 Okay, thanks everyone for coming to the Development Studies Seminar Series, I am Carlos Oya, Head of Department of Development Studies. Just very, very briefly a few seconds, I wanted to introduce the event and thank especially my colleagues Naomi and Ingrid for organizing this new seminar series. It's been a few years that we haven't done it and I think all my colleagues have been craving for it for some time. Finally we managed it but we needed Naomi and Ingrid to help with the task and it's a real pleasure that we are doing this because it does contribute to the research, cultural research environment of the department but also of the institution as a whole. And it's indeed my pleasure to welcome Guy Standing and the distinguished panel to kick off the seminar series with the launch of his book, The Politics of Time. Guy has been a loyal ambassador, a member of our department for many, many years and we can always count on him to share his research and his publications and his ideas and insights. So it's I think a pleasure for the department for all of us to welcome him and the members of the panel that will all be introduced in a moment. I'm going to have Patrick Allen from the Progressive Economy Forum and given us some introductory words then that will follow with Naomi to introduce the seminar series and the speakers today and then we will have Guy presenting his book and our two discussants following that and we have a question and answer session later on. And there is a reception after the seminar so please stand, stay here and we will keep talking later on. Thank you very much for coming. Thank you very much. Hi everybody and welcome and my name is Patrick Allen. I'm the chair and the founder of the Progressive Economy Forum and we're co-hosting tonight's book launch with so as my co-chair Professor Naomi Hossein and we're delighted that we have a good turnout on the rather wild and windy January. It's just a tribute to Guy's popularity and his politics and his writing I think so. So first a word about Peth and then about Guy and then be over to the book. The Progressive Economy Forum started six years ago. Almost overnight we created a council of economists and academics specifically to counter the narrative and the economics of neoliberalism. Guy Standing was a close friend of our coordinator John Weeks, one of the first to join the council and Guy's been a loyal and stalwart contributor and colleague ever since. At Peth we particularly opposed the economics of austerity imposed by Osborne in 2010 which has caused such damage to the country. Austerity caused a delay to the recovery from the 2008 crash. Research shows that austerity swung the Brexit vote. Pro-Brexit votes correlated to areas suffering economically from austerity and a remain result was likely but for austerity. Brexit has damaged the economy and our institutions and our national reputation. It's seen of four prime ministers and probably a fifth coming soon. It's wrecked our once reasonably efficient public services in every area that you can think of and it's caused a catastrophic reduction in public health and life expectation for poor and vulnerable. So since our foundation Peth has held many events and public lectures. We've shared workshops, we've written papers, we've written a book and we've helped to devise policies and in doing so we aim to help everybody to a better understanding of economics and that's the public, the media, politicians, our advisors and all progressives. Our biggest event to date was Economics 2022 which was a conference at Greenwich University in June 22 where we had 500 delegates and 80 speakers and we followed that up with a slightly smaller event this year, last year 2023. We worked closely with John McDonnell when he was Shadow Chancellor and now we reach out to Rachel Reeves and to Keir Starmer and the other Shadow Ministers and we intend to be a bridge between economists and politicians helping each to understand the other. I recommend our publications, I've set some up on the table outside as a rival to Guy's Table and they're all free apart from our book. So in all of this Guy has been one of our best contributors tirelessly writing blogs and papers and debating and he's a prolific and best-selling author of many books particularly well-known for the book on Universal Basic Income and the Corruption of Capitalism and the Plunder of the Commons. He coined the term the precariat. Basic income may be an idea that has now come into its time, there's a pilot going on in Wales right now which Guy may tell us about and so now Guy's turned his attention to time itself, his book The Politics of Time. I nearly finished it yesterday afternoon and I really did enjoy particularly the last sections where he sets out a plan for the next Progressive Government in a sort of counterfactual imagining that that has happened. So it's a magnificent book and a huge amount of detail and it's very shocking in many of its insights. For most people if only I would say can we reclaim the right to be lazy, that's what I'd like and for most people that's not an option. Modern Capitalism has found ways to police every second. The unemployed are policed all week by so-called work coaches. Now we can be digital nomads working from home or indeed from anywhere. How are we going to end this? So Guy has many suggestions and we're looking forward very much to hearing what he has to say about this book. So over to Naomi now. Thank you. Thanks Patrick and Carlos. So you've done such a great introduction to Guy, I don't need to say much more but I'm going to have to quote from Yanis Varoufakis' blurb for the book. But before I do any of that I should actually say to you that we are going to be recording this. This is going to be recorded and posted on the SOAS website. So don't say anything you don't want the world to know. Does that cover my GDPR responsibilities? I don't know, that's hope eh. But anyway it is being recorded so you know how things are these days. Don't say anything you don't want the world to know that you've said. So it's a real pleasure, it really is a great pleasure for me. I've known Guy's standings work, I've known Guy's work since before the precariat which I don't know how many other people know of his work on the Firmanisation of Labour but it was very formative for me and great many years ago now. And so it really is a great pleasure to be launching this wonderful book. And as Patrick said there's a series of books in between the precariat and the politics of time but somehow it does feel a little bit full circle that you know we've gone from the sort of the great precariousness to the fact that every minute of our time is being policed for the markets now. But I just wanted to before we, before I introduce the discussants, give you the quote that Yanis, no less than Yanis Varoufakis said about this new book. Guy's standings books have over the years pieced together a necessary political and intellectual agenda for defending commons that are still standing for recombining realms that privatisation has wrecked, for liberating workers from the morality of pious drudgery and most importantly for introducing a progressive version of basic income for all. His politics of time is splendid and timely addition to this body of important work and it's available outside there. You'll even sign it for me if you want. So Guy's going to talk to us about this book for about half an hour and then we're very privileged to have two really quite fabulous discussants again, Baroness Ruth Lister. Ruth is very very well known, again I have many of her books on my shelves for her work on poverty and citizenship. Yes it really is an honour because I really admired your work for many many years. It's great to have you here. If you don't know Ruth was for many years at the Child Poverty Action Group and those of you who don't know the Child Poverty Action Group, I think everyone here will know it, should know it. And now she is a Baroness Ruth Lister of, is it butter set? Is that who said? For labour I should stress and has an arm full of honorary awards and doctorates and is also a fellow of the British Academy. So since 2011 you've been Baroness. I had it almost to the day. Right. We also have Zack Polanski. Now Zack is the deputy leader of the Green Party of England and Wales since 2022 and we're really delighted to have you and also a member of the London Assembly from where he has just rushed over to be with us. And he's you know if you follow him on Twitter as I do, you can see he's been carving out a name for himself, challenging austerity politics among others, anti-protest laws as well so thank you for that. But before he was a politician, Zack was an immersive theatre actor according to his Wikipedia page and also he sings Gospel. So this is really quite an exciting lineup but he's not going to be singing sadly. We don't have in his 10 minutes he's not going to be singing