This year, Parliament has chosen the INTERNATIONAL DAY AGAINST POVERTY, on 17 October, to process the reform of the IGR. Before the end of the year, the Basque Parliament will vote on the Law on the Basque System of Income Guarantee and Social Inclusion (LISMI). The Basque Government wants to sell this law as an innovative step in the fight against poverty in the Basque Country, but it is not. The current law is a continuing law of the 2008 law that introduces more negative than positive changes, so if we say that the Basque Government does not want to end poverty it is not demagogy, but pure truth.

In the last 33 years, we in the Basque Country have always had laws and regulations to guide the policies of the poor. The latest official data provided by the 2020 Poverty and Social Inequalities Survey provide a clear picture of the failure of policies for the poor. The people at risk of poverty were 182,150, 8.4% of the population. Of these, 54,197 were outside the IGR (Income Guarantee Income) system, representing 29.8 per cent of the population at risk of poverty. Of the 127,953 people covered by the IGR, 67,306 were not out of poverty, 52.6 per cent of the total dependants. In short, the official data (the PGDI survey, which is carried out every two years by the Basque Government) show the failure of guaranteed minimum income policies to combat poverty in over 3 decades, leaving 30% of the population at risk of poverty without coverage and 53% of benefit recipients without coverage.

The reasons for this failure are obvious and can be summarised in two: there are many conditions and obligations that make it impossible for almost a third of poor people to access the IGR, and the low budget allocation prevents more than half of the IGR recipients from losing their status as poor.

If the Basque Government had devised a new reform of the IGR with a genuine political will to end poverty, the articles of the LDCPV would include measures such as reducing the years of registration and residence from 3 to 1; reducing the years of ownership of the IGR from 23 to 18; ending the family model based on cohabitation units and turning the IGR into a relative right of emergency

What do we find in the Law of the Basque System of Income Guarantee and Social Inclusion, which is to be approved thanks to the absolute majority of the PNV and the PSE that make up the current Basque Government, which makes us so categorical, when the BASQUE GOVERNMENT DOES NOT WANT TO END POVERTY?

• Firstly, the legal continuance in maintaining all the requirements and obligations that we have previously criticised.
• Secondly, to maintain the legal reductions introduced in the 2008 law, in the 2011 reform and in the 2012 budgets, which worsened the conditions and reduced the amounts of GI and PCV benefits.
• Thirdly, the unwillingness to improve the amount of RGI and PCV benefits, and up to the EUR 180 million per year that the Basque Government will save by generating the Minimum Income of Life (IMI) paid by the Social Security.
• Fourthly, the new Lanbide Inspection Corps, THE ROYAL LANBIDE POLICE, is created for the surveillance and control of the target persons, although the fraud in Lanbide does not reach 1%, and proposes, among its functions, the appropriate penalties.

Argilan ESK argues that, in order to combat this new income modification law, the leftist groups in the Basque Parliament should propose a comprehensive amendment and require the retirement of all social movements and trade union organisations, and instead propose a law on the effective eradication of poverty.

Bea Uriarte and Iñaki Uribarri

ESC. ARGILAN