Closed in England

The other day I was wondering what it would feel like to live my life with the comfort and safety of universal basic income: it would open up so many doors! Opportunities! Space to breathe and think! I likely wouldn’t quit my job, but I would take way more time off for my health, and I might go back to school or find a writing residency.

I would still be productive at my day job, but I’d spend a lot more time experimenting, building, exploring stuff just for me: side projects and what not.

But then I remembered that I already have experienced universal basic income before and never even considered it. This was back in the UK when I was in high school and it was called the Education Maintenance Allowance which provided a small but not inconsiderable amount of money and gave it to kids from low income backgrounds.

Let me count the ways this changed my life:

  1. I had food security and stopped skipping meals.
  2. I bought dozens of books that taught me everything from web development to graphic design to copywriting.
  3. I saved up and bought my first laptop.
  4. I learned how to code, enough to be dangerous.
  5. I found friends and colleagues and mentors through that little screen.
  6. I did all my course work and got my degree.
  7. I wrote music! And words! And awful, ungodly poetry! I learned what a computer really is: not a gray box that prints out reports but a human-potential particle accelerator!
  8. I got my first job at a web design agency on the other side of the country, propelling my life forwards, upwards, and away.

So what became of the Education Maintenance Allowance, that vital lifeline that was entirely essential for my being here today? Well, look, the website:

You may be able to claim Education Maintenance Allowance (EMA) if you’re studying in Northern Ireland, Scotland or Wales. EMA is now closed in England.

“Closed in England!” A phrase spoken with such authority and a ruthless lack of emotion that I struggle to read it without hearing the sound of a million doors closing. This is what “austerity” took from us. It was a brutal system of cutting funding for social services—from schools and hospitals, to my dear EMA.

And so now, as I sit here thinking of all the kids who won’t have the opportunities I had, who won’t have the EMA, who have all the doors closed to them with without even realizing it, I see clearly what all those cuts did to the social safety net in the UK and I see what austerity meant in all those political rallies and press conferences:

It just wasn’t austerity for them. It was austerity for us.