Why did Boris Johnson bury that damning air pollution report?

  
In 2013 the consultancy firm Aether completed a report for the Greater London Authority on the state of air pollution in London and submitted it to Boris Johnson's administration who then sat on it for two and a half years until his successor Sadiq Khan uncovered it shortly after taking office.

The Analysing Air Pollution in London report contained an awful lot of damning information about the state of pollution in London, including the fact that 433 London primary schools were located in areas where levels of the toxic pollutant Nitrogen dioxide (NO2) exceeded European Union pollution limits.

Nitrogen Oxides

Nitrogen Oxides are toxic pollutants that most often come from road pollution, especially from diesel engines. Other sources of Nitrogen Oxides include electricity generation and industry.

Nitrogen Oxides are proven to trigger asthma, coughing, skin irritation, aggravate bronchitis and pneumonia. Repeated exposure can cause permanent damage to the lungs and reduced lung capacity. It is estimated that Nitrogen Oxide pollution causes thousands of premature deaths per year in London alone.

Nitrogen Oxides are also linked with the formation of ozone which occurs when Nitrogen Oxides and volatile organic compounds react in the presence of heat and sunlight. Children, the elderly, people with lung diseases such as asthma, and people who work or exercise outside are at risk for adverse effects from ozone, including reduction in lung function, respiratory illnesses and respiratory-related hospital admissions.

Poverty

Some of the most shocking findings in the report were the disparities in pollution levels between poor areas and wealthy areas. 83% of the schools with illegally high levels of Nitrogen Oxide pollution were classified as "deprived" (40%+ children on free school meals). Meanwhile less than 20% of the schools located in areas below the pollution limit were classified as "deprived".

This means that over 80% of the schools suffering illegal levels of pollution were in poor areas, and over 80% of the schools with acceptable air standards were in rich areas.

The research also showed that over half of the very poorest areas of London suffered illegal levels of pollution, while the illegal pollution rate was just 1% of the very richest areas of London.

Why did it get buried?

Nobody but the most rabidly right-wing sociopath could try to claim that it's perfectly acceptable that tens of thousands of primary school children, mainly from poor and ordinary backgrounds, are being poisoned with health destroying pollutants.

Once the information that this is the case in London would have reached the public domain it would have meant that Boris Johnson would have had to either take the incredibly unpopular stance of doing nothing about the inequality on the grounds that the affected primary school children should have had the good sense to be born into richer families, or actually try to do something about the problem.

Boris Johnson and the Tories clearly didn't want to do anything about the appalling inequality between levels of air pollution in poorer parts of London and richer areas, but neither did they want to be seen to be doing nothing. Hence the logical course of action from a self-serving Tory perspective was to bury the report so that the public had much less evidence on which to base their demands for action.

Cherry-picking the good bits

The decision not to publish the report was clearly a political one because despite deciding to not bother publishing the full report, Boris Johnson's team were happy to cherry-pick and publicise some of the positive conclusions in the report, whilst completely ignoring the bits highlighting the severe inequality in exposure to air pollution.

The director of the company that produced the report Katie King said that "The crux of the report was about understanding the inequalities of air pollution, so they chose not to make public the findings regarding inequality ...The information that they did take from the report was the positive, that exposure was predicted to fall in the future".

There's no way that the decision to cherry-pick the best bits of a scientific report, whilst completely ignoring the negative parts can be seen as anything other than a display of the worst kind of cynical political opportunism.

Conclusion

I really do pity people who are so lacking in political insight that they can't see Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson as the ruthlessly self-serving political careerist that he so clearly is, rather than the harmless foppish buffoon he pretends to be. In 1951 (13 years before BoJo was even born) Bertrand Russell warned of the dangers of politicians like him when he said "our great democracies still tend to think that a stupid man is more likely to be honest than a clever man, and our politicians take advantage of this prejudice by pretending to be even more stupid than nature has made them".

Boris Johnson is a man so lacking in principle that he refused to answer the charge that he wrote two completely different versions of his famous Telegraph article, one opposing the EU and one supporting it, then chose the one that he thought would be best for his own political ambitions.

He's so lacking in basic human morality that he buried a report into the toxic environments suffered by tens of thousands of primary school children because to publish it would have negatively impacted his own career, yet had his team cherry-pick good bits out of the report to make him look good.

