Around my table sit people doing things they find meaningful. A married couple I am particularly fond of both work, but they don't have to — and when he is well enough, they choose to. She used to volunteer in cancer research when her parents were fit enough to allow it. Paul writes books and is trying to work out how to make recompense for his ancestors' slave holdings — he is still finding out quite how much there is to recompense. Julian volunteers as a counsellor. I have spent the better part of three or four years trying to make the almshouses in Chancery Lane work, living on a building site, paid diddly-squat. And I spend a good deal of time thinking about politics, watching to see if there is anything useful I can do.
By and large, we all do things we find meaningful. Not because we are paid to. Because it is what we are.
I first came across the idea not in a political context but a managerial one. I was a young aspiring manager, somewhere around the Silver Jubilee — 1977, give or take — and what struck me was not yet the full argument for basic income but something simpler and more practical: you do not want people who do not want to work to work. An unwilling worker is not a productive one. The output is poor, the atmosphere is worse, and the energy spent managing the reluctance could have gone elsewhere. It seemed obvious to me then. It seems obvious to me now. The argument for basic income begins, if you follow it back far enough, not with economics but with that simple observation: compulsion is inefficient, and what looks like a moral question often turns out, on inspection, to be a practical one as well.
Paul Dolan, a behavioural scientist at the LSE, argues that purpose is not a luxury — it is a human requirement. I believe him. And I do not believe that people arriving in this country are any different. They happen to have been born somewhere else. That is the full extent of the distinction. The idea that migrants arrive here looking to be passengers — to take and not give — runs contrary to everything I know about human nature. People want to make a contribution. Given half a chance, they will.
What prevents them — what prevents a great many people — is fear. Fear of eviction. Fear of not eating. Fear of the next bill. Fear colonises the mind and crowds out everything else. When you are frightened, you cannot think about what you might usefully do with your life. You can only think about survival.
This is what basic income is actually about. It is not about making people comfortable enough to do nothing. It is about freeing people to be productive on their own terms rather than on someone else's.
I know something about this from my own experience, and not only the comfortable end of it. I once worked a single night shift as a nursing auxiliary — an orderly, in plainer terms — wiping people's bottoms, feeding people who could not feed themselves, looking after men and women who were profoundly disabled. One shift was enough to see clearly what the job actually demanded and what the wage actually offered. I could see that anyone doing it for a living would never earn enough to come in on a Monday morning properly rested — recreated, made new again by their time off — ready to be the best version of themselves for the people who depended on them. They would be worn down instead: by the work, by being paid as if they were unskilled rather than simply untrained, by never quite recovering before the next shift began. Care work asks you to arrive whole. Low pay makes arriving whole impossible. That is not a complaint about the work. It is a complaint about what the wage does to the person doing it.
I never went back. Not because the work itself was wrong for me — I think I could have done it, and done it well, in different circumstances — but because one shift was enough to do the arithmetic on what a lifetime of it would cost, and what it would never quite pay for. What I did not stop to ask then, and have not entirely answered since, is the harder question underneath the obvious one: recreated for what? Money solves the exhaustion. It does not tell you what you are being rested in order to do. Basic income, I now think, only ever answers the first half of that. It removes the fear. What you do once the fear is gone is still entirely up to you to work out.
When I had a job, I was busy. I would not say I was productive. When I worked for myself, I was productive — and I made considerably more money. My rough theory, unsupported by anything other than my own case, is that self-employment yields roughly three times the output of employment. During the dotcom bust I was trading in computer equipment, buying surplus new stock out of the collapse of Nortel and selling in competition with them — which is a peculiar position to be in, but a lucrative one. I was at their warehouse in Blackwood, South Wales, two and a half hours from here, by seven in the morning, sorting through the equipment, making offers, tendering tranches of kit to buyers around the world and coming back to the desk to see what had arrived overnight from the States. One of the things that got me out of bed was finding out. The almshouses did the same — I was at the gym by half six so I could be on site by eight to make sure the men had turned up. Writing is different. It pulls, but not quite like that. I was making a David-shaped hole in the world: an exact fit for what I actually am, rather than an approximation of what an employer needed me to be.
