hear that the disabled are having their benefits cut where they're no longer able to repair the equipment in their houses because benefits have been cut any progressive should have a sense of rage but the real virtue of a progressive approach is empathy a sense of feeling that I and you are brothers and sisters and I may not be the same as you but you have as much right as I do to pursue my idea of a good life the sense of empathy which the ancient Greeks taught through their great tragedies our literature our Dickens our Shakespeare and whatever taught us empathy if you lose the sense of empathy you lose your humanity and you cease to be a progressive now we know the psychologist have told us that inequality erodes empathy it leads to a sense of detachment to feeling that their problem is their problem mine I can do very well the empathy has been eroded and in particular the plutocracy and the celeriat and the profitions they don't empathize with the precariat because they haven't been there they don't know what the daily humiliations that they have to experience is like they don't know the anxiety that bites when you don't know where your next meal is coming from but that's the sort of society we've created today every single day and it's rising over half a million Britons are trekking to what we call soup kitchens for homeless and the number is going up watch those numbers it's been dramatically weakened this sense of empathy by the dismantling of occupational yields of occupational communities I documented this in the last but one book that I've written that systematic dismantling of occupational communities that had been built up as guilds for many many centuries new labour made a bonfire of them tore them up stripped them turned to licensing by occupational boards and ruined the sense of community that reproduced the social memory and the ethics now I want to come to the conclusions what would be the elements of a progressive strategy that empathizes empathy compassion and social solidarity remember that the great lesson of Darwin was not the survival of the fittest through being more competitive than everybody else the survival depended on having a sense of social solidarity with inherent reciprocities and altruism for our kind in our case our kind is everybody now the 10 points I want to end on are elements of an empathy strategy the first you will not be surprised is we will need to reconceptualize work we need to legitimize and reward and dignify all forms of work equally the unpaid care that we give to our frail relatives the unpaid work we do in the community the unpaid work that we do ecologically to reproduce our society must be given exactly the same respect as any other form it is ridiculous that if you have a job pouring tea for the boss you're called productive and you're satisfying the duty to labour whereas if you're looking for a frail relative you're not working what a ridiculous idea we need to force our statisticians our politicians to change dramatically and in that regard I urge all of you to read another candidate for toxic speech of the year which comes from a rather different source it's Ed Miliband's recent speech on welfare reform from earlier this month if you look at it and read it carefully it contains three elements one that's a stupid little one but why why why use it you're making under a big speech about the future of welfare and his first proposal is we're going to force all mothers of three year olds to do job preparation training and if they don't they'll lose their benefits what sort of idiotic idea is that the second idea is that we will not allow people to be unemployed for more than a certain time they will all be forced to do labour to go into a job and by the way it will be a minimum wage job the same time he and his colleagues are saying we must go for a living wage a living wage for everybody but he would put the unemployed intermenial dead-end jobs that would leave them in the poverty trap what sort of idea is that and the third idea is to return so the Labour Party says to the contributions principle read carefully and the only losers in that will be the precariat because they will not get into the circumstances where they've got five years of continuous contribution or five years of contributions full stop so it actually will be regressive now that leaves me next to the second point we must overcome poverty traps and what i call precarity traps we have created a society in which every day politicians say we must lower the taxation on the middle class we must lower taxation on corporations and we must have taxes set by utilitarian criteria of giving incentives so they say the salariat must have no higher tax rate than 45 percent it could go lower but we say 45 percent the same time they've announced they have a strategy for lowering corporation tax that is the tax that corporations pay on their profits to 20 percent okay what tax does the precariat pay well according to official calculations by this government and the last government if you go from a meager benefit into a low paying job your effective tax rate is over 80 percent i.e. your low income groups are expected to pay a tax rate four times what our big corporations pay and of course they get a lot of subsidies well so they don't really pay 20 percent we know that but even on paper that is wrong but in addition the precariat faces not just poverty traps where they have no incentive to take labour very little 20 percent of anything they gain right you also have to remember they have precarity traps to overcome if you are in the precariat you have to go and queue for benefits you have to satisfy this test that test this another test go back have the wrong papers come back queue again be differential to some little boy who doesn't know what he's doing and he's equally frightened because he's in the precariat too we laugh but that is the reality that