The coming weeks are likely to see increasing talk of benefits, unemployment and what it costs to live as the government makes budget cuts and then as the reality of the changes to National Insurance contributions really begin to bite in early April, alongside the rise in the Minimum Wage.
Whilst the current government is very much the focus of blame, the difficult truth that many still cannot see and politicians will not talk about – IF they actually understand, is that the Minimum Wage is the benchmark that is used by everyone as the ‘accepted’ level of what it costs someone to live.
However, although the Minimum Wage will rise to £12.21 in April, this level of pay – even for a 40 hour working week, is nowhere near enough for a single person, living alone to cover the cost of everything they need to pay for each week, without seeking benefits, help from charities such as Foodbanks, going into debt (or using savings), or a mixture of them all.
Regrettably, the way that our economic system works and has deliberately been developed and evolved over a period of more than 50 years means that money and everything related to it can only make some people fabulously wealthy in the way that they are now, by many others being financially left behind.
Although this unbalanced financial system has appeared to work for a very long time, and long enough that it means most of us cannot picture the world we live in working any other way, the reality is that it could only work for a period of time, because it has developed around the growth of what we all know as the wealth divide.
Money has been created in such volumes, especially since the Great Financial Crisis, the Covid Pandemic and the War in Ukraine, that the shelf-life or end-date is arriving even more quickly than those who understood and benefitted from the system imagined, and it is the reality that the impact and consequences of decades of having this system in place which are now proving very difficult for politicians to hide and why we are now experiencing so much that people in power are either avoiding or simply refusing to explain.
Money is the centre of everything. It’s the reference point for the value of all that we have, want, need and do, and its presence and influence has reached the point where the role that money now plays in our lives is dehumanising everything – and being helped to do so by those who are benefitting from what we believe about money (that isnt actually true), and what we will accept from them as a result.
However, the world could be very different. And to be very different, we need to put people, community and our locality and environment back at the heart of everything.
The Basic Living Standard is the radical proposal to change the way that economics and money works, so that everyone working a full working week would be guaranteed a level of pay that would ensure that they could be completely self-sufficient, and live independently, working in the lowest-paid employment, thereby giving EVERYONE the same benchmark for life and minimum human value in all and whatever they do.
The Basic Living Standard would require everything in business and across society to change, so that we all recognise the value of people and what living a good, healthy, happy, safe and secure life within a genuinely fair, balanced and just system, in every part of life and in everything that we do – as it should be – rather than the focus always being upon profit, greed and advancement, as it is right now.
Please follow the link below to read the Full Text of The Basic Living Standard, download the FREE PDF version or buy the Book for Kindle.
Adam Tugwell 
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