AS a corrective to the desperate series of misdirections to undermine the concept of a citizen’s basic income by Iain Duncan Smith’s think tank, the self-styled Centre for Social Justice, perhaps the following may be of interest (IDS think tank claims basic income would be worse than universal credit, August 4).

These misdirections are being promoted precisely because a properly revenue sourced, effective citizen’s income would lead to the true ending of a persisting feudal servitude through wealth inequality.

If we the people, the citizen majority, were to vote for the democratisation of land ownership then a citizens income could be based on a system of land ownership where all non-domestic land is in the shared ownership of all the people via a common good agency. An agency in which every citizen is a shareholder.

The common good rents, for access to the community owned lands, with similar funds raised on all privately owned buildings and domestic land holdings, rated according to use can provide a sustained and sustainable revenue stream to provide a citizen’s income of £900 month, adult and child allowances of £480 month, plus an individualised heritable pension scheme with £100 set aside every month between the ages of 16 and 66 for every citizen.

By de-privatising the natural environment away from the absolute minority who claim to own the vast extent of it by right of the violent exclusion of the majority in times past, we could finally build a truly egalitarian, pluralist democracy in which wealth inequality cannot be used to entrench hereditary advantage to a minority. Instead it would ensure equality of opportunity and enhanced freedoms of choice to all to reject a gerrymandered employment market in which the system as it stands permits the few, who effectively own that system, to set who gets to work and when in work, the hours and rates to be paid for the labour of the very, very many. Think zero hours, minimum wage contracts as the norm the corporatists desire.

Since the revenue providing assets would be in the shared ownership of all the people via the common good agency then, by definition, all citizens become landowners. Also, by providing a basic level of constitutionally guaranteed, tax free income to each (£10,800 per annum plus pension set aside of £1,200 per annum) to provide for their own use in providing for themselves their food, clothing and shelter needs, we can each then be in a position to demand more of the value of our labour to ourselves and to negotiate more family friendly working arrangements.

These proposals allow for the abolition of employment-based National Insurance taxes and the deliberately discriminatory nature of the current means-tested benefits regime and its current political abuse by the party of privilege.

With a minor tweak to the revenues rates to be accrued on the land and buildings, we could also protect the existence of, and sustainably fund, our existing democratised health service.

The elites in politics, the administration of the state, the judiciary, the “high end” lawyers, and the rapaciously greedy in corporate commerce and banking would hate this precisely because it removes their ability to play their coercive and exploitative games with our lives.

We would be changing the rules of the game to the life betterment of the very, very many. A life worth living. A true social justice.

We would be evolving our democracy to provide a better future for ourselves, our children and our grandchildren.

We would be voting for a land income for everyone, voting that each may have a socially just life.

Robin Clunie
Glenrothes