It’s not unreasonable to define the crisis we are in as a ‘cost of living crisis’. It costs too much to live an ordinary life: it costs too much money, it costs too much freedom, and it costs too much planet.
- One solution to something costing too much is to earn more to cover those costs. So we could try and pay ourselves more money, grant ourselves more freedom, and find some more planet.
- The alternative would be to reduce the cost of living. To make ordinary life cost less money, include more freedom, and take less planet.
At the moment everyone is trying to do the first option. But it’s not working, and it can’t work. We are not defined by money, money is a child of our society and so there can never be enough money – as soon as we pay ourselves more, we have raised our cost of living again. We have natural freedoms, and we cannot give ourselves what we already have. There is no more planet to have, so we’ll have to live with what we’ve got.
It’s funny (strange) that no one is considering the second option yet, because that’s actually the easiest one to do.
And that’s the option that LIFE has been working on, and for which we have a complete policy framework; all costed, and realistically based on starting where we are and moving to a future worth living.
We can make a one time investment in social infrastructure that allows a really basic life to be lived without cost, and we will make that investment back in less than 7 years. At the end of that process we will cost less to live, we will live in a much freer society, and we will be using less planet.
UK LIFE 