Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen, (1)

My name is Alexander Baron, and I have been an ardent Social Crediter since I first encountered the writings of Major Douglas in the early 80s. I expect, enlightened audience that you are, that most of you are au fait with the concept of Social Credit, and that probably many or most of you are also familiar to some extent with the writings of the greatest economist of all time, even though they have long been consigned to the memory hole (2) on the pretext that Douglas, like his followers, should be classed with the lunatic fringe of conspiracy theorists and sundry acolytes of the New Age. Briefly though, for those of you who are not, Clifford Hugh Douglas (1879-1952) was an engineer; among other things he worked on the Post Office’s underground railway.

Douglas lived in troubled times, and when he applied his fine brain to the financial system, he realised that the economic problems of the day were caused by faulty engineering. That is that the purpose of the financial system should be to deliver the goods and services that the community demands, and that it can do this and can supply a decent standard of living to all, but that it doesn’t actually do this on account of its built-in shortcomings.

The reason that it doesn’t is because, primarily, money comes into existence as an interest-bearing debt, not all money, but most of it, and that this debt must increase progressively. As the world grows wealthier, so it grows more and more indebted to the banking system.

Major Douglas was an advocate of debt-free money, and he postulated further that far from having any sort of National Debt, we the people, all of us, should be enjoying a National Dividend. I want to tackle here one specific facet of the Major’s ideas, that of the National Dividend or the Social Credit, or as it is better known today, the Basic Income. And I want to cover this with specific reference to the underclass which, unless our senses deceive us, is growing by leaps and bounds in our society.

Earlier this year the nation elected a Labour Government, primarily because most people had had enough after seventeen years of so-called free markets. One of the priorities of this new administration is to get Britain back to work. Labour has promised a job for everyone, or if not a job for everyone then training for everyone. Politicians everywhere make much of the virtues of work. Work they say creates prosperity, and people are poor primarily because they don’t have work.

This is partly true but it is also partly nonsense. In the thirties, during the Great Depression, there were something like three million people unemployed in Britain. The population of Britain was considerably less then than today, so that was a lot of people without livelihoods. In March 1933, according to the London Daily Express one gentleman, a so-called philosopher, proposed a splendid solution to this problem. The paper reported thus: “Mr. Gilbert Frankau, the novelist, [made] a piquant speech [the previous night]... ‘A war would be a great idea,’ he said. ‘Another war would give our three million unemployed ample employment.

I would suggest conscription for this country. It would be immensely popular.’” (3)

He got his wish of course; the Second World War did indeed generate a lot of employment. It also killed over fifty million people. And after the war, much of Europe lay in ruins, and there was human suffering on a colossal scale. Is there anyone here who thinks war is the ideal solution, or any sort of solution, to the problem of unemployment? No? I’m glad to hear it. Of course, war is not the solution, but years of brainwashing and indoctrination make it difficult to see that unemployment is not the problem. People don’t want employment for the sake of it. Most normal people want employment because it puts money in their pockets, and they want money to give them a reasonable standard of living, to purchase goods and services. In short, money is a medium of exchange. It is also a store of value so that we can buy things tomorrow with the money we receive today. There is no other legitimate reason for the use of, even for the existence of, money.

It follows from this that employment is beneficial to the community only if it generates goods and services the community as a whole desires. If you don’t believe that, let me give you this analogy. A burglar can work hard. He may work seven days, or more likely seven nights, a week. So may a pickpocket. Such a person may make a good living for himself, and if he has a family to support, he may make a good living for them too. Until he gets caught.

The burglar and the pickpocket may make a good livelihood for themselves and for their unknowing dependents, but they contribute nothing to society as a whole, and of course they actually cost us all dearly, not solely in fiscal terms but by creating unnecessary work, by causing people distress, and so forth.

A government or a society which creates jobs, be it jobs for burglars or jobs for police officers to catch them, or jobs for soldiers to kill people, or jobs making bombs to kill people, this government, or this society, is not productive. It is not industrious in the accepted sense.

We have today the most wondrous of scientific inventions since the wheel, this is the silicon chip. This, and allied technology, has resulted in the increasing automation of society. Automation has always been one of the great fears of the Trades Union Movement. Right back to the days of the original Luddites. Yet automation has the potential to free us all from drudgery, to ensure that increasing numbers of us have more and better consumer goods, more leisure time on our hands, and more money in our pockets with which to enjoy it.

