Good wishes for Michael Briguglio's AD

What do you think are the fortunes of Alternattiva Demokratika going to be under its new leader, whom they prefer to call chairman?

I have always thought that Green concerns are not best served by a political party. A movement, in which form Alternattiva Demokratika began its life, is more effective, as I think Astrid Vella's Flimkien Ghal Ambjent Ahjar has proven.

The moment a lobby or NGO starts seeking power, it inevitably begins to compromise as required in any vote-catching game. I do not think that even a man who is not afraid of being labelled an extremist like Michael Briguglio can remove that inherent conflict between the nature of Green concerns and political party leadership.

However, it seems perfectly possible for the sociologist/artist that Briguglio is to give a sharper political identity, obviously in the wake of some of the New Left thinkers about whom I have often spoken in these columns, to the party, without of course renouncing to the traditional two major Green concerns.

The first of these is the threat to the environment, especially through pollution, inbuilt into the productivist or economic growth mania of industrial civilisation, a threat that has to be countered without, however, generating mass unemployment. The second is the alienation that most available jobs tend to produce instead of authentic human fulfilment.

Consequently, I would expect the new AD leadership to start serious discussion of such proposals as the Universal Basic Income (UBI) put forward by the Economist-philosopher Philippe Van Parijs, supported by his Earth Network.

Very briefly, the Basic Income, amounting initially to possibly less than needed to guarantee subsistence, would be allocated without any such conditions as means-testing or returns to society, without any distinction between employed and unemployed, between students and pensioners, between categories of people whatsoever.

How do Prof. Parijs and his followers propose that the cost of such a basic income be met?

As expert statisticians, they have calculated that in Europe, since the basic income would substitute unemployment benefit and several other social service payments, only a very small additional tax would be required for the State to be able to provide the basic income at a rate between €400 and €1,000.

Prof. Parijs has explicitly argued that the UBI should appeal particularly to those who have Green (and feminist) concerns. It would provide the possibility of people giving more of their time to autonomous activity not imposed upon them by either market forces or the State.

It would not give anybody, because of its small size, the right to withdraw permanently and completely from paid employment, but it would provide some degree of freedom to allow anybody to engage at least periodically in autonomous activities, such as grass roots militancy, unpaid care-work or art, and to turn down absolutely unfulfilling jobs.

UBI advocates have pointed out that something very similar to UBI exists in one state of the United States. "In 1999, the Alaska Permanent Fund paid each person of whatever age who had been living in Alaska for at least one year an annual UBI of $1,680. This payment admittedly falls far short of subsistence, but it has nonetheless become far from negligible two decades after its inception. Moreover, there was a public debate about UBI in the US long before it started in Europe. In 1967, Nobel economist James Tobin published the first technical article on the subject, and a few years later, he convinced George McGovern to promote a UBI, then called demogrant, in his 1972 presidential campaign."

Prof. Parijs admits that when he was teaching in the Congo instead of in his usual haunts of Louvain, Oxford and Berkeley, he at first thought that the distribution of a UBI in the conditions then prevailing in the central African countries was an administrative impossibility. But he soon after discovered that in South Africa they were successfully implementing a UBI system only applicable to the elderly but with results affecting the whole population no less significant than those in Alaska.

A fully-fledged UBI has been formally proposed in Namibia and a full account of it was given by Vivan Storlund, from Finland, at a meeting of the Philosophy Society at the University of Malta some months ago.

In the discussion that followed, several modifications of the idea were put forward, including the possibility of its application to categories such as creative artists in analogous ways in which it was applied only to the elderly in South Africa. My suggestion to AD is to follow up these explorations which might enable the movement or the party to present itself as not so much neo-Liberal as more genuinely Left than the Labour Party.

Why did you say, in referring to Alternattiva Demokratika, "the movement or the party"?

As I implied at the beginning, I do not think AD has a future as a political party, not at least unless there is a significant change in the working of our electoral system.

For instance, in the last election, had an AD candidate been elected, the result would have been an Alfred Sant (rather than a Lawrence Gonzi) government. I have myself often argued not just for electoral reform, but for an overall review of our Constitution. I am still not without hope that the bi-party parliamentary committee under Speaker Louis Galea's chairmanship may take at least some modest steps in the right direction, if not a little more as well.

In this connection I should add that, in a book called What's wrong with a Free Lunch?, the UBI is argued for as a weapon against "social ills like exclusion and domination of small groups on the others".

Fr Peter Serracino Inglott was talking to Miriam Vincenti.