I love the idea of nurturing and interacting with nature. Over the years I’ve become far greener, more ecological. But his idea of a socialism grounded in crafts, grounded in rural living, grounded in a conviviality and local communities, I’ve always been influenced by that perspective. He lost out to the Fabians and to the communists and so on.
William Morris, I found, has a very attractive form of socialism. I trace my eco-socialism to the great figures of the late nineteenth century around William Morris. Those were radicalising events which have shaped my whole thinking. I was in Paris in May 1968 and I was in Greece shortly afterwards and saw the colonels.
It was an age when many of us were questioning what was happening in our name. And it wasn’t a golden age of capitalism. You can trace my radical politics and world view back to the 1960s, and Liverpool was of course a very central point in helping my generation to feel liberated and more radical because we had lived in, and been brought up in the post-war era of drabness of Labourism and of a sort of social consensus built around industrial society. In a wide-ranging conversation between Professor Standing and our Patrick Hurley prior to the event, he spoke freely on his influences, his worries for the future, and the values that underpin his politics he also told us what happened the time he got locked in a room with Boris Johnson… The event was being held to promote Professor Standing’s report to the UK’s Labour Party on potential pilots of Universal Basic Income in the UK should it come to power after a General Election. Amongst others on the panel was John McDonnell MP, shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer and Professor Guy Standing, co-founder of the Basic Income Earth Network and attached to the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. On 18h July 2019, we had the pleasure of attending a discussion on Universal Basic Income in our home town of Liverpool, UK.
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