The reason Boris Johnson failed to publish the damning report into air pollution levels in London schools is obvious. It's that he's one of the worst examples of the ruthlessly self-serving over-privileged Tory careerist type. It's just a damned shame that so many people fall for his foppery act and allow themselves to forget who he actually is, and what he actually represents.
 
 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

OR

12 writers who influenced my writing

This is by no means intended as an exhaustive list of all of the writers who have inspired me and influenced my writing style over the years. I'm sure that after I hit publish I’ll think of other writers who were just as worthy of inclusion as some of those who made it to the forefront of my mind as I was compiling it. 

The list is presented in more-or-less chronological order of when I came across their writing in life, and provides a short explanation of who they are and why I consider their writing so inspirational.

Roald Dahl

Roald Dahl is most famous for his children’s literature, but he also wrote adult fiction too, which is certainly worth checking out. Some people tend to scoff at children’s literature, but I don’t. It takes a special kind of writing voice to engage and inspire children. With his wonderful appreciation of the utter silliness that children adore, Roald Dahl was responsible for completely revolutionising children’s literature, making it as engaging for adults as it is for children. In my view any parent of young children who hasn't read at least a few Roald Dahl books aloud to their kids needs a bloody good talking to.

Spike Milligan

Like Roald Dahl, Spike Milligan was a veteran who witnessed the horrors of the Second World War. I first came across his work as a child (the ning nang nong, Milliganimals and loads of other silly stuff) but it was only when I re-engaged with his work as an adolescent that I came to appreciate the staggering genius of his work. His war diaries are juxtapose the sublime with the ridiculous and the horrific with the breathtakingly beautiful, but it’s in his poetry that I found the most inspiration. Spike suffered terribly with his mental health, and it was his poetry about depression, love and loss that reached out into the mind of the depressed and socially anxious teenager I was and told me that it doesn't matter how bad things get in life, you can still write something utterly amazing about it.

Arthur C. Clarke

Arthur C. Clarke was a remarkable man. He did pioneering work on the development of the radar technology that helped the UK survive the Battle of Britain, he is credited with inventing the concept of the geostationary telecommunications satellite and he was also a noteworthy underwater explorer who discovered the remains of the Koneswaram temple in eastern Sri Lanka. In later life he became one of the greatest science fiction writers of his generation with his brand of hard sci-fi, that eschewed fantasy and scientific inaccuracy for the creation of potential future realities. His science fiction work was a kind of novelisation of popular science and futurology. His book 2001 resulted in one of the greatest science fiction films of all time; Stanley Kubrick’s "2001: A Space Odyssey", a film adaptation that severely tests the common assertion that film adaptations are never as good as the book.

Douglas Adams

If you haven’t read "The Hitch Hikers’ Guide to the Galaxy", why not? Surely you've been told many times how good it is. In the view of an unapologetic nerd like me, Douglas Adams is the most hilarious writer I've ever encountered. The humour in his science fiction writing contrasts with the seriousness of hard sci-fi writers like Arthur C. Clarke, but he was no less educational and informative for it, dealing with issues like quantum indeterminacy, improbability, computing, artificial intelligence and countless others through the prism of humour. If, for whatever reason, you consider yourself the kind of person who doesn't like sci-fi, I thoroughly recommend his two hilarious novels about Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency. Perhaps the most valuable lesson I learned from Douglas Adams’ work is that it is possible to be incredibly funny and informative at the same time.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Solzhenitsyn wrote compellingly about his experiences of the brutal excesses of the Soviet Union. He spent a decade in various soviet forced labour camps and political exile for the “crime” of writing a letter to his friend criticising Stalin’s conduct of the Second World War. His experiences during these years formed the basis of most of his great works. “The Gulag Archipelago” was one of the most compelling books I read as a teenager, but the much shorter book “One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich” is his most accessible masterpiece. As the title suggests, it chronicles the events of a single day in the life of the protagonist. What makes it such a remarkable work is the way that it builds a picture of the whole world of the Soviet labour camps by chronicling the activities of a single prisoner in a single day.