If everyone were allowed to make a hole in the world that matched what they are, I cannot help thinking this would be a good idea.
The Nordic countries seem to agree. Finland produces Nokia, whose telecoms infrastructure technology is world-beating — and whose relevance has only grown since Western governments decided they could not trust Huawei with their 5G networks. Sweden produces Ericsson, Nokia's peer in the same space. Denmark leads the world in wind technology: Vestas is the largest wind turbine manufacturer on earth; Ørsted pioneered offshore wind. These are not the products of a sluggish, welfare-addled culture. They are the products of well-educated, well-supported populations in high-tax countries with generous social settlements. Spain — which regularises migrants rather than punishing them — has been one of the stronger-performing economies in the EU in recent years.
The argument that generosity produces dependency is not supported by the evidence. The argument that fear produces productivity is not supported by the evidence either. What fear produces is survival behaviour. What security produces, it turns out, is Nokia.
It also, it turns out, produces happiness, measured independently of any of this. Finland has topped the UN's World Happiness Report for eight years running, with Denmark, Iceland, Sweden and Norway clustered close behind — the same small group of high-tax, high-welfare states that keep appearing in this essay for entirely different reasons. The 2025 report carried a detail I find more telling than the league table itself: researchers deliberately lost wallets in cities around the world to test how many would be returned, and the return rate was almost twice what people predicted. Belief in the kindness of strangers turned out to be more closely tied to happiness than anyone had assumed. Security, in other words, does not just free people to be productive. It frees them to trust each other — and trusting each other is most of what happiness turns out to be made of.
Britain has its own demonstration of what fear-without-floor produces, and it is not Nokia. On the 18th of June 1984, miners and police clashed at Orgreave coking plant — the defining set-piece of the strike against pit closures. The standard account treats it as a fight about jobs, or about coal, or about who controls industrial Britain. I think the miners themselves understood it more plainly than that. They were not fighting for the right to keep doing dangerous, filthy, dark work underground. Nobody fights to keep a job like that for its own sake. They were fighting for the right of their community to survive at all — because no income floor existed underneath them, closing the pit did not mean finding something else; it meant the town itself had no further reason to exist. The dispute was never really about coal. It was about whether a community without a floor is allowed to go on living once the thing that justified its existence is taken away.
If it was right to stop mining coal — and on balance I think it probably was — that does not make what followed right. You can close an industry and still owe the people inside it a floor to land on. Britain offered neither floor nor alternative, only the closure, and the result, decades on, is measurable: the former coalfields remain among the most deprived parts of the country. The miners were not refusing the future. They were refusing to be discarded by it without a parachute, and were treated, in that refusal, as the enemy. I do not think they were the enemy. I think they were simply the first to be shown, in stark terms, what happens to a community when survival depends entirely on a job that someone else has decided to remove. There must be other ways for communities to survive change than being cast, by the state that is changing them, as something to be defeated.
[NEW — check tone/fit] Orgreave was what happened when an industry closed and no floor existed underneath the people inside it. I do not think we are done with that particular lesson. AI has the capacity to make a great many people redundant — not, I think, the people who do the work that plainly needs doing, the wiping and the feeding and the caring, but the paper-shufflers, the people in what David Graeber called bullshit jobs. That is still a great many people, and a coalfield's worth of the same argument. The question Orgreave should have taught us to ask in advance, and did not, is what happens to a community — or a country — when the work that justified its floor disappears. We are about to be asked the question again.
As to where you set basic income, I do not know. This is where the argument has to get honest. Unlike some people I know, I pay rent. Looking at my sums, I do not think I could get by on rent plus state pension alone. So the number matters enormously — and it varies depending on your housing situation in ways that make a single national figure almost meaningless. This is a problem, not a reason to abandon the idea, but it is a real one and I am not going to pretend otherwise.
