“Levelling Up” is one of those ambiguous meaningless terms that inspire headlines but little else.

If you look at the core of this idea, as ever, the focus is on work and productivity, the failing with that, is that this method is no longer a means of alleviating poverty.

People who are working 12 – 16 hour days on three gig economy jobs still don’t have enough money to get by. 17% of Britain’s working population is in poverty.

The government has to subsidise wages with Tax Credits, in essence give Social Welfare to corporations, allowing the trillion pound companies not to pay decent wages, but instead getting the Taxpayer to fund barely liveable ones.

Work is definitely not the solution.

What’s missing in the “levelling up” process is the same thing every person experiencing homelessness has been crying out for decades: a base or standard level of living, by which we as a society all agree is “decent” and must be met.

A Human Rights Charter that states what every British citizen must have. An ability to eat healthily, access to free healthcare, access to a home, access to a good education. Rights, not choices. If someone isn’t getting them, that’s a failure of government and systems should be in place to enforce them to correct.

To do that, this scheme needs to take a complete 180 and not look for how to get other parts of the country acting like the South East but agreeing that every British Citizen should never be in a state of poverty.

That’s true levelling up.

Just yesterday (Wednesday 16th February 2022) Wales announced they were trialling the first true Universal Basic Income (UBI) initiative in the World giving 18 year old care leavers £1,600 per month unconditionally for two years.

UBI was an idea I put to Iain Duncan Smith the day before Valentine’s Day in 2014 in an Open Letter to him as head of the DWP at the time, as my benefits as now, had been incorrectly stopped, the idea of giving every adult person in the UK enough to live without work, eradicates the need for welfare entirely and would save £billions.

The resistance to this idea by the British public always highlights their lack of understanding of economics and trade. We’ve been sold the idea of wage slavery and often fight to keep it going, which I find incredibly strange. The media has also done a great job of the Us (hardworking tax payer) and Them (lazy welfare recipient) narrative.

The reality of course the real us (majority of Britain) and them (1% in Power or Wealth) is divided by the meritocracy lie, the idea that you are only not rich because you haven’t worked hard enough which as I pointed out above is complete nonsense.

But to level up, means we should all start at least at a base level, UBI is the only way to achieve this and it’s absence in this report to me, just means we are pursuing ideas that time after time have failed to deliver.

I submitted to the Commission on Social Securities and the resultant report published at the end of January 2022 in the main, supported this concept of a decent life and a base line of income to achieve it.

The financial crash in 2008 was the end of capitalism and free markets. The markets had said the banks should fail, state intervention propped them up. Our economy is now driven by property and share price increases, not as the Levelling Up report suggests, R&D (research and development).

We now have loss making companies like Netflix, Uber, WeWork pursuing monopolistic positions and on that provision their shares continue to rise and the Taxpayer continues to subsidise them (For example, WeWork having never made a profit was given a £4.5 million pound rental holiday by Spelthorne Council.

Why don’t we fund our citizens instead of loss-making companies?

I’m sure you would agree with me that only the end of poverty in Britain should be seen as real “Levelling Up”!

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