is the reality and you're finding that job centres and other so-called welfare agencies are being rewarded and incentivised to maximise the number of sanctions they introduced don't believe me look it all up in the literature it's exactly what they're doing and in the process this precarity trap of queuing and trying to apply doing the wrong forms coming back again being humiliated again joining another queue in the end you might get your benefit not very much your debts have built up your situation has deteriorated you probably lost your rented accommodation and then along comes the job centre young man and he says we found the other side of London a job minimum wage job it's a casual job may not last more than three or four weeks take it none of us in this room would regard it as rational to do that not only you would be facing the poverty trap but you'd be back in the precarity trap within a weeks we should have a rage against that and that leads to the next point which is part of any progressive strategy we need a revival of respect for due process it sounds very dull but if you're in the precariat and you're a supplicant you find every day that somebody somehow can take away your entitlements with impunity they are doing it regularly millions of people are living with this threat and experiencing the reality now due process goes back to Magna Carta it's fundamental to our our civilisation yet there is no due process there's no legal aid to help people when they're have they're sanctioned and they don't have any way of getting it back we don't find that the people doing the sanctions are held to the same rules as they hold others to in my view when atos makes one of its many many errors it should be penalised and the person who has the benefit deducted and it subsequently proved that that was wrong should be compensated not just have the benefit back where is the rage from our supposed progressive politicians about due process as for work fare itself i think most of us if we were faced by a bureaucrat saying i am sending you to work in an amazon warehouse a tesco supermarket a sewage or whatever you have to do it otherwise we take your benefit away i could say look if i do that i will lower my lifetime income expectations because i will be downgraded as a worker as a person doesn't matter you have to take it now i defy any of us here to say that this is a policy born of empathy of compassion it isn't and it can never be and i can imagine myself snarling with rage and saying up with this i will not put or words to that effect we should do that more systematically the worst thing of all in regard to work fare was recently two young students you probably all know this story if not it should be ingrained in our collective memory they were they were forced to do virtually unpaid labour because they were unemployed and they took the government to court and they said look it's it's it's not law it's not a law that we have to do this it's wrong and the courts ruled in their favour and what did the government do the government rushed through emergency legislation within two days you only meant to do emergency legislation when there's a national crisis bombs are dropping think how they ignored that they rushed through this emergency legislation making the offence retrospective so that if you had refused and been had your benefits stopped you couldn't claim those benefits even though you weren't breaking the law now this is a fundamental principle of british civilisation it went like that but what was equally scandalous was that the opposition are proud representatives of the progressives they ordered their MPs not to vote against it and made it a resignable offence for all the shadow camera the utilitarians in the middle have lost it now i want to skip some points because i'm running out of time and i apologise for that i think it's very important in this new compassionate approach that we have to strengthen the collective voice of the precariat that is beginning to happen it is the energy is taking place but i want to conclude and i hope i don't break down on this point with the last and fundamental principle of a new progressive social protection that is that the time has come when we must move towards having a basic income as a universal right of citizenship move in that direction move away from conditionality and move away from the utilitarian rationale towards the sense of giving people basic security as a right of a civilised society now there are many criticisms which we've dealt with over the years and there are a number of fundamental principles and anybody who's interested in this could join our organisation which has some members here in this room now which has been promoting a basic income around the world the argument i like to use is derived from tompe who wrote in 1795 he didn't use the exact words i'm going to use but the point he developed is roughly right we don't know who contributed to our wealth today everybody's income and wealth in this room and any other room is far more due to the efforts of previous generations than anything you or i do ourselves it's an obvious thing and basically the argument for a basic income is it's like a social dividend for the contributions of previous generations to our collective wealth because i don't know if it's your father or grandfather or my grandfather who made the contributions we don't know if we're honest recently i was invited to middlesbrough to present the precariat and some academics took me around the old parts of middlesbrough those of you who don't know middlesbrough it's a brief point or two in the 1820s it was a hamlet hardly any people there small holders and so on and by the 1850s it had become the great ironworks of the empire and you will find that most of the indian railway system was built on the iron ord in middlesbrough the sydney harbour bridge is built with the iron ord in middlesbrough