At the beginning of this year an invitation to become part of a working team publishing articles for Bylines Cymru landed in my in-box.
Could I be arsed….?
At first, I honestly thought that I didn’t really have the time to think about publishing an online only magazine article. However, it was over coffee and cake at the BIEN Congress in Bath University where I got talking to the founder of the UBILab Cymru, Jonathan Rees Williams, someone I have known for a good few years through my involvement in the UBILab Network.
We were talking about the possibility of a (more) devolved Wales being able to support a full roll-out of a UBI for every citizen in Wales, something I have been writing about for a while now, and, as a Welsh Labour supporter (then) something I was keen on Welsh Labour implementing.
However, as I have argued in this blog and, as Hefin and I have argued in this article, and this Conversation article (obviously a passion), Welsh Labour had decided to pull the plug too early on the Care Leavers Pilot, effectively not giving enough time, space or money to understand how a Basic Income could be transformational for Wales. I call it a ‘Basic’ Income pilot, purposely excluding the ‘Universal’ element of this, because for it to be Universal it would have to be available to all citizens (so we have never truly had a ’Universal’ pilot yet).
So, I thought I’d give this article a go. As I started writing my thoughts were fully fixed on devolution being the way forward. A fully devolved Social Security System would be the best way for Wales to implement its necessary changes, or so I thought. It was not until I had started to work through the mechanics of this that I immediately hit the joint questions of ‘the border’ and ‘national identity’.
As a person born in (and until recently living in) Bolton, England, this hit home. (Admittedly, I have been living in Wales for the last 15-years, only spending the few years of Covid back in Bolton following the start of my job at the University of Salford. But I have been back in Wales now for a couple of years, and its now home).
So, that raised the question in my writing - If Wales, in its approach at ending Austerity had a truly Universal Basic Income, how would it be administered? Is the border important, and who is considered as ‘Welsh’?
Who should/shouldn’t receive it? How would they be identified? What would we do with such a porous border? Reflectively, as a born Englishman now living in Wales, what would stop others wanting to do this in order to receive the UBI? Would Wales see an influx of new residents? What about people like me who live in Wales, but work in England?
It was questions such as these which led me to think that the only real achievable way forward on this would be to scrap the very idea of devolution. Independence is the only way this could work.
As my chapter the book argues, its these questions which lead me to believe that Independence has to be the way forward. This is because, for people like me who both live in Wales (therefore would receive the UBI), but work in England (therefore would fall under HMRC for tax liability). Therefore, an independent Wales/Cymru would need its own Tax Office, whereby my wage, taxed at source, would be sent to Wales to pay for an independent social security system, whilst my English-based colleagues would still be liable under HMRC.
Questions such as this have been thought about by my colleague in the book and over several articles for Bylines Cymru, Emlyn Phillips who has painstakingly pondered over similar questions of independence.
So, my call to you here is to read this book. Think critically about how we do end austerity.
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