There’s no such thing as a free lunch. So, when it comes to giving away money, anyone who thinks that a Universal Basic Income is going to help anyone and in particular our farmers, either has an agenda they aren’t sharing, or they don’t have any real understanding of the true cost of making UBI work.
UBI is certainly well intended. A lot of research and thinking has gone into the trials and projects where a localised equivalent of a guaranteed basic income has been tried.
The problem is UBI is a solution that uses the creation or printing of money to enable it to work.
Money creation or printing is an essential part of the FIAT monetary system that we have today. The same system that is the root cause of all the money related and inflationary problems that we and our farmers are facing.
It is ironic that giving cash handouts to farmers would only build upon the culture of dependency that now exists, where the conditioned over reliance on subsidies and guaranteed contracts have made farmers vulnerable to the greed underpinning big money and profiteering retailers. Corporate interests that are not only taking all the profit that would be available from the food chain if it were accurately priced, but they are also using their market positions to inflate prices even further so that they can continue to take even more, without giving a damn about the impact and consequences for us all.
Minded that every one of us needs food every day in pretty much the same way that we need water and the air that we breathe, it defies sense or logic that British Farmers should be in a situation where they cannot have a secure, financially sound and fair-income-paying business, in return for providing a service which really should be considered a public good.
That farmers cannot survive and there are now organisations suggesting that UBI is the answer makes very clear that the working model or operational platform for British Agriculture is broken.
This reality is all the more alarming given the fact that in a time of growing world crisis, we only grow the equivalent of around 52% of our own food in the U.K.
Regrettably, the farming problem isn’t one that good politicians would be able to fix in isolation. Because the issues farmers are facing are interconnected with many other areas of public policy that are breaking down today. All for no bigger reason than we have now had decades of politicians and the political parties they represent that have become increasingly poor.
If good politicians were representing us all as they should be today, the focus on farming would be to use legislation to immediately end the profiteering, price manipulation and speculation taking place that keeps taking money from the food chain without adding any form of value.
The next step would likely be to provide financial support and other legislation to help farmers transform food production and the pathway to retail to a system which is a contemporary version of what we had historically, where food was produced and consumed locally and in much more original, unprocessed and therefore healthier forms.
However, we don’t have good politicians and when the eagerly anticipated General Election comes, we will not have the option of good politicians to choose from even then.
This leaves farmers with a very difficult choice. To remain at the mercy of poor politicians who say lots but do very little. Or step back from conformity with the current broken system, take the risk of funding change themselves and then taking the lead and working closely with consumers who are the other key stakeholders in the food chain, so that food security, healthy nutritious food, and viable food producing businesses supplying every one of our local communities are brought back.
Adam Tugwell 
That is full fledged socialism and there is nothing good about it.