Gospel or being an immersive actor but so we'll get they'll get 10 minutes each and I'm now going to hand over to Guy for your half an hour's talk which starts now. Well thank you very much. My phone has been red hot all afternoon with people calling me saying awfully sorry the weather has put me off coming to the event so I'm very appreciative of all of you who have come. It's always difficult when you're presenting a new book because you haven't had time to develop the narrative. The book that's been mentioned the precariat believe it or not I've given over 600 presentations of that book in 42 countries and over that time the book has evolved as much as I've evolved so it's quite a different book that I present as I still continue to do so but this is a subject on which I've really been working for the whole of my career since I was doing my doctorate in Cambridge because it's about how we use time and I was thinking of how to begin and I remember it was reminded as I was sitting there of a famous statement by Sir John Gilgood. John Gilgood was one of those fantastic Shakespearean actors and he said I'm an artisan. He was an immodest character. He was far more than an artisan but he said I'm an artisan. I try to make it a little better every night and in a sense this is a subject that once you're immersed into it you constantly come back to it and it reminded me also of when I was doing some research in the slums of Kingston, Jamaica many many many years ago and I was interviewing an unemployed man and he said man I don't want a job I want to work and I've always hoped that he meant what I wanted him to have meant and I would love to meet him now and see whether he in fact ever realised his dream. Now time is a very strange concept the physicists talk about it in all sorts of ways that can be very turgid and very complicated. I quote Albert Einstein in the beginning of the book and Walt Whitrow who is the greatest philosopher written about time and he quotes a medieval priest and the medieval priest said I think I know what time is until someone asks me what it is and then I'm lost and time in fact is something which needs to be conceptualised and I begin the book by going back to the ancient Athenians. Now the ancient Athenians in my view had a conceptualisation of time which is infinitely better and more sophisticated than what we have today because there for them they divided time uses into the following the first one they said was labour labour is done for exchange value it's done by the slaves the medics the outsiders it is by definition tending to deform the body and the mind and it blocks out the opportunity to learn and be a citizen now we can be critical of that but the theming of that the conceptualisation of that I can relate to we wouldn't want to deny anybody citizenship in our day but that's what their distinction led them to believe and they differentiated labour from work work was what you did with your friends and your relatives in the home or around the home it involved reproduction it beyond creativity and the reproducing of one's filia civic friendship Socrates believed that that if you were going to do labour you better do insecure labour because if you did secure labour that bred a spirit of civility doulia and therefore he actually didn't want people to be in regular labour the ancient Greeks also had a differentiation on non-work non-labour they thought of recreation time needed to get the body fit the mind fit and so on and they had a concept of chollé chollé was a combination of education and public participation in the life of the police and the citizen was expected to maximise the amount of time that he spent and it was a sexist society he spent in chollé that was your citizenship time but they also had another two uses which I emphasise which don't get much attention one is ergia Aristotle was loved ergia ergia literally means idleness and they thought it was vital that people had plenty of opportunity to be idle because being idle means you can contemplate you can deliberate your mind devolves and Cato later was to say never is a man more active than when he's doing nothing a very kind statement that has come down to us over 2000 years ago and they had a concept which evolved into commoning eranos was the term which was close to being in a guild commoning was shared activities with a focus on reproduction a focus on linking nature to our our species and keeping us embedded very relevant a commoning now though thinking of those conceptual tools I try and trace three time regimes not going to go into them now because I don't have the time but the background theme of the book is going from agrarian time regime through an industrial time regime to a tertiary time regime of today and you will see the dynamics in the agrarian time regime that the common man and woman wanted to maximise the time in work and leisure and minimise the time in labour that was their objective and the rulers wanted to push people gradually into labour but they were fighting against the ethos of the era and all the great battles in our history I'm speaking as a British person at the moment all of the great battles have been about the resistance of the commoners to the pressure to do labour the peasants revolt of 1381 the charter of the forest which I use as the central starting point of 1217 the charter of the forest said everybody has a right to work in the commons and a right to resist labour this was a subversive document that has never been surpassed in our history much more radical than the communist manifesto of 1848 or the child of the human rights of 1948 it's a really radical emancipatory document now you go on the civil war was also an attempt to restore the commons an attempt to restore the right to work they lost the bourgeois revolution made sure of that but the levelers the diggers were part of that tradition of fighting for the retention of a meaningful right to work but of course by the 19th century in industrial time coming up Karl Marx was quite right to say to talk of a right to work is in his words an absurdity a miserable pious wish in capitalism because you're being pushed to labour and labour is not a right now the funny thing is in the story and the first provocative theme I want to send out this evening which is not the main theme through the book is that we've seen subsequently a fetish of jobs a fetish of jobs that developed very much through the initial vagabondage acts which said anybody caught lay not doing labour would be branded and the second offence offence second offence they would be hanged so several hundred thousand people were hanged in Britain for not doing labour then we go through the enclosure then we go through the various acts of the 19th century which I discuss and you push everybody into a proletarianized existence but in the book I also discussed the resistance that took place that started with the romantic poets with Wordsworth and Coleridge went through Carlisle and Ruskin and evolved into people like Kropotkin and William Morris who's one of my intellectual heroes who were constantly trying to resist the juggernaut of labourism and I say it was one of the historic errors of modernity at the latter part of the 19th century when the juggernaut of labourism won and it was symbolized by the collapse of William Morris's socialist league in the 1990s and the emergence of ethos that everybody should be in labour and this went forward into the 20th century with Lenin saying with the Soviet constitution he who does not labour shall not eat very much a labourist doctrine and it went further into the evolution which was very strange given that the left was suddenly saying we want everybody to be in labour the Fabians that formed the Labour Party in Britain thought the youth if they weren't doing labour they should be sent to labour camps ah remember that the evolution of labourism of course is associated with Taylorism Frederick Taylor's principles of scientific management came out in 1911 and it was eulogised on the left as well as the right and Taylor's fundamental principle was that anybody doing jobs should not really be thinking he wanted to separate the thinking function from the doing function and make jobs so that workers just did jobs and it went forward and I recall the example of Stakhanov Alexei Stakhanov and Alexei Stavenov was this Soviet coal miner who in one day he did 14 times his quota of coal mined with his hands and he became a Soviet hero celebrated by Stalin but also celebrated in the United States and Western Europe as a model worker so this picture on Time magazine the cover and this sense of the model worker as an individual competitive being better than everybody else in their jobs went forward in different ways and I cite that with people like Th Marshall one of the most influential post second world war sociologists saying that everybody has a duty to put their heart in their job tell that to