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This chapter explores the concept or idea of “basic income” in relation to the growing work on reference budget standards, particularly in relation to the Minimum Income Standards (MIS) findings in the UK context. It confirms whether basic incomes should be paid to every individual at MIS levels or whether a Universal Basic Income (UBI) scheme as a whole should raise family incomes to the levels of the MIS. It also investigates what approach is both feasible and affordable to bring families and households closer to the MIS. The chapter marks new territory in the UBI debate, taking some of the first steps to join up important debates and explore issues surrounding UBI, MIS and reference budgets, both in theory and in practice. It discusses the feasibility of paying basic incomes at levels defined by the published MIS reports.

Basic income has risen rapidly up the UK political agenda over the last five years with support from the Green Party, think-tanks such as the Royal Society of Arts, and some trade unionists. The Labour Party has set up a working group to explore the idea, and four Scottish councils are developing plans for a pilot scheme. This chapter explores the history of basic income campaigning in Britain since the 1980s and examines why the idea has regained traction since 2013–14. It pays particular attention to the institutional role played by the Basic Income Research Group (now the Citizen’s Basic Income Trust) and the Basic Income Earth Network, developments in the global south, and changing attitudes to work within the labour movement. It also examines how British campaigners have sought to reframe the case for basic income in dynamic terms, as a foundation for economic security across the life cycle.

This final chapter draws together the arguments developed in previous chapters and examines the prospects for the UK’s ‘transfer state’ in the twenty-first century. It argues that Universal Credit marks the culmination of a particular line of development: the expansion and rationalization of income-tested support for the working poor, driven forward by policy-makers in Whitehall and backed up by conditionality requirements. The combination of benefit sanctions and cuts means that, despite its scale, the UK social security system does not provide a guaranteed income for working-age citizens in any meaningful sense. Although a subsistence-level Universal Basic Income is likely to be prohibitively expensive, even a low-level basic income could give individuals greater economic security by placing a stable income floor beneath the means-tested benefit system.

The 2008 financial crisis and the era of austerity that followed have pushed poverty and inequality to the top of the political agenda for the first time in a generation. One of the most striking responses has been the surge of interest in a Universal Basic Income—an idea which has circulated in British politics since at least the First World War, and has intersected with proposals for more selective and conditional forms of minimum income. This introduction examines the history of guaranteed income in modern Britain from two perspectives: an ideational story about the circulation and development of basic income, Negative Income Tax, and tax credit schemes, and a public policy story about the growth of cash transfers since the 1970s. It argues that the UK has become a ‘transfer state’ in which working-age benefits play a central role in legitimating a particular form of post-industrial liberal capitalism.

Deindustrialization and stagflation transformed the context in which social policy was made during the 1970s and 1980s. One of the foundations of Margaret Thatcher’s electoral success was a public backlash against welfare spending and the tax burden. Nevertheless, the idea of a guaranteed income continued to resonate for three reasons. Firstly, the collapse of the post-war employment model opened up a wide-ranging debate about the future of work, and basic income began to attract support as a way of underpinning the transition to a more flexible labour market. Secondly, developments in economics and social research highlighted the growth of poverty under Thatcherism and focused attention on tax-benefit reform as a possible solution. Thirdly, cash transfers to working-age households grew rapidly between 1979 and 1997: partly as a by-product of deindustrialization, but also because shrewder Tories recognized that an effective social safety net could help smooth the introduction of free-market policies.

Historians of British social policy have long seen the 1940s as a critical juncture, in which the Beveridge Report marked the formation of a new social security settlement. One of the consequences of Sir William Beveridge’s success, however, has been to overshadow the rival proposals canvassed by his contemporaries. This chapter examines how Universal Basic Income emerged as a policy option in the context of mid-twentieth-century welfare debates: Dennis Milner published the first scheme for a tax-funded UBI in 1918, and Juliet Rhys-Williams revived the idea in the 1940s as an alternative to Beveridge’s proposals. Though Rhys-Williams’s campaign was unsuccessful, it has had a major impact on how basic income has been understood in Britain. By presenting UBI as a step towards tax-benefit integration, Rhys-Williams squeezed out alternative conceptions of basic income as a ‘social dividend’ which had circulated between the wars, and tethered it firmly to redistributive market liberalism.

This chapter looks at the breakdown of the labor market not as an economic crisis, but as a moral opportunity to rethink our relationship to work and to one another. It examines the work of John Maynard Keynes. It looks at the fear, among advocates of a universal basic income, of idleness.