THE RAPID ADVANCEMENTS in both Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Robotics has made many people fearful about their future – especially when it comes to employment. For, as this report notes – https://home.bt.com/tech-gadgets/future-tech/9-jobs-overtaken-by-robots-11364003046052 – around 35% of the jobs we do today in the UK could go to robots by 2034. The obvious question here is that with over a third of all jobs disappearing, how will people be able to live?

To try to answer this question Devon Voice – The Voice Of The National Liberal Party In Devon – is reproducing an article by Brian Bergstein from MIT Technology Review – see the original here https://www.technologyreview.com/s/611418/basic-income-could-work-if-you-do-it-canada-style/ – which looks at the introduction of a trial system of Universal Basic Income in Lindsay, Ontario, Canada. The Universal Basic Income (UBI) is generally understood to be a guarantee from the government that each citizen receives a minimum income which is enough to cover the basic cost of living. The UBI is also designed to provide financial security – particularly in the not-to-distant future where it can offset job losses caused by technology.

This is the third and final part and should be read directly on from from part 1: http://nationalliberal.org/devon-voice-debate-1-–-universal-basic-income-for-devon-part-1 and part 2 http://nationalliberal.org/devon-voice-debate-1-–-universal-basic-income-for-devon-part-ii As always, debate is free with Devon Voice & the NLP. Therefore, we’d appreciate your views on this article (and the idea of Devon introducing the UBI) when it appears on either the National Liberals Facebook site – https://www.facebook.com/groups/52739504313/ – or the National Liberal Party Facebook site – https://www.facebook.com/NationalLiberalParty/ One big worry for us is that governments could use UBI as a means to ‘control’ people. Therefore, National Liberals must think long and hard as how any future UBI is paid. Maybe this’ll be the subject of a future Devon Voice debate?

It goes without saying that there are no official links between Brian Bergstein, MIT Technology Review, Devon Voice and the National Liberal Party. Please note that Devon Voice has kept the original North American spelling and phrases as they are.

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Basic Income Could Work – If You Do It Canada-Style (Part 3)

A Canadian province is giving people money with no strings attached – revealing both the appeal and the limitations of the idea.

A simple US graphic which explains Universal Basic Income (UBI). Rapid advancements in Artificial Intelligence and Robotics will see more jobs disappear. Therefore, Devon Voice asks: How will we take care of our workers when there’s no work?

After all, she says, Canada does many other things to strengthen its safety net and reduce inequality. For one, it has universal health care. School funding in Ontario is primarily allocated at the province level rather than being heavily dependent on local property taxes, as it is in the US. Canada also traditionally spends about 1 percent of its GDP on workforce-development programs, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. That’s about half of the proportion in other advanced countries, but it still dwarfs the US figure, which is about 0.3 percent.

Funding a different mind-set

Tony Tilly is the outgoing president of Fleming College, which specializes in preparing people in Kawartha Lakes for careers in both white-collar work and trades. About half the students don’t come right from high school; they’ve already been in the workforce and hope to learn a new skill.

He supports a basic income because he thinks it could help people break out of poverty that has beset their families for generations. But even if the program continues past the three-year trial period, Fleming’s essential challenge would remain: how to prepare students for a world in which more and more tasks are being automated.

Fleming is still priming its graduates to work in traditional strongholds of the regional economy: jobs tied to the environment and natural resources, infrastructure development, mining, construction, and government. But the school is trying to instill a different mind-set from the one students had when Tilly became its president 14 years ago. They now get more emphasis on so-called soft skills: teamwork, problem-solving, personal interaction. Above all, he says, they need to know “not only how to do some particular job but how to contribute overall to the success of an organization, whether it’s a manufacturer or a provider of social services.”

If the basic-income plan works as expected, Fleming might get even more students than it otherwise would. Dana Bowman could be one of them.

It’s been years since she last had a paying job, as a receptionist. She has been on disability for a variety of ailments, including skin cancer and arthritis. But she feels she is up to doing some part-time work. In 2015, two years before the basic-income trial, Bowman asked a case worker if she could get help paying for transportation to a Fleming campus that offers classes in social work. The official said that would lead to cuts in other benefits Bowman relied on. The message Bowman says she got was: “You’re unemployable. You’re not worth investing in.”

In contrast, the basic-income plan ensures a minimum for her without micromanaging how she spends it. For every dollar that recipients earn above the minimum, their payout from the province will be cut by 50 cents, but no one is made worse off by working.

Even being able to consider that prospect, Bowman says, has been good for her. “I don’t feel ‘less than.’ I feel ‘equal to.’ Not feeling guilty walking down the street, thinking, ‘I didn’t do enough today,’” she says. “People want to do something. People aren’t inclined to do nothing.”