Aldous Huxley

Aldous Huxley was born into an establishment family, and perhaps that’s how he gained such a remarkable understanding of the way the establishment powers use propaganda and distraction to maintain their grip on power. He is most famous for his science fiction novel “Brave New World”, but his non-fiction work “Brave New World Revisited” is equally worth a read. George Orwell was another writer who strongly influenced my writing, but as the years progress I’m ever more convinced that we’re moving toward Huxley’s dystopian vision of the future rather than Orwell’s. In 1984 Orwell imagined an all-powerful state that controlled the population through brute force, while Huxley imagined a state that kept people servile by bombarding them with propaganda and distraction. Both Huxley and Orwell taught me that it is possible to conduct insightful and engaging political analysis through the medium of fiction.

Hunter S. Thompson

It is impossible to understate the influence that Hunter S. Thompson’s writing has had on me. He invented the genre of Gonzo journalism, and when he was at his productive peak he was capable of producing unsurpassable analysis of politics and American culture through the prism of his own lived experience. His most famous work was Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, the film adaptation of which was directed by the legendary Monty Python turned film director Terry Gilliam, but his some of his other work was equally influential. Hells Angels, The Rum Diaries and Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail are all exceptional works. I’ve written quite a lot in the gonzo style, the vast majority of it as yet unpublished, and I fully intend to write some more and publish it at some point.

Bertrand Russell

Bertrand Russell is perhaps my favourite philosopher. Many of the things he wrote in the early to mid 20th Century stand truer today than when he actually wrote them. It really doesn’t matter whether you consider yourself a left-wing person or not, reading some Bertrand Russell and thinking about it will make you more intelligent. If you want to read some, a good place to start might be his essays on Socialism, Anarchism and Syndicalism entitled “ProposedRoads to Freedom” from 1918.

Naomi Klein

Naomi Klein has written three phenomenal books. “No Logo” is a brilliant critique of consumerist culture. “The Shock Doctrine” exposes the crackpot right-wing economic agenda that was forged in the furnaces of brutal South American dictatorships, and has gradually become the economic orthodoxy of our age. Her most recent book is “This Changes Everything” which deals with the devastating environmental impact of modern capitalism. One of the big influences Naomi Klein had on me as a writer was the way she is so meticulous in backing up her assertions with facts and references.

I think it’s definitely worth noting that Naomi Klein is the only female writer in my list and considering the reasons why. Part of the reason is selection bias. There are just more male writers in my favoured genres of science fiction, politics and economics, but this imbalance is gradually changing and improving as the years progress. Another reason is that most of my favourite writers come from the mid-20th Century period, where there were so many more barriers to female success in place, meaning fewer women could break through and establish themselves as influential writers. I wish there were more women on my list, and hope that should I compile a similar list in the future (perhaps of influential 21st Century writers) that it contains more female voices.

Noam Chomsky

The world is so complex these days that it’s rare indeed for anyone to be able to claim to be a world leading authority figure in two distinct fields. Noam Chomsky undeniably is. Not only is he a world renowned linguist (perhaps his most famous contribution is his grammatically correct but completely nonsensical phrase “colourless green ideas sleep furiously”) he’s also one of the great political thinkers of our age. If you haven’t read any Chomsky you really should. If you lean to the left, then you’ll find his writing compelling, and if you lean to the right you should get a teriffic mental workout from trying to find fault in his analyses.

Ha-Joon Chang

In my view Ha-Joon Chang is one of the greatest economics writers of our age. He has found a manner of explaining seemingly complex economic ideas in everyday language, so that ordinary people can engage with what is often perceived to be an elitist and inaccessible subject. I was already writing about economics in everyday language when I came across Ha Joon Chang’s book “23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism” and I read it with amazement as I realised that there was somebody else out there doing what I was trying to do, and doing such a fantastically good job of it. If you want to know more about the subject of economics, but find it intimidating, then I absolutely recommend that you read some Ha-Joon Chang.

Steve Keen

Steve Keen is an Australian economist who was one of the tiny minority who managed to accurately predict the 2007-08 global financial sector insolvency crisis. I’m not saying he was unique in saying that there was a bust coming, even I was saying that and back then I knew a tiny fraction of what I do know about economics. What made Steve Keen different is that he explained how the crash would come about, and he put his head above the parapet and said so. At the time Keen was lambasted as a fearmongerer for having dared to stand up and criticise the orthodox economic system, but the global financial sector meltdown proved him right. If you manage to read some Ha-Joon Chang and take something from it, the next step could be to move on to Steve Keen’s “Debunking Economics”, which although much harder work, is crammed full of critiques of the right-wing crony capitalist neoclassical orthodoxy that caused the global financial sector meltdown, and has somehow built itself such a powerful position that it seems almost impervious to criticism and immune from reform.