if you go there today you will find derelict estates people in the street slobwish without education without hope without dignity and you say to yourself or you should if you're a progressive these are the descendants of the people who created the wealth by which those in the south became millionaires and like in duncan speth has his 1500 acres of land they created the wealth and yet today they get none of it and we should be very angry about that and basically the justification for a basic income is that it is a social dividend that we should all share there are many other reasons for moving in this direction it will give people a greater sense of control over their time it will encourage more work rather than labour it can be used as an automatic macroeconomics stabiliser and it will strengthen social empathy because it will induce a greater sense of altruism tolerance reciprocity psychological experiments done in many countries have shown that this is precisely what happens i want to mention too that the illusion of the centre is that somehow work which they mean labour is the best route out of poverty again they're being conutish real wages have been stagnating in or falling in all the industrialized countries in the past 30 years and real wages in this country fell in the last five years at a faster rate than at any comparable time in our history even faster than in the 1930s it is a fool's illusion to think that we're going to address the poverty and inequality but a better wage policies i'm all in favour of better wage policies but they're not going to do what is needed we need to find ways of redistributing financial capital the worst sin of the thatcher regime was giving away north sea oil to those privatised companies so irony of irony today one of the biggest stakeholders in north sea oil or scottish oil depending on your point of view consists of a chinese state corporation well done well done norway set up a capital fund by which all its citizens receive benefits from this fund that is reinvested all the time the alaska permanent fund which was set up has done precisely the same it now finances a regular payment to every citizen of alaska it predates palin and she tried to ruin it but we've also seen the growth of cash transfers as johnny mentioned in brazil when i first went there in the 90s we were laughed at a basic income in brazil today more than 60 million people in brazil receive a cash transfer every month it's still semi conditional i wish it weren't but there's a slaw on the statute books to remove even that conditionality we have done experiments and this is on what the point on which i wish to end we've done experiments in namibia where we gave every person in several villages a basic income and then charted what happened to their lives and more recently we have just concluded a major pilot in india when we started in 2009 2010 the bureaucracy in deli all said guy you're wasting your time it's crazy they'll waste the money it will go nowhere with sewa the self-employed women's association they were converted unicef helped fund it and for 18 months we provided 6000 men women and children with a monthly unconditional basic income individual not family now i won't summarize the results but i want to make four points by way of conclusion the first one is that it was unconditional we didn't tell people what they had to do with their money that's paternalistic if you believe in a progressive social policy you must empathise and say the only difference between them and me is that they're poorer but they're human beings so it's unconditional it was universal everybody in the community got it no means testing no behaviour testing like this it's nonsense you can claw back through taxation if you wish and the 30s individual now what's happened we also tested some of the villages we had a collective body representing people sewa some of the villages no sewa because our theory is that collective voice gives greater strength to the vulnerable and the results we presented at a conference in deli on may 30 and 31 and i'm very proud of the fact that the minister of social development came he is the indian minister cabinet minister in charge of cash transfer policy for the whole of india he came and at the end he said this dispels all doubt that the poor will be irresponsible we have seen child malnutrition dramatically poor we've used the z score of anybody is in public health to see the distribution of weight for age and what's even more wonderful than when moatsart was playing in my ears when i saw these graphs with our data because we've analysed with a randomized control trial comparing with other villages where we've had no basic income is that the weight for age of young girls improved even more than for young boys we've seen schooling attendance improve the schooling performance go up women's status improve economic production improve health care improve in various ways but the point that i found most dramatic and i try and make it in an article in the indian newspaper the financial express that which is circulated for you is that the basic income grants have been transformative what's happened is they've given liquidity to people who didn't have liquidity it gave them a sense of having a greater control over their spending and a greater ability to resist the money lenders and the now car system the bonded labour system and it released the constraints on them able to borrow little proceeds for fertilizers and little things and we saw a rather strange development which is of course one the critics of giving people unconditional basic income because they'll be lazy and scrounge and drink and do all sorts of things well the irony is that what did happen is a reduction of casual wage labour horror but a much greater increase in work on their own farms and their own small businesses and their own activities in caring for their relatives