someone who's cleaning a public toilet or sitting in an Amazon warehouse and see what they might say to you put your heart into your job so we have a situation where the fetish be developed even further but I think I'm skipping a bit for time I think it reaches uttermost absurdity in I'm afraid to say under new labour and Tony Blair appointed a person I know quite well who's also a member of the House of Lords now Richard Layard as his happiness Tsar and Richard reasoned that people who have jobs are happy and on the same basis he said that all youth should be forced to take jobs well if jobs make you happy why do you need to force anybody to take them think about the logic and he then advocated and new labour implemented a program of cognitive behavioural therapy CBT which is emerged in a new phase of neoliberal economics in nudge theory nudge theory says people have to be persuaded to make the right choice which has a harks back to Bentham and his panopticon of the late 18th century which I discussed briefly in the book and this therapy approach was basically incorporated into David Cameron David Cameron appointed one of the co-authors of nudge the nudge book as his advisor in 2010 and it led to the current ethos in universal credit so the job's fetish has gone on very systematically and has led to a lot of outcomes that I explain a bit in the book that I won't go on to now so that's one theme that we've lost the perspective on work and comedy because we've given jobs an excessive fetish the second theme is that in a second theme I'm going to mention in the development of the tertiary time regime all the boundaries in the traditional time uses have broken down you can't distinguish between labour and work and recreation all the boundaries tend to be blurred with multitasking or whatever you want to call it and in the process what we've seen is a chronic inequality in access to time and I present it in class terms by comparing people in the salariat people who have salaried employment with all the perks and the rest of it with the precariat a modal of barbarian ideal type if you like and it's quite interesting because if you do that you immediately find out that if you're in the precariat you have many forms of freedom in labour you have paid holidays for a start you have future time security with an occupational pension probably offering you a quarter of a century of non-labor at the end of your employment period you have retraining constant retraining that is paid for you by the firm continuous professional development it's called where mandatory retraining every year has to take place and you have some very bizarre phenomenon one of which is called empty labour empty labour is actually quite an interesting concept but essentially what it means is people who are paid to be in jobs but not actually doing any labour and I quote an example an extreme example of a civil servant who on retirement sent an email to all his colleagues said in the past 14 years I have been here but not really here because I haven't had to do any work at all and in that period I've been paid over 500 thousand pounds it turned out to be and adieu and it was leaked that email into the press got a little controversy but in case you think it's just a matter of bureaucratic people I mention a case of a man working in the city of London in one of the major insurance companies who on leaving it he said I've been in the job for six years I've been paid six a six figure income every year but actually the amount of work I've had to do I could have done in less than six months but there are a lot of smaller cases of empty labour that I mentioned in the book now I don't want to go into the other details but a lot of the time of the salariat there's another concept called business leisure going on retreats going on paid bonding series it all takes part of the the salariat so they're doing very nicely by contrast the precariat have none of those things but at the same time they have to do a lot of work for labour work that they have to do or they pay a heavy price if they don't do it but for which they don't get any compensation any recognition in our statistics and so on and they also have to do a lot of work paying for their own training they have to do a lot of work for reproduction they have to do a lot of work for the state and one of the scandals of our time someone asked me a PhD student was interviewing me before this and she said what do you think about universal credit do you think it could be modified as some politician has tried to persuade her I said no if I had my will I would end universal credit tonight abolish it because universal credit takes the time of people in the precariat totally for granted okay it applies an illegal system in which people pay a very heavy price for what one might call time offences being late for an interview that they have to attend regularly 10 minutes is there anybody here who has ever not been late for interviews but only for people who are trying to get benefits is it a crime and it's a crime which the penalty for doing it it turns out on average and I give some figures on average greater than the average fine in all our magistrates courts for real misdemeanors and yet there is no due process there's no representation a bureaucrat finds you guilty but there's no proof and many people manage to appeal after they've been punished and the appeal takes a year and eventually they're proven to be not guilty but by that stage they paid a heavy price so the inequalities are built up in the way people are spending time having to spend time and you can expand on that particular thesis the last point for the precariat is you have to spend a lot of time working for charity working to queue for food banks some two million people in our country today have to make use of food banks depending on the discretionary nature queuing wasting their time the victorians we thought had been finished but that is the reality today now briefly on the other couple of points and then I will conclude the second part of the book looks at chronic uncertainty we are living in an era of chronic uncertainty an uncertainty for an economist is not like the contingencies of the welfare state era uncertainty is about unknown unknowns I don't know what shock is going to hit us next I don't know what hazard is going to hit us next and you can't have an insurance system against uncertainty you can have an insurance system against unemployment or illness or accidents or maternity or whatever but for uncertainty you don't and so millions and millions of people are existing in chronic insecurity linked to uncertainty and none of our political agendas are addressing uncertainty we have secure enomics no one's quite able to convince me what the hell it means I've read Rachel Reeves' speeches I haven't got a clue yet but I'll get it in the end I hope but uncertainty is something that people face in all their living and we need to develop people's robustness develop people's resilience and give people a sense of control over their time and this is where I come back to basic income and what I've been trying to do is say look the control of time is part of an emancipatory agenda we want to revive work we want to enable people to do work and commenting that are outside jobs and I ask a question what is the most valuable form of work in this country according to the Office of National Statistics what is it what is it that takes more time is more valuable and yet is given a value of zero in our measure of GDP and economic growth which Keir Starmer and Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak all want to accelerate growth so this activity this work which is regarded as the most valuable is given a value of zero it's called unpaid care work and the Office of National Statistics have done the imputed values of the value of women's unpaid care and it comes to about 50 percent of the total monetary value of the economy okay 50 percent and I also take a very strange example when I wrote to the Financial Times recently because they said there's a problem of economic inactivity it must be reduced and I said what do you mean what's wrong with what you call economic activity it means people doing a lot of work why do you call them inactives they're not inactive and this led to a torrent of abusive letters comments to me or not to me addressed to the newspaper because my article come out addressed to me including one who mocked and said you might as well include breastfeeding and as it happens the book does precisely that the book does that and it gives value of breastfeeding why should you seriously why should you say we should include the value of cow's milk or goat's milk in measures of national income and not women's milk that is giving succulents to our future generations and it is extremely valuable and it turns out that countries vary enormously in the amount of time that women devote to