Danny Dorling pointed me towards Guy Standing — a British economist who has spent decades making the case for basic income and who, in 2024, examined a doctoral thesis by Howard Reed doing exactly the modelling I have been confessing I cannot do. Reed spent years as Chief Economist at the IPPR and the IFS. He has run the UK numbers. The numbers exist.
Standing reaches back to Thomas Paine, who wrote in 1795 that what he was arguing for was not charity but a right, not bounty but justice. That sentence is still doing the work two hundred and thirty years later. It kills the something-for-nothing objection at source.
[NEW — check tone/fit] None of this is as new an idea as it sometimes feels, even at the harder edge of economics. Milton Friedman — no one's idea of a soft touch on welfare — described a version of it in 1969: the image of a central bank dropping money from a helicopter simply to get it into circulation. Ben Bernanke revived the phrase decades later and was tagged "Helicopter Ben" for his trouble. The idea of simply giving people money has a longer and more respectable pedigree than the objections to it usually assume.
He also gives a name to the class of people I have been describing — the ones whose fear crowds out everything else, who cannot think about what they might usefully do because they are too busy surviving. He calls them the precariat. It is a better word than I had.
His argument about what basic income actually delivers is the one that fits my experience most precisely. He distinguishes three kinds of freedom. The one that matters here is what he calls republican freedom: not just the absence of constraint, but freedom from domination — the ability, as Gandhi put it, to look others in the face without having to give in to their will. That is what the David-shaped hole is. It is what you make when nobody is telling you what shape to be.
Finland tested the laziness objection directly. When the requirement to search for work was removed, recipients had slightly more days in employment than the control group. The objection, applied to reality, dissolves.
[NEW — check tone/fit] We have, in fact, already run a version of the experiment ourselves, more recently and at much greater speed. Furlough during Covid was basic income by another name — money paid to people regardless of what they produced, so they could keep eating while the economy worked out what to do with them — and the country managed it administratively within weeks, not years. Whatever else it proved, it proved the mechanism works.
As to the number — Reed's work is where I am going next.
There is a simpler way of framing the question, though perhaps a less precise one. Start with GDP — what the country actually produces. Then ask who you are distributing it to. Exclude the children, who are not yet in the game — although what a child is, I confess I am no longer entirely sure. Exclude the old who have done their time and chosen to step back. Exclude those who cannot work through illness or disability. What remains is a number: the people who are available — available to work, available to contribute, available perhaps simply to enjoy doing something worthwhile. Divide one by the other and you have a figure. Not what a basic income must be, but what it could be — a ceiling defined by what we actually produce, divided among the people we are actually talking about.
It is a different question from the one usually asked. The usual question is: can we afford it? This question is: what is each person's share of what we already make? Framed that way, the constraint is not economic. It never was.
[NEW — check tone/fit, and check the £62bn/£87bn figure against whatever's current when this goes out] I did the numbers on one example recently, because it stopped me in my tracks. Amazon's five biggest UK divisions made £555m in pre-tax profit last year and paid £39m in corporation tax — an effective rate of 7.1%, against a statutory rate of 25%. Had they paid the ordinary rate, that is £138.75m instead of £39m: roughly £100m from five divisions, in one year. But it would be a mistake to make Amazon the villain of this paragraph. Amazon did not write the rules that let it pay 7.1%. Our own government did, and keeps doing it. Starbucks UK made £556.3m in sales last year and paid no corporation tax at all — for the second year running — after £40m of that revenue was paid out as a royalty fee to a related company, converting UK profit into UK loss. Google UK's tax bill was £128.56m in 2023, more than doubled from £59.13m the year before, on a business whose global parent's profit margins suggest it should be paying a great deal more. eBay has had its own version of this story told about it too, though the clearest figures I have are old: routing UK fees through Luxembourg and Switzerland to pay £1.2m in tax on nearly £800m of UK sales. Different companies, different mechanisms — royalties, licence fees, group recharges — but the same government choosing, year after year, which of these arrangements to permit.
