RyanWatch (work in progress)

Joan Ryan was MP for Enfield North from 1997 to 2010. There's a summary of her record here.

2015
May:  Joan Ryan re-elected MP for Enfield North.

July:  Joan abstained on budget vote. ie unlike Kate Osamor (Edmonton) she did not vote against the cuts in benefits.

August 12th: Concerning FVAs Joan said  "I agree that local residents should be informed of all matters in relation to this development and I would, of course, work to ensure full disclosure of relevant documents."

December 2nd:  Announced her support for airstrikes against ISIL in Syria. She spoke in the debate and voted for air strikes.

*****************

Some campaigns I support

Since becoming a candidate I have agreed to support the following causes (sorry for lack of detail!). I've also offered qualified support to a number of others:

• CND's opposition to replacing Trident.
• CAMRA's manifesto (beer and pubs)
• Crisis' No One Turned Away (homelessness)
• Cancer Research's Cross Cancer Out campaign
• Barnado's and others A Stitch in Time campaign
• The Royal Statistical Society;'s Data Manifesto
• The Public Service Users Bill
• Traidcraft
• The Frack Free promise (FoE and Greenpeace)
• The League Against Cruel Sports' five animal welfare calls.
• The Living Streets Manifesto
• Compassion in World Farming
• Breast Cancer Campaign
• The OneKind pledge
• The Campaign for the Preservation of Rural England's manifesto.
• The Local Goverbnm,ent Association's four points
• The RSPB's I'm Backing Bob campaign
• The Disability Benefits Consortium's 5 asks
• The CTC
• The Terrence Higgins Trust
• The Empty Homes Agency
• The LGBT Whip
• London Cycling Campaign's demand to remove TSRGD
• The Tibet Society's demand for human rights for Tibet.
• The ASI

The case for a universal Basic Income

Basic Income is a Green Party proposal to pay every UK resident a modest income that is free of means testing. It’s been proposed many times, under various names. It’s in Fritz Schumacher’s book Small is Beautiful and our own Clive Lord has long advocated a Citizen’s Income. It’s even been implemented a few times.

There are four main reasons to introduce it now:

1.      So that we all share in our human heritage
2.      To end our punitive and uncivilised benefit system
3.      To abolish the poverty trap
4.      To reduce inequality

To share the common heritage

Our manufacturers and services do great things. They produce exciting products and deliver services that past kings could not dream of. But these products and services are not the result only of those who do today’s work; still less are the due solely to a few entrepreneurial geniuses. They are also due to work by millions of people over centuries that has created a legacy of technical knowledge and social order. That legacy is the common heritage of humanity and all should benefit – Basic Income is a practical way to deliver that benefit.

More concretely, much of the value in our economy is now delivered by machines – robots and websites. With less need for human labour it makes sense that some of the value of our heritage should be shared in a way independent of who does the labour.

But, you may say, doesn’t the benefits system already embody that principle?

Perhaps it did. It no longer does.

To end our punitive and uncivilised benefit system

Everyone who knows the system and the Job Centres has a fund of horror stories. Of demands that claimants apply for unsuitable jobs. Of disabled people deemed fit for work. Of instructions to improve a CV that has already been revised a dozen times. All these are within my personal knowledge or proved by official figures; or both.

And then there’s ‘sanctions’ – withdrawal of benefits for weeks or months – for trifling errors. JobCentre advisors – a title that’s surely in breach of the trade descriptions Act – have to meet targets for the sanctions they impose or themselves face sanctions from their management.

All this is to conceal the fact that the JobCentres have little to do with jobs any more.  They are systems of social control aimed at:

• Reducing the benefit bill.
• Undermining the confidence of the unemployed so that they will accept poverty wages and appalling conditions and NEVER think of criticising the system.

Basic Income addresses this simply by being an unconditional benefit. No-one need go to the JobCentre to get it!

To end the poverty trap

If you’re a worker on average pay and you get an extra £100 the state takes £32 in tax and NI – a marginal rate of 32%. You keep £68.

Now if you’re low-paid the state pays you benefits – and takes them back if you get paid more. So what do you keep if you are paid an extra £100?  In 2010 the Coalition said that UC would produce an effective marginal tax rate of 65% – so you’d keep £35.

But according to a recent article in the Telegraph you’ll get just £27. Actually this is optimistic since there are other benefits, eg Council Tax benefit, with their own independent clawbacks. For some people the claw-back rate could exceed 100%!

Now the most important shift is obviously from unemployment to employment. Suppose Jane Claimant of Enfield is lucky and gets a fulltime job at minimum wage on Oxford Street. She earns £45 a day – of which she’ll keep £12. But her tube fare will be £10 – leaving her with £2 per day for lunch. And no profit.

Not much of an inventive is it?

Basic Income addresses this because there is no claw-back. Jane Claimant will have to pay income tax and National Insurance just the same as anyone else. She’ll get £30 per day (though she’ll still need to pay for travel and lunch).

To reduce inequality

Inequality has been growing for the last 35 years having stayed low for the previous 35 years.

Today:

• The poorest fifth of society have only 8% of the total income, whereas the top fifth have just less than half (41%).
• The richest 10% of households hold 44% of all wealth.  The poorest 50% own just 9.5%. 
• The bosses of the UK’s 100 biggest companies earn on average 143 times as much as their staff. ^[1]
• 5 families in the UK are worth the same as 12 million UK citizens. ^[2]
• Poverty and problem debt are increasing. Last year Trussell Trust foodbanks supplied three days’ emergency food to 913,000 people. That’s 14 times more than in 2010.
• Inequality is especially bad in the UK. Out of a group of 30 OECD countries the UK is the fourth most unequal, and the most unequal in Europe. Those worse are Mexico, US and Israel. Those better include Denmark, Germany and Switzerland.