Endnote

If you are an aspiring writer, I imagine that it would be a useful exercise for you to compile a similar list of writers who have influenced you, and analyse what it is about their writing that made it so engaging.

I think the factor that makes these writers stand out from the hundreds of others I've read is more than the fact that they wrote about subjects I found engaging, it's that they found a voice. A style of writing that was uniquely theirs.

If you think that I’ve missed off any terribly important writers please feel free to add your own suggestions and descriptions in the comments section.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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The "I don't understand you - so you're stupid fallacy

The "I don't understand you - so you must be stupid" fallacy is one of my absolute favourite bits of faulty reasoning. To be perfectly honest it is not technically a right-wing fallacy because it could conceivably be used by very stupid people of any political persuasion - however in my experience, I've only ever seen it used by those poor people suffering under the delusion that their haphazard collection of simplistic right-wing tabloidisms represent some kind of profound understanding of politics and the economy.

The user

The kind of person that uses the "I don't understand you - so you must be stupid" fallacy is the type of person that thinks that just because they are in possession of a collection of simplistic idioms, slogans and assumptions to explain away any given political phenomenon, this makes them an expert authority figure when it comes to political debate.

There are many problems with this mindset, not least the fact that anyone that has ever pursued genuine knowledge is familiar with: the more you learn, the more you realise you don't know. This problem was brilliantly summed up by Bertrand Russell who said "The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts."

Fools and fanatics allow themselves to believe that they are experts because they have a collection of very simple answers to support their worldview, whilst thinking people realise that the elevation of particular views to the status of "absolutely beyond doubt" is an impediment to the pursuit of genuine understanding.

A major problem for the tabloid thinker is that many of the idioms, assumptions and slogans they use to create their comfortable illusion of political expertise are mutually contradictory. 

For thinking people, the acceptance of two mutually contradictory views results in irritating bouts of cognitive dissonance until we can resolve the situation by rejecting or redefining one of them. The tabloid thinker is often almost completely immune to cognitive dissonance because they don't have a holistic worldview. 

One minute they can berate the unemployed as "idle scroungers", then the next spout some spurious justification narrative to defend the idle lifestyles of hereditary wealth. They can do this because they are unwilling to consider the idea that it is somewhat contradictory to generalise about the poor and castigate them for being idle, yet defend the rentier class despite the overwhelming evidence that their wealth allows them the freedom to be as idle as they like. 

The tabloid thinker is comfortable holding mutually exclusive explanations because they just don't do "joined up thinking"

Being a pub bore
The first time I remember noting the "I don't understand you - so you must be stupid" fallacy was in a pub a few years ago. Now I admit that I was being a bit of a pub bore by talking about politics (one of the three forbidden pub subjects - politics, business and religion) but in mitigation this was a quite special pub, where the barman would play me at chess for free drinks* and intellectual conversation was not strictly forbidden.

Anyhow - I got talking to a bloke about the unrepresentative nature of politics. The thing I was trying to explain was that the average politician doesn't actually work for us, they work for their donors. The politician knows that they get their parliamentary pay whether they bother to represent their constituents or not - therefore it serves their self-interest to use their political power and their political connections to serve the interests of corporations and the wealthy minority in order to further enrich themselves with kickbacks, rather than devoting their time to serving the interests of their constituents (as they are supposed to). Thus politicians have a strong financial incentive to forget about the best interests of their constituents, and instead serve the interests of corporations and the wealthy in return for political donations, corporate junkets, ludicrously overpaid advisory positions, corporate directorships, speaking fees and countless other forms of kickback.

The guy I was talking to was absolutely insistent that I was wrong. He maintained that we pay their wages so they must work for us. I tried explaining my point in several different ways, using numerous examples, however there was no convincing him. He soon became agitated and angrily declared that he couldn't understand what on earth I was going on about, therefore I must be stupid. Normally I would have argued the point, but the guy was as burly as he was drunk, so I decided to drop the "conversation" and challenge the barman to another game of chess instead.

