Universal basic income and its riders

It could be an important part of a radical agenda, but beware: Its proponents include neoliberals hostile to the very idea of the welfare state

or some time now, the radical Left has been dipping its toes in the waters of universal basic income. The idea is exactly as it sounds: The government would give every citizen — working or not — a fixed sum of money every week or month, with no strings attached. As time goes on, universal basic income (UBI) has gradually been transitioning from the radical left into the mainstream: It’s Green party policy, is picking up steam among Scottish Nationalist Policy (SNP) and Labour MPs and has been advocated by commentators including this newspaper’s very own John Harris.

Supporters of the idea got a boost last week with the news that the Finnish government has piloted the idea with 2,000 of its citizens with very positive results. Under the scheme, the first of its kind in Europe, participants receive €560 (Dh2,302) every month for two years without any requirements to fill in forms or actively seek work. If anyone who receives the payment finds work, their UBI continues. Many participants have reported “decreased stress, greater incentives to find work and more time to pursue business ideas”. In March, Ontario in Canada started trialling a similar scheme.

Given that UBI necessarily promotes universalism and is being pursued by liberal governments rather than overtly right-wing ones, it’s tempting to view it as an inherently left-wing conceit. In January, MEPs voted to consider UBI as a solution to the mass unemployment that might result from robots taking over manual jobs. But UBI also has some unlikely supporters, most prominent among them the neoliberal Adam Smith Institute — Sam Bowman, the thinktank’s executive director, wrote in 2013: “The ideal welfare system is a basic income, replacing the existing anti-poverty programmes the government carries out.” He added that UBI would result in a less “paternalistic” government.

From this perspective, UBI could be rolled out as a distinctly rightwing initiative. In fact it does bear some similarity to the government’s shambolic universal credit scheme, which replaces a number of benefits with a one-off, lower, monthly payment (though it goes only to people already on certain benefits, of course). In the hands of the right, UBI could easily be seen as a kind of universal credit for all, undermining the entire benefits system and providing justification for paying the poorest a poverty income.

What’s needed is not the arbitrary adoption of UBI, but an entirely different conversation about what a welfare state is for. The conversation, in light of UBI, could go even further: It’s possible for the welfare state not just to act as a safety net, but as a tool for all of us to do less work and spend more time with our loved ones, pursuing personal interests or engaging in our communities.

UBI has this revolutionary potential — but not if it is simply parachuted into a political economy that has been pursuing punitive welfare policies for the last 30 years.

On everything, from climate change and overpopulation to yawning inequality and mass automation, modern western economies face unprecedented challenges. These conditions are frightening, but they also open up the possibility of the kind of radical policies we haven’t seen since the post-war period. UBI could be the start of this debate, but it must not be the end. Ellie Mae O’Hagan is an editor at openDemocracy and a freelance journalist writing mainly for the Guardian.

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