breastfeeding and it's worth a wonderful study has been done which I cite which is worth hundreds of millions of pounds a year okay so you if you want growth you should say women turn to formula milk because then you get a double whammy increase economic growth come on it's but stupid absolutely stupid for me now we need to think of a progressive agenda and this is what the final chapter of the book tries to do it does a William Morris allegorical it's come but in the process I want to see a revival of commoning and I will end by saying this we are at the moment where at this very moment there are about 150 basic income pilots and experiments taking place around the world if you told me that five years ago I would have said that's in my dreams that's in my dreams the results have been fantastic the results have been consistent I'm advising Mark Drakeford and the Welsh government on a beautiful basic income pilot for care leavers in Wales I'm talking working with people in Barcelona in Nepal we've done India we've done Africa we've done Brazil we've got pilots 100 pilots in the United States it's extraordinary and the first thing that happens is that you see people's mental health improve you see people's physical health improve you see people getting more control of their time you see people doing more work not less contrary to what the critics say but you see them doing more collaborative work more commoning more altruistic work you see these consistently the results come pumping out it's the politics now that we have to win we can afford it and I explain that how it can be afforded in the books but what is really a beautiful aspect of the basic income debate now that didn't used to be the case is that they are showing that people when they have control of their time they turn to the sort of things we would all like to do work real leisure commoning allotments I'm proposing see allotments which are growing in Denmark there are lots of activities sharing that are facilitated and that these pilots are showing taking place for me this is an exciting moment but it's also a depressing moment because we're not seeing it into our politics yet but if we allow the insecurities to grow and the inequalities behind it to grow then the drift to populist politics and the drift to supporting the sort of things that Patrick was talking about and the trumps and the Boris Johnson's and the Orban's will continue because people living in fear and insecurity don't have the time for shoddy they don't have the time for deliberative democracy and that's where we need to build thank you very much for listening well I hope I'll be flawlessly timed I probably won't be anyway thank you very much for the invitation and congratulations to Guy for what is an important book which I hope will stimulate a debate on the politics of time the significance of which he illustrates through what is a very broad canvas however the very breadth of its scope makes the role of discussant that much more difficult and as I was reading it I jotted down points I might want to take up but ended up with lists that would have kept us here all night so I decided to focus on time itself the politics of time and how such a politics helps us think about a good society which Guy refers to in a number of places and I think I first really understood the significance of time through my work on feminist approaches to citizenship which was mentioned earlier whilst gender isn't a central theme of Guy's book it's importance for the study of time comes out in a number of places if we think of time as a resource it has to be understood as a gendered resource and the politics of time as a gendered politics and this guy underlines time is a resource for citizenship and as he said one of his central arguments is the need for time for chalet and I'm glad that you mentioned it because I didn't know how to pronounce it so public participation including participation in politics formal and informal and to the extent that women have spent and continue to spend more and less controllable time than men on unpaid domestic work in the private sphere they have entered the public sphere with one hand tied behind their back and while the domestic division of labour is less gender skewed than it was in the past it has not been eliminated and I'm conscious here that I'm not following Guy's directive to distinguish clearly between labour and work but while I can see his argument I think it could be confusing in practice and therefore I'll continue to talk about paid and unpaid work stroke labour from a policy perspective the impact of the gender skewed division of labour stroke work points to various forms of time rights and Guy is critical of what he calls labour time rights but such rights can make a real difference to the gender distribution of time and the extent to which people with caring responsibilities still more likely to be women have control over their time and I'd highlight in particular parental leave not the pathetic version the Covenant government introduced but something more on the Nordic model that earmarks part of the leave for fathers thereby encouraging them to spend more time on the care of infants and children so that we see a real shift in the gender division of unpaid care work other examples of time rights would be the right to time to care for adults such right has just been introduced thanks to a private member's bill but it's unpaid and it really needs to be paid to constitute a meaningful right now the other key policy issue here is the length of the paid working week which still works to the disadvantage of those with caring responsibilities and I was surprised that Guy was so dismissive of the growing support for a four-day paid working week the evidence I've seen has been pretty positive including from the workers point of view and a report on what was billed as the world's largest four-day working week in practice shorter working week trial to date found that it produced a meaningful reduction in paid working time without loss of earnings and had for most part a positive impact on employee well-being with less stress and improvements in both mental and physical health three and five reported they were better able to combine paid work with caring responsibilities or with their social life personally I think we should be arguing for a shorter paid working week rather necessarily a four-day week as a shorter paid working week can be of more value to those with caring responsibilities but while I can see the limitations that Guy outlines in the book I'd have thought this represented a valuable transitional measure to the kind of good society that he's arguing for and that may be something we want to debate not surprisingly given his earlier work on the precariat security stroke insecurity is as you've heard an important sub-theme of the book and in my own work when I came to write the second edition of my book on the concept of poverty I realized that insecurity was an in was an aspect that I'd paid insufficient attention to not only in terms of the insecurities of the labour market that Guy has done so much to highlight but also the existential insecurity that poverty can mean as there is a constant worry about making ends meet and the smallest unexpected spending demand can torpedo the delicate budgeting tightrope required to get by in poverty and treading that time rope can be very tight rope can be very time consuming again particularly for women who still take the main responsibility for managing poverty and act as shock absorbers for the rest of the family if they're in a family getting by in poverty when it's not possible to buy oneself out of some of the work involved can take a lot of time James Bloodworth a journalist who spent six months in low paid jobs describes poverty as the thief of time as without money every day living takes more time he says and lacks the speedy efficiency which characterizes middle-class life although I'm not sure that's how I'd quite describe my own life that in today's society Guy also notes as he's just said how work for the state for instance claiming universal credit is a major time stealer that has received little political attention and with reference to the precarity observed more generally that their time is given no value or respect and while this is not strictly a time issue he rightly in my view enunciates the principle that officials should follow the Kantian golden rule of treating others the way you would want to be treated yourself for me this means a culture of human rights in which all including in particular members of marginalized groups are treated with dignity and respect and I don't mean here the kind of cliche that's now become part of sort of managerialism but a meaningful basis of human interaction on the part of state officials and professionals and this reminds us that time is both a relational and a distributional issue I've talked about the gender