Arguing with trolls
The encounter in the pub happened a while before I'd established Another Angry Voice, so for quite a while I remembered it as an probably the stupidest bit of "reasoning" I'd ever encountered. However, as the AAV Facebook page began growing in popularity and my exposure to cognitively illiterate right-wing ranters increased exponentially, I began to see ever more pitiful attempts at right-wing "logic" including numerous invocations of the "I don't understand you - so you must be stupid" fallacy.

One particularly impressive example occurred after I rebuked someone for a truly feeble attempt to claim that New Labour was a left-wing project. He said that the privatisation of the HMRC property portfolio into the hands of a company based in Bermuda for the purposes of avoiding tax was a left-wing policy, because it had happened under a Labour government.

My response was to question his assumption that everything that a Labour government does is by definition left-wing, even the extraordinarily right-wing policy of privatising the HMRC property portfolio. I mean what warped definition of "socialism" must an individual be using if it includes privatisation of public property into the hands of tax-dodgers?**

As part of this response I stated that New Labour had abandoned socialism in order to embrace the "right-wing psuedo-economic ideology of neoliberalism". The comeback to this was that it was nothing more than "a load of meaningless buzzwords" and that I was stupid.

The problem of course is that all of those words do have meanings. Even if you don't know the meanings of any particular word, it isn't difficult to go and look it up. Apologies to those that are arleady familiar with all of these words, but I'm going to briefly define each of them to demonstrate that they are not "meaningless buzzwords".

Right-wing : An outlook or specific position that accepts or supports social hierarchy or social inequality as inevitable, natural, normal, or desirable.

Pseudo-economic ideology : The prefix pseudo- is used to mark something as false, fraudulent, or pretending to be something it is not. Thus something that is described as a pseudo-economic ideology is something that purports to be an economic discipline, but is in fact an ideological agenda.

Neoliberalism : A word that is used to describe the economic orthodoxy of the late 20th / early 21st Century, which is built upon a foundation of neoclassical economics and pushes right-wing economic objectives (privatisation, tax cuts for corporations and the super-rich, attacks on labour rights and the right to protest, financial sector deregulations, abandonment of capital controls, centralisation of executive power, abandonment of monetary autonomy ...). Here's my article on the meaning of neoliberalism.

The moral to this story is this: If you don't understand all of the words, the person that uttered them is probably not the stupid one in the conversation.

Tips
I imagine that anyone that has managed to read this far without abandoning the article as "stupid" because it is full of "meaningless buzzwords" such as "cognitive dissonance", "mutually exclusive", "holism" and "neoliberalism" isn't actually in need of any tips for avoiding the "I don't understand you - so you must be stupid" fallacy, but I'll provide some just in case.

If you find yourself reading something that you don't fully understand, there are two possibilities. Either you're not getting it because you're missing some information or vocabulary or it is actually incomprehensible gibberish.
 
It is fairly easy to identify incomprehensible gibberish, because it is usually presented in appalling grammar. However, Noam Chomsky demonstrated that it is possible to construct grammatically correct sentences with no actual meaning. The famous example he provided was "colourless green ideas sleep furiously". It is fairly easy to spot that this kind of construct is meaningless because of the glaring incompatibility of the words ("colourless" and "green" are mutually exclusive, it's not a great strategy to personify abstract concepts and "furiously" is hardly an appropriate adverb to describe sleep).

If the thing you are struggling to understand is written in acceptable grammar and is not filled with glaringly incompatible words, then it is likely that you need to look up some of the constituent words in a dictionary. Looking up the meaning of a new word is hardly an admission of ignorance, given that there are well over a million words in the English language and the test your vocab data suggests that the average native English speaker knows some thing like 20,000 - 35,000 of them (between 2% and 3.5% of the total).

Whatever the case, it is probably better to avoid going around calling people "stupid" whether you understood what they said or not. If you have looked up any unfamiliar words and had a good think about what it means and you still don't understand, the best course of action is probably to ask politely for a rephrased explanation, not to resort to insults.

Conclusion
The "I don't understand you - so you must be stupid" fallacy is one of my absolute favourites for two main reasons. Firstly because it takes such an astonishing lack of self-awareness for the user to conclude that because they can't understand the argument, the utterer of the argument must be the stupid one; and secondly because it is such a remarkably daft stance that it actually quite rare (as compared to other much more common fallacies such as the inefficient state fallacy, the "Hitler was a socialist" fallacy*** or the "Waah you're censoring me" fallacy) so it is quite a privilege if you ever have it wielded at you.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

* Being quite good at chess I became somewhat of a regular there!

