UK LIFEReform of the welfare and benefits systems
LIFE will integrate social care services and the NHS to provide a nationwide service that ensures that everyone will have access to basic care services at all stages of their life.
Care homes will still be run and funded locally, but the budget will be allocated from national income taxes.
LIFE will guarantee that every citizen and resident in the UK has free access to basic public services, including old age care.
Universal Basic Services (WellFair) include the NHS, education, transport, housing, food, communications, as well as public safety, legal aid, and our democracy.
This includes a plan to build 1,000,000 new social housing units within 7 years, and free basic phone and Internet for everyone.
All funding will be from Income Taxes.
LIFE will ensure that any constituency, local area, or region that organises itself to for a new local government will receive direct control of their allocated budgets for WellFair, and the right to set their own migration levels.
LIFE will ensure that all money raised from Income Taxes, National Insurance, Inheritance Tax, and other personal taxes are only spent on public services.
Public services include the NHS, education, transport, housing, food, communications, as well as public safety, legal aid, and our democracy.
To provide the additional revenues to cover the cost of the expanded public services (WellFair) we will halve the personal allowance, treat capital gains as income, set corporation tax at the same as income tax, and change inheritance tax rules to a lifetime allowance of £1,000,000 per person.
It takes years of patient and hard work to rebuild communities if they breakdown, and so it makes perfect sense that it takes years of underfunding before the consequences of failing to nurture a community also become apparent.
Across this land the awful tragedy of the almost impossibly arrogant notion of a “big society” promulgated by the Tories in this decade is now unfurling. The idea that the voluntary sector can and would pick up and replace public services when the government abandoned them could only make sense to a shallow-thinking, protected group of naives. But it is the curse of those who view the world exclusively through the lens of motivation that they cannot see the social imperative that makes their view possible.
Leaders in the NHS are sounding alarms about the effect on health services, but they are just the ‘canary’ for a much wider thinning of our social fabric.
Human society, as it is currently configured, is unaffordable.
Why?
Because service, not material, is the true basis of human groups.
Membership of a group costs every individual member of the group a little something, an intangible, and not the same thing from every person, but something from everyone.
The group returns something to every individual member, an intangible, a feeling of belonging, and a sense of safety, and a contribution towards their individual happiness.
You cannot pay people to be a member of a group, people agree to be a member of the group knowing that they will make a contribution in return for their membership.
If you pay someone to be a member of the group, you automatically introduce the notion that their intrinsic value is not sufficient for group membership, you instantly degrade the very groupness of that group, and undermine the individual’s worthiness. The group can provide a service, a kindness, without the intrinsic value of the member coming into question.
Think about being asked around to a friend’s house for dinner: if, when you arrive at the front door, your host gives you £20 with a smile on their face, what would run through your mind?
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.
The survival of BOTH – both our social group and our individual uniqueness are part of the same evolutionary forces that led homo sapiens to this point. We must understand that inescapable inheritance in order to fashion systems and structures for our societies that will give us the best opportunity for sustainable success.
We have published this one page guide to the evolution of human nature and how it can guide us to develop our social safety services and our economy in ways that will be naturally aligned with our origins, and most likely to succeed.
Download the PDF from this link: The Survival of BOTH. Enjoy.
In an excellent collection of essays the Policy Network has collected together for their “Making Progressive Politics Work” publication, we found the following comments by various authors in support for the fundamental principles that LIFE’s policies are based on.
Why cash has (almost) no place in a social security system.
Unconditional love is the ultimate expression of our humanity for a reason, because it is the basis of our successful evolution.
The purpose of social security is to provide unconditional support as the expression of solidarity, thereby maximising the output and the quality of our society. Conditionality defeats the central purpose of providing social security, corrupts all participants, and stultifies our society and its economy. Because cash distribution always includes conditionality, it has to be removed from social security.
UK LIFE 
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