• CONGRATULATIONS on managing to keep publishing in the chaos we are all facing.

Even though you don’t have shareholders to keep happy, you still need income, so I hope businesses will continue to advertise, even though they are having to change the way they work to survive. We need your independent advice and information.

Looking at the wider picture, we can see that our world will need to change dramatically as the impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic continue to grow.

We have seen how the lives of millions of our people were shattered in a matter of days and, despite the government’s massive injection of money into all parts of the economy, the patchiness is clear for all to see, as the government tries to fill hole after hole in our welfare state.

Yet there has been a simple solution on offer for years: the concept of Universal Basic Income (UBI).

This aims to provide all citizens of a country with a set sum of money, enough to cover the basic cost of living and provide financial security, regardless of their income, resources or employment status.

It would massively simplify the complex systems now used by replacing all the various benefits and the complex assessments which already fail to give people enough to live on.

This complexity is clearly shown by the difficulty people have had trying to claim income support, made deliberately difficult as part of the Tories’ austerity nastiness of the last decade.

But even if you do manage to wade through the forms it takes weeks to organise and deliver. UBI could even save money as it would not need the complex assessments involved in such systems.

Once Sir Keir Starmer and his Labour colleagues get settled I hope they will take some time to see how this system could be applied as we try to rebuild our economy in the years ahead.

We must not see a return to business-as-usual. We now know how bad that system worked: complex and full of holes.

We need a new economic system, and UBI could be the foundation stone of a fairer and more efficient Britain.

DAVID REED
Eton Avenue, NW3