** Anyone who is even vaguely politically literate knows that one of the core socialist principles is the commitment to social ownership, which is completely incompatible with selling off public property to a Bermuda based tax-dodging operation.

*** The ludicrous "Hitler was a leftie" fallacy is one of the next articles to write in my political myth busting series.

 Click here to read more articles in the Political Myth Busting series 

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Universal Basic Income

Universal Basic Income (sometimes called Unconditional Basic Income, Citizens Income or just Basic Income) is a proposed economic system in which all adults within the economy receive a guaranteed basic income irrespective of whether they have a job or not. It is a very interesting proposal which finds support from across the political spectrum, especially amongst socialists and libertarians.
   

 Arguments in favour

Technology and automation: As technology and automation improve, the requirement for labour in the economy falls. However, the pace of technological advancement is retarded if the public cannot afford the outputs of advanced technology and automation. If the public have their basic human needs met, then they have more wealth to invest in consumption of the outputs, further driving technological advancement.

Wealth Redistribution: Wealth redistribution is economically beneficial because of the Marginal Propensity to Consume (poor & ordinary people spend more of their income than the wealthy). The more wealth that is spent, rather than hoarded, the faster the economy will develop.

Efficiency: Universal Basic Income is the most efficient form of wealth redistribution because there is no need for a massive and expensive bureaucracy to means-test recipients. The only checks would be whether the recipient is a citizen of the state, and whether they are classified as an adult, which would massively reduce the bureaucratic cost overheads of the welfare system.

Smaller government: The introduction of Universal Basic Income would reduce the economic burden of the welfare system through the elimination of almost all means tested benefits and associated bureaucracies.

Reduced crime: Crime rates will be reduced because the Universal Basic Income would effectively eliminate absolute poverty, and massively reduce the economic desperation that motivates a large proportion of criminal behavior such as theft (a Basic Income trial project in Namibia recorded a remarkable 42% reduction in crime).

Balanced Labour Market: The labour market has become ever more imbalanced ever since the rise of neoclassical pseudo-economic dogma, and the attacks on trade unions and labour rights. Workers would no longer be compelled to work in order to meet their basic human needs, so employers would have to offer high wages and good terms and conditions in order to attract workers. Exploitative employment practices would be curtailed and the worker would have greater freedom to pursue the employment that they choose, rather than doing awful jobs for crap wages in order to stave off absolute destitution.

Innovation and small businesses: If citizens are guaranteed a basic income to meet their basic human needs, the investment of time and wealth into the establishment of new businesses would be significantly more attractive and carry significantly less risk. The evidence from trials supports the conclusion that the introduction of such a system would increase the number of business start-ups.

Better capitalism: The resulting boom in small businesses would improve capitalism by increasing the diversity of the capitalist economy, and by increasing competition within existing markets. Increased diversity would lead to a more robust economy capable of withstanding extrogenous shocks, and more competitive markets would result in greater competition and efficiency.

Social justice: If the basic human needs of all citizens are met automatically, then the requirement on charity and state administered welfare is dramatically reduced, meaning that those with charitable intentions can assist the needy elsewhere in the world, rather than fighting to combat poverty in their own developed nations. 

Arguments against

Loss of work incentive: Opponents argue that the incentive to work would be destroyed, and that capitalism would grind to a halt without the fear of destitution driving workers to continue working. This objection is not supported by the experimental data, which shows that the vast majority of people continue to work, even if their basic human needs are met. Trials in North America showed that the only demographics to significantly reduce their working hours were new mothers (to spend time with their babies) and teenagers/young adults (who spent additional time in education). The trial in Namibia actually showed a significant increase in economic activity, due to the increase in economic demand and the establishment of new businesses.