WELCOME TO the first debate hosted by Liberal Worker – the voice of National Liberal Trade Unionists. As many readers may know, supporters of the NLTU are different from many of our fellow trade unionists in that we’re not socialists (or capitalists). Neither are we particularly ‘into’ class definitions. We feel that class distinction has become increasingly blurred. Also to simply define someone by the class is very restrictive: living, breathing human beings are purely described in economic terms and everything else – say, their character or natural talents – count for nothing. Despite this, as trade unionists, we’re naturally very interested in the lives and well-being of ordinary working folks.

With the above in mind, a comrade has brought our attention to the following untitled article which was published way back in July by the Independent Working Class Association. According to the IWCA, it was established ‘to promote and celebrate the political independence of the working class, and to pursue the political and economic interests of that class with no consideration for, and regardless of, the consequences to the existing political and economic structures.’

The IWCA seem to be more in tune with ordinary working folks and aren’t afraid to talk about real social issues like immigration, anti-social behaviour and drugs. They are miles away from the trendy, metropolitan ‘middle-class champagne socialists’ who seemed to have taken over the Labour Party. These are just a couple of reasons why we’re happy to reproduce an article from their Facebook page which effectively looks at black knife crime in London knife crime, and the left’s insane Politically Correct reaction to it. This article will also be posted up on the National Liberal Trade Unionist Facebook page – https://www.facebook.com/groups/277840098977231/– and we’d invite our readers to post any comments up once they it.

Liberal Worker Debate (1) – How Should Workers View Stop & Search?

London’s Metropolitan Police have produced this graphic to address knife crime in the capital. Whilst the message is clear enough, Liberal Worker believes that the vast majority of ordinary working folk would support much tougher measures such as Stop & Search. What do you think?

SINCE 1 June there have been over 40 murder attempts in London ending in 12 fatalities. Yet if the figures are to be believed there has been a significant drop in knife crime since the re-introduction of stop and search. Yet the left continue to express their disgust at the use of the tactic. As an alternative they point to a supposedly more enlightened approach pioneered in Glasgow, but in deliberately ignoring one critical component, they again betray the minority ethnic communities they claim to cherish.

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A week before the 2011 riots erupted, police went through 32 doors on the Pembury estate in Hackney in just one morning. Gang members were the target, the enormity of the operation illustrating both the scale of the problem and the surveillance and other resources required to combat it. And that was just one estate. A similar focus was required for many others across London. So in the run up to the shooting by police of Mark Duggan it was this focus that the gang leaders were increasingly unhappy with. Thus the killing became the catalyst for the gangs to hit back in a coordinated show of force. Coordinated in the sense that a truce was declared between the gangs that lasted for the duration of what the IWCA described at the time as a ‘lumpen rebellion’.

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In the aftermath, the Government declared ‘war on the gangs’ while the IWCA analysis predicted the authorities had ‘learned their lesson’. And so it proved. According to the Times, stop and search “was all but abandoned after Theresa May, as home secretary, accepted findings that it was partly to blame for the riots”. Abandoned alongside the tactic were black working class communities, easy prey for the next generation of gangsters and killers (but then who speaks for them?). Inevitably, with the police disabled, the stabbings and shootings began to increase. A process which was further accelerated under new Mayor Sadiq Khan, who on the campaign trail had infamously promised to ‘do all in his power to further cut its use’.

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But with stabbings quickly hitting record numbers, stop and search plus Section 60 notices (whereby police can stop and search without reasonable excuse across entire areas) were ushered back in. Since then, the use of the new powers has increased by 400 per cent, with a consequent 30 per cent reduction in killings and a 20 per cent fall in knife injuries to under-25s in the year to April.

Now, in a circular argument “fears have been raised of backlash over stop and search” according to a headline in the Times, suggesting the relative success of the policy may lead to further unrest. This is not only to confuse cause and effect, but also to muddle priorities. A condition Hackney Labour councillor Mete Coban represents in an effortless way. Tweeting from Stratford on June 16 he wrote: “Just came across 4 police officers at Stratford Station searching 2 young black boys for no reason. When I asked them [police], why are you searching them, one of them told me, ‘I have to stop these people getting stabbed’. This cannot be our response to knife crime. Disgusted.”

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“Does Mete think that Section 60 orders are a more significant problem than gangland stabbings? Does he think stop and search is somehow the root cause of the knife crime problems?” inquires journalist Mary Wakefield. Yes, is the answer: because as it is already accepted in liberal circles that stop and search aligned with racial profiling was one of the root causes for the riots in 2011, it is not much of a stretch to seeing stop and search as the root cause for knife crime as well. Or as Katrina French of the monitoring group Stopwatch sees it: “Blanket Section 60 orders are an admission that you don’t know what is going on. It’s more about social control than crime prevention”. Of course when the idea of a police database was set up to allow them to know precisely ‘what is going on’, howls of “disproportionate” emanated from the same quarter. A similar puerility infers that as ‘social control’ is the authorities’ real objective, another gang orchestrated rampage which mainly involved looting, robbery, and arson would not only be justified but embraced as politically progressive.