distribution of time Guy does too but focuses more on the class distribution and here is worth noting how a time lens has been used to highlight inequalities in pay just recently the high pay center got a lot of coverage for its observations that a FTSE 100 chief executive had been paid more in the first three days of the year than the median annual salary of a full-time worker UK worker time is both a relational and distributional issue really comes to the fore when as as Guy has talked about it comes to unpaid work of care and as he notes the neglect of care work by policymakers economists and statisticians was a failure throughout the 20th century what he doesn't say is that one reason for that neglect has moved was that such work has traditionally been done largely by women while care has moved up the political agenda as he notes in the book the hope that many of us had that the pandemic would lead to greater value being placed on such work and on as an essential service and on the time expended on it has been pretty much dashed and that brings me finally to the politics of time in a good society Guy uses a nice device of envisioning a progressive alliance government in the 2030s one which would emancipate time and work for its more equitable distribution as a working politician I must admit I find it difficult to envisage such a government much as I might welcome it but I do believe that some kind of vision of a good society is needed now citing William Morris Guy argues that all progressives should from time to time imagine a good society of the future and the idea of a good society represents a kind of loadstaff a compass the left of center group who's board I'm vice chair so I wrote a piece on the good society at the outset of the pandemic much of it looks like wishful thinking in the current political context but much of it chimes with Guy's book and in particular the importance of time when it comes to thinking about paid work care work and time for other forms of work leisure and just to be including the time to enjoy the beauty of the natural environment and culture in its many forms and I quoted from a family member with whom ATD fourth world a human rights anti-poverty organization worked and they said even though I live in an area which isn't beautiful I can still appreciate and create beauty the right to beauty is part of my right to dignity and guy is in my view rightly critical of the idea that dignity is conferred through a job instead it's central to the notion of human rights and is of huge importance to marginalize groups such as people in poverty whose dignity is constantly denied so for me time has to be one of the building blocks of a good society and together with an adequate secure income and it's that security of income that has persuaded me of the merits of a basic income having been rather skeptical in the past sufficient time is the starting point of a good life that enables us all to live with ease I like Guy's vision of a future which values slow time commoning and deliberative democracy and his edict that we have to live in the now which is what mindfulness is all about and I'm missing my mindfulness practice this evening uh while also thinking of guarding and reviving a sense of the future but it's not a future synonymous with economic growth rather it represents respect for I quote the precautionary principle the ecological imperative of the 21st century and with that I hand over to Zach who is much better place to talk about the important ecological themes of the book thank you very much uh and thank you Ruth and Guy those were were excellent to listen to and have provoked lots of thoughts which are now easy to share with you I guess the first thing I want to say is thank you for being here it's really present this idea of time and the fact that anyone could be doing anything tonight but actually have chosen with your time to be in here to be listening to this and I hope you'll give the time to reading the book as well I also want to thank Guy I've said this to him privately before but he's informed a lot of my thinking so to be able to share this panel is a personal pleasure I've been a long advocate for universal based income and that's obviously Guy's something Guy is very associated with but within the universal based income are so many ideas and themes that I think have pulled out more in this book they've always been there implicitly but I think are really given an explicit spotlight now before I get to those wider themes I guess I want to just give a quick personal story which as I was listening to by the way I didn't know that I was going to talk about this tonight journalists are often surprised that I don't plan speeches or I don't prepare every word that's going to come out of my mouth but I guess it comes back to time maybe it's from being an actor but I prefer the idea of being present just landing looking at who is here and what needs to be said in this moment and then I was listening to Guy and Ruth talking and thinking about the rumor in I was thinking there's a parallel track of my own life here which I think I could share that explores a lot of the themes that are in this book so being an actor in London 20 25 years ago anyone who has been an actor or knows any actors knows being an actor is very rarely being on stage being an actor is being a waiter it's working in a warehouse it's being out of work it was all of those things I was doing and I was effectively a property guardian in Camden I won't go too deep into proper property guardianship but if anyone who doesn't know what it is it's essentially legal squatting I was often living with 20 25 people in a very precarious situation where the landlord can kick you out anytime you don't have any rights now I'm knocking it I actually loved it I loved it for the sense of community we would dine together we would create work together but it is no appropriate situation that people are being forced into that situation other people are living with by precarious housing and very often when I was out of work I would walk from Camden to Soaz and I'm sure you will recognize this but the Harry Krishna would often be out there I would get a free meal I would have conversation I would often sit and chat to students and although I wasn't being educated at Soaz I would often get into those deep debates about what was going on and what protest was going on that day and 15-20 years ago I'd never grown up in any kind of political education I was completely ignorant to politics in fact I was completely uninterested I can shamefully say now not really shamefully because it's shamed the system but if you'd ask me who the leader of the opposition was 20 years ago I wouldn't have even been able to name them so it's quite a journey to the happy deputy leader of a national party and be elected in the London Assembly but I think that points to some of the failings in the system but also the beauty of being an actor and being out of work meant that when I could get free food and time I could spend time talking to people educating myself reading and surely which again I didn't know how to pronounce but that idea of being part of that wider context which I think Soaz does so beautifully by both being an academic institution but also being really present and aware to what are the the social justice issues of society and what are those wider themes that meant maybe I should have probably given some money to Soaz but I felt like I was getting some of that education and in fact back then there was a cafe which I believe isn't there anymore where people could just go and hang out really and I'd often go there with a book anyway so that started to happen and then I started to get involved with something called theatre of the oppressed again I won't go too much on a divergence here but I'll bring it straight back to the book theatre of the oppressed was essentially working with oppressed groups or vulnerable groups working about how they could empower their voice they would often call it rehearsing the revolution so I was working with a group of homeless people we would talk about how they've been evicted from their landlord and because I was an actor confident with speaking I would talk about how do you want to challenge your landlord what kind of state do you want to be in what are the words that you want to use to really grab someone's attention but during that over a period of time you start to realise and it's a bit like in the book we talk about positive well-being and cognitive behavioural therapy sure these things can be helpful for people for a period of time but they're essentially symptoms or products of a neoliberal society that says the problem is yours and you can just fix it and theatre of the oppressed as much as I loved it and I wouldn't describe it as neoliberal in fact it came from Paolo who for yeah from a pedagogy of the oppressed who can certainly not be described as a