Automation creates highly skilled technical jobs, but it destroys more jobs than it creates, in particular unskilled, menial and unpleasant jobs. I say good riddance to them. Unfortunately, under the current system, this means that increasing numbers of unskilled people are unable to earn a living by the sweat of their brow, or by any means at all. These people make up the underclass.

The underclass are unemployed for a number of reasons, but the biggest reason is that they have become obsolete. Recently I had the misfortune to spend six months in Brixton Prison at Her Majesty’s Pleasure, and I would still have been there now if I had not dismissed my imbecile of a barrister and conducted my own defence. One of the main reasons I ended up in Brixton was because I am a member of that ever-increasing underclass, and had become enmeshed in the poverty trap and targeted by the petty sadists and schemers who run the benefits system. While I was in Brixton I met a lot of people who were basically in the same position, and I would like here to give one specific example.

One of the unfortunates I met was a black man in his mid-thirties, a bit younger than me, who was on remand for robbery. Why was he on remand for robbery? Well, when he was younger he had spent a lot of time living in hostels, and although he had tried to make something of himself – he’d done some market trading – most of his income came from dealing in drugs and controlling prostitutes.

There is a strong case for legalising both recreational drugs and pimping, but that is beside the point. The point is that this man had served several prison sentences; he was not a bad man in the proper sense of the word, but was simply one of life’s losers. He had been released from Wormwood Scrubs Prison a while back with nothing more than a discharge grant and the clothes on his back. Needing to make some money fast, he rented a room in a hotel and started dealing in drugs. He got into an altercation with one of his customers, ended up being charged with robbery, and within 48 hours he was back inside.

What will happen to him next time he is released? He has no home, no property to speak of, no qualifications, and no prospects. For such a man to make a legal living is optimistic, to say the least. Who in his right mind would willingly employ a three time loser?

There are many others such as him, and they don’t by any means all end up in prison, but they do end up in poverty. We have a means-tested benefits system which is run primarily for the benefit of the bureaucrats who run it. I know this from personal experience. To apply for the so-called Jobseeker’s Allowance, one has to fill out a booklet which runs to a staggering 42 pages. The application form for housing benefit is equally complex. Westminster Central Reference Library in Leicester Square has a section on Social Security literature: legislation, income support, fact sheets, etc, which takes up over eight feet of shelf space. The Supreme Court Library at the Royal Courts of Justice has a great deal more.

I remember signing on myself one day in early 1996 and seeing a young man who had done and declared 3 hours part-time work, for which he had earned ten pounds. Five pounds of this was stopped out of his benefit.

There are others even less fortunate; I live in Sydenham, which is a short train ride from Central London; it’s not exactly suburbia but is not an unpleasant place to live, unless you’re on the street. Recently I’ve seen a young girl selling The Big Issue outside my local supermarket; she can’t be more than sixteen. It’s only recently that homelessness has manifested itself so openly in my area of London, and it’s usually the young and vulnerable. If sixteen year old girls end up on the street, what hope is there for the rest of the underclass?

The underclass is large and it’s growing, and it is an equal opportunity employer. True, it is still largely the unskilled, the least literate, the least able and of course the criminal element who end up on the scrap heap. But it is increasingly the young, and as more and more real jobs are lost to machines, the net widens. People from all ethnic, religious and social backgrounds are being dragged down into it, and the reason for this can be found in a Biblical saying: to he that has more will be given, and to he who has not, even that will be taken from him. In practical terms this means that once you fall into the gutter it is very difficult to pull yourself up out of it.

This is why we need the Social Credit, why we must abolish the means-tested benefits system and get rid of the parasitic bureaucrats who batten off it, and institute a Basic Income for all, an income which provides subsistence for each and every one of us. This would lift countless millions of people in Britain, across Europe and eventually the entire world out of the poverty trap, and out of the gutter, and would remove all the associated evils and temptations. This is a cure that cuts across all barriers: race, class, sex and age.

What is the alternative? There is no alternative. If a non-means-tested Basic Income is not introduced in the not too distant future, society will become increasingly polarised between the haves and the have-nots as more and more menial and unskilled jobs are lost to machines, and more and more of the underclass will be consigned to the gutter, and to living without hope.