[NEW — check tone/fit, and check this doesn't duplicate the housing essay's Larksworth/Jersey material too closely] It runs deeper than any single company, in any case. The Channel Islands, the Isle of Man, Gibraltar, the British Virgin Islands and the rest of what campaigners call Britain's "spider's web" were granted autonomy over their own tax affairs on a specific historical bargain: Britain would cover their defence and foreign affairs, they would keep their own house in order otherwise. It was meant to save us money. What it has produced instead is a network the Tax Justice Network holds responsible for roughly a quarter of all global tax abuse — upward of £80bn in lost UK and international tax revenue a year. And it is not only tax leaving these shores through the back door we built and guard. The UK's own deputy foreign secretary said in 2024 that around 40% of global money laundering — much of it stolen from Africa — passes through London and these territories. We did not just make it easy for our own companies to avoid paying us. We built the pipes, and left them open for everyone else's dirty money too. (The housing essay has one small, concrete example of this same architecture at work — a Bridport shopfront sold through a Jersey trust structure whose actual human beneficiary is, by design, undiscoverable. Worth reading alongside this one.)
There is also a contribution the usual ledger doesn't count at all. Someone who doesn't work but reads a great deal and buys yoghurt is not a drain on the economy — she is pulling rather than pushing, and an economy needs both. It needs to be stimulated by consumption, modest consumption, not endless growth-at-any-cost consumption, but ordinary, regular demand: someone has to want the yoghurt for someone else to have a reason to make it. That is a real contribution, even if it never appears on a CV.
[NEW — check tone/fit] Some of the people making the case for basic income are not doing it out of charity, and I think that is worth saying plainly rather than holding against them. There is a strand of tech billionaires who back it for reasons closer to self-interest: if all the money in an economy ends up concentrated with a handful of people, the rest of us stop having the purchasing power to buy what they are selling. Wealth pooled too tightly starves its own market. It is, from the other end of the transaction, the same point the yoghurt makes.
There is a complication I want to be honest about. Some work is particularly socially useful — the people who maintain the sewers, the people who care for the lame and the halt — and some people are particularly skilled or creative. It seems right that they should be rewarded for it. A flat basic income, identical for everyone, does not obviously accommodate that. It troubles me.
And yet: bread costs the same for a rich man as for a poor one. The floor is the floor regardless of what you earn above it. What basic income addresses is not reward for contribution — it is the fact that everyone needs to eat, and currently not everyone can. Those are two different problems. Basic income solves the second. The first remains.
The most instructive model I know for thinking about how you maintain differential reward without letting the gap become obscene is Mondragon — the Basque cooperative, one of the largest in the world, where the salary of the highest paid is capped at a fixed multiple of the lowest. The ratio has shifted over the years but the principle holds: you can reward skill and contribution, but you cannot reward it without limit, and you cannot reward it at the expense of the person at the bottom. The cap is not charity. It is a recognition that the person at the bottom made the person at the top possible. On holiday in Spain recently I bought some very good sardines from Eroski, the supermarket chain, and only afterwards discovered it is one of Mondragon's founding cooperatives — which felt like the right way to encounter the idea: not as a case study, but as dinner.
I should be honest that Mondragon is not a fairy tale with the difficulties edited out. Eroski has sold hypermarkets to Carrefour and offloaded half its stake in another chain, Caprabo, in the years since I last read up on it properly. The cooperative model has bent under ordinary commercial pressure more than once. That does not undo the principle — a pay cap that has survived for decades inside one of the world's largest cooperatives is still a real demonstration that the thing can be done — but it is not a settled utopia, and I am not going to present it as one.
Basic income is the floor. Mondragon is what the ceiling might look like. Between them, there is a country worth living in.