neoliberal I think I felt like I was tinkering at the edges I was trying to train people to have louder voices more powerful confident voices these things are important but if you have a system that is fundamentally broken and you have a system that means people do not have the time to breathe they don't have the time to think then how can they possibly represent themselves against the oppressed now it's interesting that Ruth said I can talk about ecological ecological justice and it's something I absolutely love to talk about it's often a common misconception of the Green Party that the anything we care about and I know you weren't saying this is polar bears and forests those things are really important and I take Guy's challenge that the blue commons is just as important as the green commons and needs to be spoken about more but fundamental to every time I have a microphone is to point out there is no environmental justice without racial social and economic justice too and this book talks about this beautifully the intersectional how these things all come together and for me at the core of this the thing that is destroying all of these justices is this obsession with GDP and economic growth and to bring it straight back to the present 24,000 people have died in Gaza and from our establishment parties I'm proud that the Green Party been calling for a ceasefire but from our establishment parties there's been very little just a following of America but as soon as trade was interrupted in Yemen it was suddenly a crisis as soon as suddenly it might affect economic growth people's lives were not discussed but our lives in terms of precariat or salar or whoever we might be was discussed because it was disrupting us and it's this obsession with economic growth I would say that it's destroying people's time who are the most vulnerable and oppressed because it's constant need to keep up just to pay for heating and eating never mind an idea of work never mind leisure and of course GDP even the person who designed it all came up with the idea says this is a terrible way to measure health and well-being to give some very quick examples I have my reusable water bottle that's not good for GDP but if I go and buy a plastic bottle terrible for the planet but does great for the GDP if I go running or go to you know don't go to the gym but work out in the park great for my health great for the national health service but not great for GDP no one's profiting from that and of course straight back to Gaza if we spend money in bombs and wars that's wonderful for world GDP but terrible and brutal for people's lives who are suffering through that so to really nail in in that idea of time and Guy talks about the Lauderdale Paradox as a problem with reading a book I don't know how to pronounce these things but the idea that it's private wealth grows public wealth shrinks and I think we're really seeing the pinnacle of that started well I was going to say it started in 2010 it started way before that with factorism but we saw it through new labour and that continued economic growth again there's the need of all things rather than talking about community cohesive communities mental health people coming together lives live with purpose and of course when we do that we can talk about solving the disability disability pay gap the ethnicity pay gap and yes the gender pay gap because the point about care really comes alive when you align it with GDP if I'm looking after someone at my home that doesn't help GDP but ironically if you choose to look after someone in my home and I give you money for it it's suddenly great for the economy this is completely incoherent and again completely misaligns with these ideas of time a huge hero of mine for a long time has been William Morris it was brilliant to see him mentioned several times in the book and of course his news from nowhere this idea of going out into a future and looking at what a better society can be is kind of the anecdote of that antidote sorry to all the doom and gloom I'm presenting because when we talk about ecological collapse it's really important that we don't ever talk about it in a way that paralyzes people or people feel like they have no hope but also at the same time it is actually vital that we speak truth to power and we talk about the fact that this general election that is coming up at any time this year I feel like it's hardly spoken about in the media that we have these targets for 2030 and whatever happens at this next election will be an existential moment for the planet and now I'm not just saying that the UK government will will solve everything and certainly I'm afraid with either the Labour Party or Conservative Party it certainly looks they will not solve everything this is global problems require global solutions but the fact that we've increasingly moved away from the global stage and we've increasingly diminished our role on the global stage means that both yes for climate but arguably even more important for diversity and biodiversity and ecological collapse these are critical decisions that need to be made right now but this is a government that just keep running at every problem they can have and making it worse we hear this obsession with stop the boats and this idea of Rwanda but then we have a Labour Party who do not criticise it because it's inhumane they criticise it because it's inefficient my point here isn't to make a party partisan point although of course is implicit in it my point really is the urgency of which we need to be dealing with some of these wider problems in society and particularly protecting the most vulnerable people but if we keep having to firefight in our politics if we keep having to deal with culture wars that are being manufactured and created then this means we can never get to the base of what is going wrong in our society and I think Guy makes a really compelling argument in this book that fundamentally this is what looking at the difference between work and labour the final thing I'd say just to wrap up is I'm elected in the London Assembly for those who don't know the London Assembly my job essentially is to keep London Mayor Sadiq Khan held to account now when I was first elected I decided that people have had enough of politicians shouting at each other unfortunately the London Assembly is one of the few bodies that is elected by proportional representation that creates the kind of progressive politics that Guy is talking about in the end of his book and it means that actually I cooperate with Sadiq Khan and credit to Sadiq he often credits me with having shifted his voice or movement on ideas now I do think there's a space where I expose gaps in his plans and that doesn't mean we're from the same party and so I push it that hard and one of the biggest gaps I think is I was talking to him just this week about the idea of a citizens panel communities coming together that want to talk about their green and blue spaces and how they can be protected but crucially I said you would have to pay these people for their time and effort because if you're looking for marginalised diverse groups to have a voice and have a say then unless you give them the time and you can only give them that time by making sure you're compensating for it in that way in a fundamentally neoliberal system then you're only going to get the same people coming in with the same ideas and the mayor's response to me and I'm not knocking the mayor he's one of the better politicians from the Labour Party but his response to me was so establishment he said that I shouldn't knock the amount of people around the city who are giving up their time for free boxing coaches scouting coaches all of these volunteers we cannot have a society run on volunteerism and we cannot have a society that is run on charity charity exploits the precariat because they're made to feel guilty and then they're made to give their time and effort it's beautiful that they do but our society should not exist on it so again to wrap up I think in the last chapter of Guy's book and and get there as as quick as you can while enjoying the book does give that vision in so many ways of the better society that we can have that is socially just and puts the environment and people and planet the heart of it so I'm looking forward to the discussion and thank you very much for having me thank you so we now have some time it depends on how thirst you are some time for discussion and I think Guy will probably want to have the very last word but we are going to take some questions from there no wait Ingrid I will decide who gets to speak first okay so this bit is also being recorded but people won't be able to see your faces so I'm going to yes I'm going to identify some yes some hands will take I think maybe three to begin with yes so the lady at the front here please sorry here Ingrid and it's nice if you introduce yourself but you don't have to if you