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If we challenge the Metes and Katrinas as to what they would consider a more proportionate response to the daily round of butchery, they will gleefully point to the Glasgow model where, according to liberal mythology, a cuddlier strategy has proven to be an overwhelming success. This is to close your eyes to one significant caveat. When the Violence Reduction Unit was set up in Glasgow in 2005, stop and search was regarded as paramount. By 2010 the tactic was being employed four times more than in England, and sentences for being caught in possession more than doubled to 5 years in jail.

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Moreover, as recently released Scottish government figures demonstrate, it was when stop and search was at its most intense that serious assaults and attempted murders showed the most dramatic decline. In short, it was only after the habitual carriers had been jailed or otherwise dissuaded that the more holistic, community based approach had a chance to bed in. Naturally, the effective targeting of the habitual carrier is precisely what liberals are set against.

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London has, of course, a number of aggravating factors (the sheer size of the place, sensitivity surrounding the ethnicity of victims and perpetrators alike, plus the mammoth profits from the drugs trade would all need to be factored in), but the adoption of the innovative hard line approach pioneered in Glasgow still looks like the most practical policy not only for the capital at present but for other English metropolitan areas as well. As for the madness assailing a left who blithely step over still warm bodies to shout ‘institutional racism’, there is however no legislative remedy.

ISSUE 1 of New Horizon (NH) was launched by the National Liberal Party towards the end of 2015. Edited by Graham Williamson – a member of the NLPs ruling body, the National Council – NH is the NLPs online ideological magazine.

As the reproduced Editorial (below) notes, NH was designed ‘to showcase (and debate) the ideas and policies of the National Liberal Party, the ideology of National Liberalism and historical antecedents.’ Importantly it also encourages free thought and free speech. To do this, NH also attempts to take into consideration as many views as is possible in open debate. Thus, members and supporters are always encouraged to have their say. To this end, New Horizon puts into practice the well-known party slogan Debate is free with the NLP!

NH is also required reading for those who understand that the many social & economic problems we face are not going to be solved by screaming and shouting. Macho–posturing and gesture politics are of no interest to us. This means that we favour informed and reasoned debate. Here we concentrate on arguments, points of view and facts. NH is not definitely interested in personalities, prejudice or promoting self-interest.

Given the recent antics of our so-called ‘betters’ who sit in both Houses at Westminster, the need for a journal like New Horizon is greater than ever. That’s why we’re reproducing the Editorial from issue 1. We’ll also be reproducing articles from all four issues over the months ahead. In doing so, our aim is to promote the ideology of National Liberalism and build New Horizon. We hope that you will help us do both!

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New Horizon – Issue 1 – Editorial

THIS MAGAZINE is designed to showcase (and debate) the ideas and policies of the National Liberal Party, the ideology of National Liberalism and historical antecedents. One of these latter, in the UK, was the Liberal National Party 1931-1948/68. This was basically composed of Liberals who had disagreed with their Party leadership’s policy to support the Labour Party in Government and a dogmatic refusal to support import tariffs in a time of recession.

These ‘rebels’ were eventually doomed to fail (and largely absorbed into the Conservative Party), but at certain times had more MP’s than the Liberal Party, once had more votes in a General election, and might have survived under a more visionary leadership. This ‘division’ was not without precedence, for earlier periods had thrown up their own contemporary ‘patriotic liberals’, whether Chamberlain’s Liberal Unionists or Lord Rosebery’s ‘Liberal Imperialists’. Indeed, there have been other ‘Liberal’ figures in and even outside the party who some suggest represent an ‘alternative liberal tradition’ (see http://www.davidboyle.co.uk/history/belloc.html ). Wider still, we can find empathy with early European national liberals such as Guiessepe Mazzini, Orla Lehmann and Gustav Stresemann.

Thus, today’s National Liberals, pay homage to an old and noble tradition; indeed the very title of this magazine, the New Horizon, is a nod to the Liberal National in-house periodical, first brought out in 1942.

In our first issue the lead article explains that liberalism and nationalism/patriotism, function in political philosophy like the head (liberalism) and heart (nationalism) in the human body i.e. “Thus a vital Nationalism and Liberalism within society can be seen as a perquisite for a healthy people as a vital head and heart is for a healthy body.” There are also Book reviews from yours truly on the Philosopher Yael Tamir’s seminal work ‘Liberal Nationalism’ and a recent biography on Liberal National MP and Minister, Leslie Hoare-Belisha.

We also include a section on party news which, in this issue, features articles based around some five key areas highlighted in a new Party recruitment leaflet. These discuss Civil Liberties (including the introduction of a CL watchdog), Democracy (in particular, greater use of Referendums), Environment (because to love your country must include loving your ecology/land), National Health Service (ensuring it has a greater national priority than present e.g. cutting overseas interventions) and the Economy (promoting apprenticeships and even a little of the Liberal National’s protectionism!). We would welcome contributions. Please email us at natliberal@aol.com

We hope you enjoy this issue of what we hope will become an important tool in the National Liberal Party’s armoury and assist in the revival of the National Liberal idea.

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