by Malcolm Torry, editor of The Palgrave International Handbook of Basic Income and author of Basic Income—What, Why, and How?

On the 28^th of August, I arrived in Bath in Southwest England for this year’s BIEN Congress: the annual international conference of the Basic Income Earth Network at which researchers and anyone else interested in Basic Income gathers to share research, ideas, good practice, and much else related to the global Basic Income debate.

A Basic Income, sometimes called a Universal Basic Income, a Citizen’s Income, or a Citizen’s Basic Income, is an unconditional income for every individual: the same amount of money for everyone of the same age, every week, or every month, with no means-test, no work-test, and no other kind of test. It would provide a secure layer of income on which to build; it would not be withdrawn as other income rose and so would never be an employment disincentive, and it would exhibit a wide variety of other advantages. In the UK and other countries with developed economies, it would be entirely feasible to create a Basic Income by making some simple alterations to the tax and benefits system, and pilot projects in Namibia and India have proved feasibility and emancipatory effects for countries with developing economies.

This year, there were over three hundred gathered in Bath for the congress, with many more joining online: researchers, educators, organisers, policymakers, and advocates from all over the world. Rising conference attendance is just one indicator of the increasingly intense and widespread global debate about Basic Income.

BIEN was founded in 1986, but my own history in the subject started several years before that. From 1976 to 1978, I worked on the public counter of Brixton’s Supplementary Benefit office, administering the UK’s means-tested social security benefits: a degrading experience for both the staff and the claimants. Everyone’s favourite benefit was Child Benefit, a still unconditional payment for children—the same amount for every family with the same number of children, whatever the family’s circumstances. So why couldn’t more of the benefits system be like that? It could be.

From 1980 to 2014, I served full-time in South London parishes, but then what had been an increasingly global but still fairly low-level debate suddenly took off. I retired early from parish ministry so that I could give to the Basic Income debate the time that it needed, and, in particular, so that I could write the books that publishers were asking for. One of those books was the first edition of the Palgrave International Handbook of Basic Income: a considerable undertaking as it had over fifty authors from five continents, which was itself an indicator of the vast number of people by then engaged in a wide variety of aspects of Basic Income research. 

The first edition was published in 2019; and then in 2022 Ellie Duncan of Palgrave Macmillan wrote to say that the Handbook had 40,000 downloads and that they wanted a second edition. Most second editions commissioned just three years after the publication of the first edition might need minor updating, but the speed with which the Basic Income debate had evolved meant that that was never going to be adequate for the handbook. There had to be new chapters—on the wide variety of US experiments with incomes with similarities to Basic Income; about problems with pilot projects; about the health case for Basic Income; about Basic Income’s relevance to development and peacekeeping in post-conflict settings; and about public opinion on Basic Income. Almost every chapter retained from the first edition had to be substantially revised or completely rewritten. Editing the second edition, and rewriting some of the chapters, was almost as much work as editing the first edition.

In 2022, my book Basic Income—What, Why, and How?  was not yet another introduction to the subject—there are now dozens of those. This was about those aspects of the global debate about which there is the most discussion and sometimes the most conflict. For instance, there is still significant debate about the definitions of ‘Basic Income,’ ‘unconditional,’ ‘universal,’ and ‘Basic Income scheme;’ about Basic Income’s relationship with capitalism; about Basic Income’s feasibility; about how much a Basic Income should or could be; about the usefulness or otherwise of pilot projects and other experiments; about appropriate research methods; and so on. You will find all of these aspects of the debate discussed in Basic Income—What, Why, and How? And of course, many of them are discussed by the authors of the second edition of the Palgrave International Handbook of Basic Income.

Before 2014, I could honestly say that I had read everything written in English about Basic Income, and much of what had been written in French and German. After 2014, I couldn’t say that. Nobody could. There are now many thousands of individuals, and hundreds of university departments, think tanks, and other organisations engaged in the debate. For instance, the reason that the University of Bath hosted this year’s international congress is that it has established a ‘UBI Beacon’ that brings together researchers from a variety of departments to work on Basic Income research.

Now that there are so many people engaged in this debate, it’s time for some of us who were involved when the modern debate began forty years ago to take a back seat and let the next generation of researchers and advocates get on with it. I am now back serving a church part-time in the City of London.

Basic Income isn’t going away, and one day somewhere will implement one and reap the benefits. Other countries will then follow.

Malcolm Torry is a Visiting Fellow in the Institute for Policy Research at the University of Bath, UK, and Priest in Charge of St Mary Abchurch in the City of London. The author’s books about Basic Income can be found here. Why we need a Citizen’s Basic Income (Policy Press, 2018) is a useful introduction to the topic, as is Guy Standing’s Basic Income: And how we can make it happen (Penguin, 2017)