and irony and irony the greatest beneficiary of the system bear in mind it's given to everybody equally is that the people who benefited most are the disabled because they suddenly have a voice at the family they have a voice to say i count now we're seeing a transformation and i'm very proud of the fact that the moment there seems to be very positive mood music if you want to call it that yesterday i was preparing my talk and i was actually meant to having having a meeting with a very important person in india who has suddenly become enthusiastic instead we sent some of the women from the villages to see her and i'm glad to say i received an email this morning saying she was very enthusiastic by the end of the talk this hope still not a great one but this hope that it will be rolled out across india and the minister is encouraging us if we've got the energy to do further pilots now if progressives believe in equality and for freedom for those at the bottom of our society then they must get rid of the labourist bias that has dogged social democrats for the past century or more we must strengthen collective voice but i say to you all that the only way to give people in the precariat and give those peasants a sense of basic security is to move towards a basic income as the floor of a structure of social protection it's not a panacea on top of that you need contributory based systems you need private and public and other forms of of social protection but without a base we're not going to go anywhere in this age of uncertainty we must overcome insecurity and i'd like to end with a quotation which has always inspired me and when i came to be writing the 25th anniversary letter to all our lifetime members in bian i quoted it it's from that fine scholar Barbara Wooten who 44 years ago said it is from the champions of the impossible rather than the slaves of the possible that evolution draws its creative force we have made a tiny start it's up to the precariat to take it to the next stage thank you very much i'm very glad that we moved from the very dismal scenario that guy spent quite a lot of his talk with the scenario generated by the politics of the nudge and welfare and so on to a much more optimistic and you know hopeful scenario the politics of agency citizenship transformation so it falls to me to say thank you um and i i also did not prepare a text i want to have a few minutes but i thought i'd wait to see and hear a guy before i decide what i want to thank him for um so first of all i think i would like to thank guy for what we will all recognize was not a conventional academic lecture it was a very passionate and a very committed exposition of his ideas and his his way of moving us forward um i met guy at the end of the 1990s sometime when he was within the iLO and i had not realized i mean i was called to be on the advisory group of his report uh exactly how these things worked and i think uh john wicks talked earlier i think he mentioned the word maverick but um i think one of the things that struck me about that report is it uh he went about it in a way that i didn't think normally was procedure in these uh un reports because he brought in a very interesting group of people for his advisory board including of course myself and some other feminists and psychologists and sociologists and a few people from from soas and what came out of it i think was about insecurity and about justice and so what i realized and that was really the first time i'd met him and i've met him off and on over the years our parts of crust and i've realized of course by reading his work that this has been a lifelong or at least after he became an adult i don't know if i thought about it as a child but certainly a lifelong preoccupation and it has become clearer and firmer over the years um and what i'm particularly glad about is that he has picked up on that aspect of poverty which was often overlooked in poverty studies and that is what does it mean to be insecure those of us who learned about poverty we always were told that poor people have very short term horizons partly because they're so preoccupied with surviving the present but i think there is more to short term horizons is that you don't know what the future holds so how are you to plan for it and in a sense the way that guy is proceeding with his ideas about basic income and the universal social flaw is to provide people with that firm ground from which they can think about the future and i've also just looked up his website you know as a way of sort of orienting myself and you realize that this is a man with a mission who is i think in several places at the same time and talking to several different audiences at the same time and probably uttering several different speeches at the same time but it makes me very pleased that someone has made it their business to really get on top of the facts about what insecurity means and what is interesting of course is guys examples today were about britain a few years ago maybe a decade ago we'd have been talking about the south but today those very experiences of indignity of humiliation all of that that goes with the work fair with welfareism is very much and he has graphically illustrated it and he clearly has spent a lot of time studying it is very much the experiences that we are seeing around us here so my final thanks to guy is to thank him for making it his business to stay on top of what's going on and to make to provide a possible way forward i am very pleased i knew about this experiment in india i don't approve of randomized control trials but obviously you have to do them in order to get some kind of hearing and i'm very pleased that it seems to have worked i never doubted that it would work i am not surprised that poor people are very industrious given the opportunity but it is very good to have strong evidence that tells us this is so so for that as well thank you