Laundry list of links. Crisis and rescue link, i.e. the claim that the aff solves some mega crisis. Their framing of basic income as a singular moral response to inequality isn’t a link of omission, it’s a narrative trap

The fourth global wave or spike in public interest in Basic Income emerges after the global financial crisis of 2007, and the deepening of public austerity policies, and growing poverty and inequality in core capitalist states, that followed. Te globalisation of Basic Income discourse coincides with growing interest in piloting or experimenting with features of Basic Income in the real world. A relevant question in this context is this: Is crisis the most conducive context for Basic Income, and, if so, what kind of crisis? Or more precisely: what dose and form of crisis? Te recognition within the institutional literature that signifcant change often takes the form of a ‘cumulation of seemingly small adjustments’ (Telen 2009: 475) is highly applicable. A plausible hypothesis here is that more developed public systems are less likely to experience major structural crises, and that they are better able to recognise and respond to smaller crises (as in recent experiments that address the dysfunction of income assistance sanctions systems in Denmark, Finland and Holland) (Haagh 2019c). In hybrid cases such as Scotland or Canada, debate about or experiments in Basic Income, or mechanisms with characteristics similar to Basic Income, are more likely to be focussed on poverty.

Te globalisation of Basic Income narrative changed the debate in several ways. In the altered global context, a long-standing tendency to draw out the centrality of Basic Income might turn out to be illusory in so far as a Basic Income’s impacts are created by other policies. Relatedly, the global Basic Income narrative has also been reshaped by the emergence of new actors in the debate. In a context of global dis-embedding of economic life, a singular form of Basic Income narrative has become a shared language among financial institutions and actors, and globalisation protestors. The double-sided nature of the Basic Income defence in the contemporary setting— its moral justifcation in response to rising inequality, yet a tendency towards singularity—generates a series of devil’s deals and common analytical traps.

The devil’s deals concept was frst used by Judith Tendler (2002, 2004) in relation to anti-poverty policy in urban Brazil in the 1990s, specifcally in relation to tax exceptions for small and medium-sized frms, which Tendler argued appeared to support business development and employment, while in fact promoting low-wage informal employment, thus downgrading the development of the formal sector in Brazil, retaining a low-skill equilibrium and informal economy, with signifcant poverty. In the context of Basic Income debate, devil’s deals obscure the nature, feasibility or impacts of Basic Income, posit false trade-offs between Basic Income and other policies, or practically involve accommodations that compromise implementing a full, stable and/or effective Basic Income over time. Devil’s deals in the contemporary development context are framed by the movement towards neo-liberalisation and financialisation of the global economy, although this context plays out in both general and more particular and variegated ways in diferent countries.

Common devils’ deals—from the general to more particular—include neo-liberalisation, whereby Basic Income is used as a justification for governance through the market; fatalism, whereby Basic Income is viewed as necessary to compensate for wider insecurity; polemicism, where Basic Income is pitted against supplementary policies; Basic Income populism, defned by immediate needs for the resolution of grievances; informal marketisation and illiberalisation, where Basic Income becomes a plank in extending a development paradigm based in weakly regulated economic relationships; financialisation and uprooting, whereby Basic Income absorbs existing inequalities through the instrument of individual finance; simplifcation and displacement, whereby Basic Income is used to increase the deregulation of wider economic security structures; and decoupling, linked with experimentation in partial models. In this context, Basic Income is also prone to two conceptual traps that generally affect single-issue politics: the crisis and rescue traps. Specifically, the linkage of Basic Income advocacy with real and imagined crises, as exemplifed in the debates about job displacement and relative poverty, both of which some see as inevitable and others as preventable, reinforces a view of Basic Income as settlement, a form of rescue from more intractable problems.

Next I look at the locally embedded nature of these analytical risks within the new settings and actors that characterise defence of Basic Income in the post-austerity period, followed by a discussion of the issues at stake. While it is impossible to cover the wide range of new narratives, four new trends can be identifed, linked to: (i) new forms of grassroots activism, (ii) consolidation of the globalised financialised system, (iii) aid and new informal communities, and (iv) experimentation within public bureaucracies with limited features of reform in the direction of reform in the direction of Basic Income.

i. Grassroots Activism and the Europe-Wide Project In 2016, popular initiatives, including citizens’ pressure for a referendum on Basic Income in Switzerland, and a Citizens’ Initiative within the European Union, under the institutions of the European Parliament (see Chapter 21 of this volume), put Basic Income on the media agenda, particularly in relation to the crisis of representation of those outside employment or in precarious employment. At the same time, a narrative for Basic Income aimed against existing economic security mechanisms walks a tight-rope between democratisation from within and populist disintegration. In the context of the rise in OECD countries of punitive benefits systems, and actors rightly or wrongly perceived as having a stake in it—for instance, trades unions—a key feature of grassroots activism in Europe after 2016 is opposition to state welfare paternalism in general. In Denmark, frustration at the lack of engagement of the labour movement, and proposals to shift the subsidy for unemployment mutual societies towards funding a Basic Income, fill a representational gap, as trades unions are argued to be ineffective in representing unemployed groups and those in precarious employment. In Germany, as well as in the USA, new groups linked to activism prefer crowd-funding for parastatal ‘social’ forms of Basic Income. In the 2010s, Basic Income was taken up primarily by fringe parties formed around specifc campaign issues, for instance, Green Parties (environmentalism), Pirate Parties (anti-censure of the internet), and new so-called peoples parties (nationalisation of money). More recently, Basic Income has been taken up as a single-issue party platform (as in Sweden in 2017). In 2018, Basic Income advocacy became linked with populist movements across Europe, from the left-right populist alliance in Italy (where the anti-establishment Five Star Movement and the right-wing League have gone into coalition, preparing to set the eurozone’s third biggest economy on a path of tax cuts, an income for the poor, and the deportation of 500,000 migrants), to some intellectuals and activists linked with the French Gilets Jaunes (Yellow Jackets) (Mouvement Français pour un Revenue de Base 2018). The connections between vague notions of Basic Income and populist movements in Italy and France, with signifcant tax cuts, and (in Italy) mass deportations, illustrates the potential for Basic Income advocacy becoming usurped into new populist narratives (British Broadcasting Corporation 2018).

ii. Consolidation of Capitalism Besides the well-known propagation of support by prominent platform capitalists, notably Zuckerberg and Musk, owners of Facebook and Tesla respectively, global development and financial institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have taken up the case for Basic Income or similar mechanisms in some limited form. A case in point is the IMF’s 2017 Fiscal Monitor, which recognises Basic Income as a viable policy alternative, alongside a need to consolidate fscal states by raising the level of tax, and the need to support public education and health services. First, whilst the IMF’s recognition of the dangers of public finance erosion is a signifcant u-turn, it formulates the challenge of the fscal empowerment of states primarily in terms of raising top rates of tax (International Monetary Fund 2017). Notably, the political outcome of a redistributive tax system, with money drawn from the rich and distributed to the poor, is a smaller welfare state and a lower level of sharing of resources and rights (Haagh 2012, 2015; Hills 2014). The International Monetary Fund reasons that Basic Income is potentially a good idea in developing countries on the grounds that resources are needed to protect welfare services, which then frames Basic Income against other social policies.