Your Nest, Our Nest

There has been much grumbling about the current government's intention to encourage more low-level retail investment in the markets, not least from the two grumpy old buggers who inhabit this house [there are only two of us]. However, I think that maybe - and at the moment it is still a maybe - we might have misinterpreted that intention, and that, as usual, the Labour government has signally failed to adequately communicate its motives [and actions] to the public. This thought was prompted by an opinion piece in this weekend's FT by Nicolas Berggruen, a billionaire investor and philanthropist, offering up the notion of Universal Basic Capital [UBC] as a better alternative to the concept of a Universal Basic Income, something I've been in favour of for some twenty years or so, since visiting Denmark and talking with a journalist friend there about the Danish social support system.

UBC would entail all citizens being given a one-off grant toward, and workers continuing to contribute to, a state investment fund, and contributing throughout their working lives, rather than taking a state-funded hand-out by default. This state pot would be invested in a markets-wide portfolio of stock and the dividends fed back into that pot, in turn paying out to support all of those social contract services and support structures that the National Insurance was supposed to cover, but which 'insurance' has since developed into [yet another] direct taxation on income, with little room for growth or expansion of the fund to cover expediencies, as it isn't being invested, but simply used up as needed on an ad hoc basis. I've long felt that neither the neo-liberal concept of utterly untrammelled market capitalism, nor monolithic state socialism have any mileage - if they ever actually had any at all - left in them for the future of human society. Certainly the former has been demonstrated to have failed miserably - certainly in the last decade alone - and state communism has never been a satisfactory solution to any of the problems it set out to solve in the first place.

But the idea of a mixed economy has always appealed as it potentially holds the key to providing support to those least able to exploit life whilst affording extra opportunity to those who can, without recourse to paternalistic philanthropy. Ring-fencing the funds for social support systems without that becoming a burden on society as a whole surely has to be a way forward; empowering and supporting ordinary citizens without the need for state handouts. Give everyone a stake in the wider market economy as a matter of course, and increasing their spending power in the process, and you will grow the economy by default. The key is in moving money around, rather than it being uselessly hoarded by the ultra-rich, where it lies stagnant and useless to all but them alone. If this is what Starmer's government is intending, I commend it. If not, then they are missing a very big trick here. Let's reinterpret Clause Four of the Labour Party Constitution for the twenty-first century properly this time, because my reading of the basic idea of UBC and the original Clause Four is essentially socially based. We need rules, we need limits, and we need a fluid economy. That's neither essentially socialist nor essentially capitalist. It's common sense. It's just social...