don't want people to know you are sure no worries thanks everyone that was really interesting my name is Sophie Scott Brown I'm from Gresham College Guy congratulations on the book brilliant I think one of the main themes in this is this notion that what's the reason that we really want to reclaim time and it's actually got an awful lot to do with control and that made me wonder a little bit about again thinking about politics and political solutions to that to be provocative I mean would traditional party and parliament politics as we currently understand that really be interested in relinquishing that control because having everyone laborized or proletarianized is actually really convenient for controlling them so possibly even things like that sound very well meaning and attractive like we will give you or we will implement the four-day week for you that's not quite giving up the control that's at stake here so do we need to maybe do some reimagining of the political imagination alongside our reimagining of time thank you that's great let's take let's take another question over there sorry Ingrid over there sorry can you see you can't see what I'm doing thank you and then at the back there afterwards yeah well was that me yes cool my name is Datto I'm an economist and a foreigner thanks for the insightful panel my questions to Guy I guess my observation was that you insisted on the term fetish when you were describing work is the reason for that do you mean it in a marxist sense do you want to talk more about it great question and Ingrid there's somebody at the back there yeah thank you thank you for your time this evening um as this is about development study selection I'm a development study student I would love to know what are the implications and maybe even solutions of using this politics of time is this going to be another idea that's going to be implemented either financially or through policy um two countries that are the recipients of aid before it's even enacted in the UK or do you think this is something that the UK would trial on its own before it goes rushing off and telling other countries what to do thank you for those three questions um I think the political parties uh have to be confronted with the fact that at best they act paternalistically and at worst they're moving in the direction of a panopticon state with a banopticon state that I discuss in the book where you are increasingly banning a larger and larger segment of our population from being full citizens that is an extraordinary feature I didn't emphasize it in my talk but the way the politics of time has been actually implemented in recent decades not the recent not just this conservative government but the previous coalition government and the new labor and going back to Thatcher so it's the major parties are all implicated and then still not prepared to have an emancipatory approach but if they don't do that we're going to see the things that I was talking about and the book says a drifter populism the drifter extremism the drift to fearfulness and we have had an enormous increase in premature deaths in the last decade the economist wrote an article saying that we've had 700 000 excess deaths since 2010 from what long-term trends 700 000 and that's linked to growing insecurity growing fear growing loss of control of time all of those things that are there and the parties have to be confronted they're driving us further and further in the same directions and here we have promise of moral austerity it's it's a it's a it's dead end dead men walking so I think we have to confront the political parties by saying you are digging a hole deeper and deeper Dennis Healy's famous remark if you're in a hole stop digging the second thing is I'm sorry that you miss misunderstood I said jobs fetish the emphasis on trying to put as many many people into jobs and everything has to be judged by jobs the labor party has just proposed a robot tax which may sound attractive to some people the idea is that artificial intelligence and automation will displace jobs and that would be terrible we've got to create jobs so they're going to tax robots now I want all public toilets automated if that deprives people of menial lousy jobs great we have to think differently I won't want my fellow citizens working in amazon warehouses mindlessly rushing around with time devices telling them let's automate let us have a movement away from saying jobs jobs jobs there are many things we would like to do all our lives that we can't do because we're in jobs so we have to get away from this putting them on a pedestal everything has to be judged by whether you create jobs and I agreed with some of the remarks you made that seems to me what the fetish is about it's the same with GDP growth and that leads back to something that that roots said that the concept of GDP was invented by a man called Simon Kuznets in the 1930s and the measure was designed to measure mobilizable resources for the war and he reasoned that as women were looking after children mainly at that time they were not mobilizable and that was his rationale for giving work done by women a zero value now that was in the late 1930s if I am not mistaken we're not in the late 1930s now we ought to be ridiculing our concept of GDP and GDP growth and that's the proposal I make in the last chapter and the final question very good question I think I answer it in the book in different ways I want I want to emancipate the time of the precariat that's why I don't like the dichotomy of unpaid work paid work because a lot of the work that the precariat does are only because the state or employers force them to do it okay it isn't care if you're a member of the precariat you have to apply for hundreds of jobs before you get one job offer and now with algorithms many jobs in big companies require you to go through multiple rounds of algorithm tests more and more tests and tests so you can finally get to a short list where actual interview takes place and I cite some examples where thousands of people apply for a job and at the end of six rounds of how much time do you think they use nobody's appointed so we're getting a situation where eating into time is taken for granted the waiting work as waiting work as waiting if you're in the precariat you know all about that and for me emancipation is about all aspects of time so I think it's it opens up a different set of questions I'll go for each of them but I'll go briefly so you can get more time with with guy as well yeah so I think this question is really important and actually probably one of the most important political questions a quick 30 second story a couple of years ago a group of migrant workers low paid black and brown migrant workers got in contact with me there were care workers that worked throughout the pandemic so they were working hard when most of us were locked up away safe when they complained about the lack of rise in wages the CEO rewarded them with pizza in fact it was cold pizza um so I managed to get a trade union involved or they were already involved united voices of the workers but we brought media along and we just caused a storm they're now some of the highest paid workers in London which is fantastic that was a win solidarity and trade unions work however I've seen the suspicion towards that trade union from some other politicians because they're a new trade union working with migrant workers and they don't have the same connection to them they don't have the same funding to them and I think there's a real suspicion between the political class and community organizing or trade union organizing if they don't have their foot in the door to come back to my background in in theatre when I was doing this for the oppressor something called the joker that's the person who facilitates one of the number one rules is that you don't interfere with the narrative you're there to facilitate I'd like to see every politician have some of that training so that they understand it's important to be in there I'm not talking about being a blank slate and having no values or ideals but ultimately people should be guiding and steering the conversation not politicians coming from the top down so how you do that is a much longer discourse than I can have tonight but I think it's a really important question Dito I thought it was really interesting Kirstam's team did some focus work into what is working class and it came out with if you are middle class what is the most important thing to you or what represents you people came up with a cafeteria and some breakfast tea they asked working class people what what represents you and they came up with dirty gloves or muddy boots or the tools of their trade and I can understand why they said those things and of course they said those things it's not for me to define what what defines them but I think that's a culture that is constantly told people they are what they do as