Idleness: One of the most commonly wielded criticisms is that if a guarantee that the individual's basic human needs are met is given, then the individual will be inclined towards idleness. Not only is this concern disproved by the trials that have been carried out, it is also disproved by an appeal to "common sense". If having sufficient wealth that our basic human needs are met causes idleness, how is it possible to explain the fact that multi-billionaires like Warren Buffet or George Soros carry on working, when they have accumulated enough wealth to provide their basic human needs for ten thousand lifetimes or more? Why do actors like Keanu Reeves carry on working, when they have made more than enough money to live in comfort for the rest of their lives? Why do sportsmen carry on working even after they have become multi-millionaires? How is it possible to explain the fact that the current UK government is absolutely stuffed full of multi-millionaires? If having "enough to survive" was a disincentive to work, then all of these people would surely have retired to a life of idle luxury. The only way that this objection makes any kind of sense is if you accept the ludicrous right-wing stance that the rich are best motivated by more money, and the poor are best motivated by the threat of absolute destitution.

Something for nothing: Another one of the most common objections is the "why should people get something for nothing" argument. This kind of attitude lies behind the irrational British obsession with welfare spending. It is estimated that the UK economy loses £120 billion a year to tax-dodging, however this issue is completely dwarfed (in terms of column inches and public opinion) when it comes to the cost of welfare, of which only £1.2 billion is claimed fraudulently. The British public are easily riled with the sense of injustice that they must work hard, whilst others have a roof over their head and food in their belly despite not having a job. The sense of injustice is a powerful emotion, and the right-wing press deliberately weave it into their anti-welfare narratives, but it in economic terms it is a meaningless objection to Universal Basic Income, because if everyone is entitled to an income that guarantees them a basic standard of living, whether they work or not, the objection that the unemployed are getting something that the employed don't no longer carries any weight at all.

Reciprosity: Another objection is that the guaranteed income is basically unconditional, and that means that there is no conditionality that the recipient must put anything back into the economy. This objection demonstrates a basic lack of economic literacy because the recipient will either spend it (creating economic demand) or save it (creating the capital reserves that the capitalist system requires in order to fund the credit economy). The only way that it would be possible for the individual to extract the wealth from the economy entirely would be through off-shoring it, but that is a problem of capital flight and tax-dodging, not a problem with the principle of unconditional income.

Welfare for the rich: Another objection is that the Universal Basic Income would result in payments to citizens that are already wealthy, and have no trouble meeting their basic human needs. In my view, this is a particularly short-sighted objection for two reasons. Firstly, because making the payment conditional on wealth and income would necessitate a large bureaucracy in order to means test everyone, which would undermine one of the main benefits (efficiency); and secondly, because if the wealthy and powerful (generally high-tax payers) are excluded, they are likely to oppose the scheme because they are paying for it, but getting nothing back. If guaranteeing the basic human needs of the majority in the most efficient way possible must come at the price of giving the already wealthy "a bit extra" too, then so be it. To hopelessly compromise the whole concept of a universal benefit out of a desire to make sure that the rich don't get a share of it would be to throw the baby out with the bathwater so to speak.

Inflation: Of all of the regularly stated objections, the only one that carries any significant economic weight is the threat of inflation. It should be fairly easy to understand how this might happen. Take rent for example: If the idle rentier class is aware that their tenants are in receipt of a monthly payment designed to meet their basic human needs, it is clearly in their financial self-interest to then massively increase the rental charge so that it takes the entire amount (and probably a bit more for good measure). An example of this kind of rent seeking behavior can be seen in the UK childcare sector after the introduction of Child Tax Credits. The childcare providers knew that working families were getting a payment from the government to cover the cost of childcare, so they raised the cost of childcare so much that the UK now has the most expensive childcare in the developed world (33% of family income, as compared to the OECD average of just 13%) meaning that the Child Tax Credit allowance is nowhere near enough to cover the inflated cost of childcare. If Universal Basic Income is introduced, then it must be done with a package of anti-inflationary measures (such as rent caps) or the value of the payment will soon be eroded away through the rent seeking behavior of the idle rentier class.

Another solution to the rent seeking behaviour of the idle rentier class could be to ensure that the UBI payment is linked to the cost of living, so that if the cost of rent, energy rates and water bills go up 10% in a year, the UBI payment would rise proportionately. This would of course result in inflation, but the inflation wouldn't end up driving ordinary people into poverty because they would be getting an inflation adjusted UBI payment to meet their basic needs. 

 Disclaimer

I've outlined some of the arguments for and against Universal Basic Income. The problem is that most of the arguments in favour are backed by empirical evidence and sound economic reasoning, but most of the commonly raised arguments against don't make any sense at all from an economic perspective, are contradicted by the evidence, and amount to little more than opinion. This means that it is absolutely impossible to construct a "balanced" article without giving the completely false impression that the arguments against are somehow equal to the arguments in favour, when aside from the valid concerns over inflation, they are transparently not.

