Ronnie Cowan, the MP for Inverclyde and member of the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Catalonia, is in Barcelona this week, and will keep readers of The National readers up to date with what he’s doing there in a daily diary. He is hoping to meet some of the political prisoners in the coming days, but over the weekend he has been attending an event which considered a basic income

WITHIN the basic income movement, we need to get our act together. And the first item on the agenda is the name.

It’s a bit like that scene in The Life Of Brian with the confusion around the many different popular people’s fronts.

In Barcelona, we just had the Unconditional Basic Income Europe Network event. I have always referred to it as “universal basic income but in the interest of peace and progress I can accept “unconditional”. It is, after all, a basic principle of the subject.

No-one should be means-tested or evaluated before receiving their basic income – unlike the horrendous punitive process we currently have with Personal Independence Payment (PIP) and Employment and Support Allowance (ESA).

The event was hosted at Barcelona Activa which is Barcelona City Council’s development agency. The speakers representing the projects in Barcelona and A Coruña in Galicia both expressed their commitment to basic income but also the frustration in running such schemes.

The logistics behind running a full-blown unconditional basic income scheme at a national level are simpler than running pilot projects for a host of reasons, including fear of losing out on the existing system, continuing to be stigmatised and the difficulties in making it truly unconditional when working with a subset of society.

Economists who spoke here strongly supported using consumption tax, European corporation tax, carbon tax, green fiscal instruments and money created by the European Central Bank to fund an unconditional basic income scheme.

Of course, the fly in the ointment for the UK is Brexit. As the EU is considering innovative solutions,

we are turning our back on the EU.

This was further compounded by a discussion that the common agricultural policy could be used to facilitate a scheme specifically for farmers. With numbers of farmers dropping and the average age increasing, this is an area of employment that needs serious attention.

One striking presentation came from Serbia, a country which is not in the EU but which is considering a scheme to address its massive emigration problem.

On average, 35,000 people leave Serbia each year to work abroad, the main driver being poverty. Not surprisingly, the priority of the Serbian project is to eradicate the country’s poverty.

Meanwhile, with the advancement of automation and the much-heralded gig economy, our workforce is going to change.

Zero-hour contracts have created a precarious lifestyle for many. And as that continues to grow our already creaking welfare system shall come under increasing pressure.

I was asked recently when is the best time to plant a tree? The answer is 25 years ago.

If we are wise we can plan ahead and offset a very real threat to our society. But we have to start planting the seeds today.

The four pilot projects in Scotland currently in their planning stages could prove to be hugely significant in determining the viability of an unconditional basic income scheme not just here but in a wider European, if not global, platform.