opposed to recognizing we are all individuals and we can have our time and that's you know completely against the entire narrative of our society I don't think the labor party or anyone should be perpetuating that narrative that who you are is what you do and I think that's what the labor is that's for hard work the work is what you invest in your ideas what you want to contribute to society how you want to be in society which exists with the pleasure too but in a positive way I realize pleasure is a negative way but I think there's a way of bringing that so it's all all encompassing I would say as a politician I have that beautiful privilege you know I don't stop working but I love what I do so that's that beautiful moment where philosophy academics and what you do in every moment all comes together but I think everyone should have that privilege and we can do if we design politics differently I won't talk on this question for a long time because it's just not my expertise so I could be a waffling politician but I don't think anyone needs that really difficult questions and I think actually I'm just going to respond by asking a question in return because the question that keeps going through my mind is how do we get from here to there and you know I'm being a part of parliament you know you're kind of very conscious of the day to day kind of questions that get asked and politics and everything and it's I just I just wonder if we if in the forthcoming election you know one of the political parties I mean perhaps the Green Party would will be doing it would would actually put would kind of put their policies through the lens of time the kind of way that the the guy suggests in the book what kind of prefigurative kind of policies might we be proposing you know the those of you have much too young to remember the notion of the prefigurative the idea that you you in a microcosm try and create the kind of work kind of practices that you're you're looking for in the in the wider society I don't I don't know I mean I just feels like and this this might sound a bit negative so far you know reading that that last chapter of the book which it is so far from where we are at present and in some ways it feels like we're going backwards but this I think the notion that the kind of lens of time does open up a different way of looking at politics and policy that we we should try and be pushing and thinking about the distribution of time the relationships that that creates the maldistribution of time thank you thank you Ruth yes I'm sorry Ingrid if you don't mind um the person there with the excellent braces um sorry yeah I will I will hello Alan Wheatley a former member of the Green Party that has had UBI in its policies since I think about 2001 and one who Guy has termed a member of the Disability Precariat one thing that strikes me is that there's been no mention so far about the scapegoating of disabled people or the fact that the social model of disability has been officially recognized by successive governments since the Disability Discrimination Act and that I emphasize is that it's the barriers social economic and physical that turns a person's impairment into a disability and I would say that the ones who have been swinging the lead are politicians and the drivers of what's called corporate demolition of the welfare state and uh yeah that's about it thank you oh yes one thing Rachel Reeves is married to the director of finance for the department for work and pensions and uh at 2007 the wife of Tony Blair was Cherry Booth who at that time was also president of scope the disability charity that is not a user led charity thank you um Ingrid so two more ladies in the hat and man over there please and if I can ask you both to just keep it quite brief because I think we're going to run out of drinking time if we don't and that would be terrible thank you very much Guy for your wonderful synopsis on your book um when you mentioned about being in Jamaica and the gentleman saying work and job it immediately perked up my mind up and also when you mentioned about Einstein's concept of time as a past student of calculus physics Einstein said time was my main concept and when we look at these two things we see the importance of how culture and many people have spoken on it impact time and how culture impacts the systems that um narrate time the the developing world which is rapid developing world which is rapidly glowing has a different concept of time and it's more socially orientated community orientated compared to the perhaps ethnocentric system in the west which is systematic time and you see how this affects for culture I'm going to land with this if we're increasing becoming an intersectional world this has to be taken into account and how we form our politics and how we take into account the concept of time because now it's going to be very intersectional with the growth of the brick nations etc thank you very much thank you ever so much for that when you were talking about war I was reminded of Ruth Wilson Gilmore and I've been trying to find a quote from her she's an American geographer who studies the abolition of prisons and racism in the US and I can't find the right quote but one way in which she measures the extent of racism is by how much time is robbed from people particularly when their lives are shortened which occurs in America for different racial groups and we see occurring worldwide of course at the moment with atrocities why is it that you think we've valued a time of some people so much less than the time of other people because we value them less we value them less as people and therefore their time is seen as worthless and and it goes back to what what guy says in his book about human dignity I would like to conclude by saying that thank you very much Alan for your questions and comments and Alan has informed me about many things relating to how time is taken from people with so-called disabilities and how among those who have their time robbed more than any other are people with so-called disabilities and mental health disabilities have skyrocketed over the last 15 years enormous increase in people suffering from mental health problems and that I think is is part of the linking up with emancipating time so that people are under less pressure they have control of their time and can do things but I want to come back to a beautiful question or comment from the back because it links a number of things I cut out from my speech because I knew I wouldn't have the time a discussion of a debate between Elon Musk and Rishi Sunak last year which was a classic dialogue of the death and Rishi Sunak was talking about work giving people dignity when he was talking about jobs because Musk said jobs will disappear and Rishi Sunak jumped up in his very you know jumping way and and and said no work is good work people like good which was not his point Musk's point and we do have a situation where AI gives us the opportunity that we will be reorganizing how we look at time but your comment relates it to Jamaica and in the book I discuss how commoning is a global phenomenon commoning in Africa is all about Ubuntu okay commoning in South Korea where my books for some reason seem to do very well in Korean they understand Hongik Ingen which is community work and living the basic essence of Korean society and you can go on in the Caribbean and I'm not at all surprised that the Prime Minister of Barbados a woman has now come out in favor of basic income for the reasons that that I support similarly in South Africa and by way of conclusion I have a very very difficult job at the moment and I don't think it's a job it's a work which is I've been asked to advise and I'm working with the Palestinian Economic Policy Institute and they asked me last year could I help them develop a basic income scheme for the West Bank and eventually for the Palestinian state and of course today as you mentioned in your comments and Danny was intimating we are in a situation where a horror after horror so it makes it all seem sort of fanciful and that goes back to Ruth's point so often something seems impossible and then suddenly it becomes as Milton Friedman recognized and Barbara Wooten recognized in the 1950s what was impossible today suddenly becomes inevitable and in a remarkably short time so I think it's up to us as academics as intellectuals as thinkers if you like to say look the impossible is actually quite possible and that I think is where we should be all today because what we're facing is a dark tunnel and we don't need to be in that dark tunnel if we had the courage to imagine and put into practice that vision so on that point I'd like to thank you once again for coming I really appreciate your turnout and thank you very much thank you so much everyone and now I think we're breaking for the reception and please go and ask your difficult questions over a glass of something thank you so much