Inequality is bad for everyone. Many research studies have shown that more unequal societies have worse records on health, crime, social and political participation. Thus unequal societies have worse outcomes for:

• physical and mental health, obesity and life expectancy
• violent crime and robbery
• participation and voter turnout
• social mobility and education.

A single example: A reduction of inequality from Spanish to Canadian levels would reduce murder by 20% and robbery by 23%.

Many of our problems – teenage pregnancy and class differences in life expectancy for instance – cannot be solved unless we reduce inequality. Please note that it’s not just wild lefties who say this. An increasing number of establishment figures have drawn attention to it and it was the theme of this year’s Davos meeting.

And here we have some direct evidence. For five years the town of Dauphin, Manitoba, had a version of Basic Income. An evaluation of the period reveals:

• More children graduated from high school
• 8.5% fewer hospital visits; plus various other health benefits
• Fewer work-related accidents.

So Basic Income would help reduce the crisis in A&E!

Some historians and commentators point out that when inequality reaches an extreme a revolution is likely – probably not the benevolent democratic event that my Marxist friends seem to believe in.

The Green Party believes that inequality is a problem we should solve. Of the national parties only the Green Party believes this.

Labour sees it as embarrassing, regrettable – but a bit like the weather. A condition to be endured not cured.

The Coalition seems to see it as just – and any policy that reverses it as literally unthinkable.

The Green Party would address inequality in three ways.

1. We would introduce Citizens Income and the Living Wage to raise the incomes of the poor.
2. We would reduce housing costs both by building more and by reducing demand.,
3. We would use higher taxation and a crackdown on tax avoidance and evasion to limit the wealth of the rich.

The Basic Income will reduce inequality, ameliorate the poverty trap and humanise the benefit system. Its time has come.

---

[1]  High Pay Centre, see http://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/aug/18/pay-gap-grows-ftse-bosses accessed 03/10/14.

[2] Oxfam via the Guardian: http://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/mar/17/oxfam-report-scale-britain-growing-financial-inequality

What's wrong with Universal Credit?

Universal Credit is the Coalition's flagship welfare policy. Universal Credit is a single benefit that will replace six existing means-tested benefits. Its aim is to be simpler and to create fewer anomalies, (Everyone agrees that the existing system is a mess and creates perverse incentives, ie provides people with rewards for doing things that we don't want them to do.)

There's lots wrong. Let's start with the project of introducing UC:

• It's way over budget. The DWP says it will cost £12.8 billion over 11 years. The original estimate was £2.2 billion.
• It's late. The plan was to have one million people on UC by April 2014. In fact hardly anyone was.
•  It will do less than originally planned. For instance, it won't replace Council Tax benefit.

All this is pretty shambolic - but far from unique for major public sector change programmes. All politicians who plan major changes, and that certainly includes us Greens, should remember the key message here: "Listen to your critics. They know things you need to know."

Now some consequences:

• In many families it will replace payments to women with payments to men. In most cases this won't matter but in dysfunctional families the men are more likely than women to waste the money.
• It will make life more difficult for the poorly-paid self-employed (a rapidly growing group under this government!). They will have to submit three different sets of accounts - for VAT, Income Tax and UC.

The worst aspect, in my view, is the claw-back rate. In 2010 the coalition claimed that people on UC would lose £65 of benefits for every extra £100 they earned and that this was acceptable. But recently the Telegraph calculated it at 73% whilst another source has said 76%. In other words a person on minimum wage would be working for just £2 per hour. That's not much of an incentive!

But it gets worse. Because some benefits that aren't included have their own claw-back rates the net claw back rate will sometime be more than 100%. This is surely indefensible.

One final thing. There's an interaction between UC and increases in the tax-free threshold. (That's the LibDems signature policy which "takes lots of poor people out of the tax system".) Any increase in this threshold provides the poor with extra income but because UC is based on net income most of the gain (65% or73%) is clawed back by the state. That's a NEW anomaly since the benefits that UC will replace did not claw-back such gains.

A dreadful policy badly implemented.The Green Party would replace the whole thing with Basic Income - but that needs a separate post.

Child Poverty in Enfield

The news from the End Child Poverty campaign that almost half of the children in Edmonton are living in poverty should be a source of shame to all the parties of government.

David Holmes, Chair of the End Child Poverty Campaign, has challenged all politicians to "set out a clear roadmap towards ending child poverty which includes the additional actions needed". The other Green candidates for Enfield are happy to do just that. Unlike other parties our plans are based on research and an absolute determination not to leave people in poverty. This policy is not a "nice to have".

Since much poverty is the poverty of the working poor we would raise the minimum wage to the London Living Wage (currently £8.80/hour) immediately and to £10/hour by 2020.

Since it is inequality, not just poverty, that makes the health and well-being of the poor worse than those of the rich we would reduce inequality by outlawing excessive pay. We would pay particular attention to the financial sector where vast bonuses seem to be the result of a defective moral compass! Green MEPs have already taken the lead in capping bankers' bonuses.

The benefits system has become a machine, a complex and expensive machine, more for punishing claimants than for finding jobs. We would abolish the 'presumption of guilt' that guides its staff and simplify benefits. We would abolish the bedroom tax. In the medium term we would replace most benefits with a Universal Citizens Income that would be more generous and much cheaper to operate.

The fact that, as the report shows, housing costs push 14% of Edmonton children into poverty confirms the need for lower rents and property prices. The key to this is more homes. We would make it easier for Councils to build council houses and flats. We would take active steps to bring empty homes into use and to build on land being hoarded by developers. We would also support measures to improve home insulation for both comfort and to reduce energy bills.

These policies would, of course, be part of a wider Green agenda to provide all our citizens with decent lives and livelihoods without trashing the planet. It will be hard - but nothing less will do.