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Start the Week: The Good Samaritan

The Good Samaritan

09/04/2018

BBC Radio 4 - Start the Week, The Good Samaritan

Andrew Marr with Chris Hughes, Caroline Slocock, Nick Spencer and Ian Goldin.

Cultural discussion programme. Andrew Marr discusses the Good Samaritan, UBI and the role of the state with Chris Hughes, Caroline Slocock, Nick Spencer and Ian Goldin.

Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes makes a case for cash handouts to the poor. He tells Andrew Marr that having become exceptionally wealthy he is looking for the most efficient way to give something back to society, and a Universal Basic Income is among his ideas.

But the Oxford academic Ian Goldin argues that UBI is an intellectual sticking plaster. He suggests targeted benefits, better taxation and philanthropy may be the answers to today's growing inequality and the prospect of mass job losses due to automation.

Caroline Slocock was the first female Private Secretary at No.10, employed by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. She looks back at the last years of Thatcher's time in office, and Thatcher's vision of a smaller state and individual responsibility.

Margaret Thatcher used the parable of the Good Samaritan to argue her case, suggesting that the voluntary actions of a wealthy Samaritan trumped the collective action of the state. Nick Spencer, Research Director at the public theology think tank Theos, explores how this parable has been hijacked for political ends from both the left and the right.

Producers: Katy Hickman and Hannah Sander.

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