Politics

The concept of Universal Basic Income is compatible with several political ideologies, especially socialism and libertarianism. I would also argue that it is also compatible with most forms of free-market capitalism (apart from the extremely rabid variety that opposes any kind of welfare intervention whatever).

Socialism
Perhaps the most famous left-wing advocate of universal income was the British philosopher and social critic Bertrand Russell, who wrote in 1918 that "those who choose not to work should receive a bare livelihood, and be left completely free" and that under such a system "The dread of unemployment and loss of livelihood would no longer haunt men like a nightmare".*

Other left-wing advocates for the Universal Basic Income include James Meade, who argues that it represents the only way by which full employment can be regained, and the Belgian philosopher and economist Phillippe van Parijs, who founded the European Basic Income Network in 1987.

Libertarianism 
Libertarianism can crudely be divided into two schools, and advocates of the Universal Basic Income can be found in both of them.

Left-libertarianism
One of the early left-libertarian advocates of Universal Basic Income was the American economist Henry George. He proposed a progressive tax system where tax would be levied upon land and under which every citizen would receive a basic income called a "citizens' dividend". The benefit of such a Land Value Tax system is that tax is levied upon wealth, and not upon consumption or income.

In recent years the Green Party of the United States has proposed a universal income for all adults regardless of health, employment, or marital status, in order to minimize government bureaucracy and intrusiveness into people's lives.

Right-libertarianism
Many Conservatives might be inclined to oppose Universal Basic Income because they have been conditioned to hate the welfare state, but many of the ideologues of the neoclassical ideology that the Conservative thinker implicitly supports are advocates of forms of Universal Basic Income. These advocates include Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman and Gary Johnson (the Libertarian party candidate in the 2012 & 2016 US Presidential election).

Right-libertarians often propose a form of conditional Basic Income called Negative Income Tax, where people earning below a certain income threshold receive supplemental payment from the government instead of paying taxes to it.

Free Market Capitalism
One might assume that the concept of universal welfare is completely at odds with free-market capitalism, but it isn't. Universal Basic Income would increase the competitivity of the market by freeing people from concerns over their basic human needs, and giving them the liberty to start their own businesses. A rise in the number of small businesses would increase market competition and promote greater efficiency.

If the free-market capitalist believes in any form of welfare at all, then the logical form to support would be the form that involves the least government interference and the smallest amount of costly bureaucracy, which would quite clearly take the form of some kind of universal income, rather than a bureaucratically administered means-tested benefit.

Conclusion

Universal Basic Income is a very interesting idea. There are numerous research projects being conducted all over the world, meaning we will learn more about the benefits and pitfalls.

It is clear that the underlying principle of a universal bureaucracy-free welfare system has a great deal of appeal to people from either side of the political spectrum, given that it has supporters from either extreme (from Bertrand Russell to Fredrich Hayek) and many in between.

Many of the critics rely on economically illiterate objections such as the "something for nothing" complaint or faux concerns about "idleness". 

By raising such ludicrous concerns that the poor and ordinary would cease work at the very instant their basic human needs are met (whilst ignoring the fact that the rich continue to work despite their basic human needs being met many times over), the opponent is essentially admitting that their view of capitalism relies upon exploitation of the fear of destitution, rather than the willing participation of the workers.

Another thing that this kind of "something for nothing" objection reveals is the absurd idea that the only way in which it is possible to contribute to society is through paid labour. The idea that the individual is incapable of contributing anything at all to society apart from through submission to capitalist exploitation. This stance is ludicrous nonsense, not only because the individual would contribute to the economy every time they spent or saved their Universal Basic Income, but also because non-remunerated activities such as bringing up children, caring for elderly or disabled relatives, volunteering for charities or investing time in unpaid endeavours such as education, writing or the arts are all clearly contributions to society, it's just that they are much less easily monetised by the "cost of everything, value of nothing" brigade, so they are dismissed as worthless "non-contributions".

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* - Bertrand Russell "Proposed Roads to Freedom; Socialism Anarchism and Syndicalism" 1918 (I strongly recommend people take a look at this)