Universal Basic Income – a Quaker idea!

Sifting through Irene's archive revealed a number of pamphlets and other publications by her husband, Bertram Pickard. Whilst most concerned themselves with his dedication to peace-work, and a few with the spread of Quakerism across Europe, one stands apart. It was a radical foray into political economy: A Reasonable Revolution: being a discussion of the State Bonus Scheme – a proposal for a national minimum income. 

Bertram had been at Bootham School, one of the Quaker boarding schools, along with Denis Milner, whose brain child the 'state bonus' was. Denis and his wife, Mabel, wrote a small pamphlet about the idea in 1918. It seemed such an obvious and revolutionary step: pay every single adult a fixed sum of money sufficient to provide for their most basic needs. At a stroke, the demon of absolute poverty, whether caused by sickness, unemployment or incapacity, would be done away with. And it would be simply funded by each person in work, or earning money from investments, being taxed at 20%. 

It was an obvious solution for all to common destitution that followed in the wake of the First World War: the millions of permanently incapacitated x-servicemen; the legions of widows; the masses of unemployed discharged troops; these in addition to the usual burden of the sick, workless and unfortunate. 

Bertram expanded the pamphlet, with its limited circulation largely in Quaker circles, to a small book, published by George and Allan Unwin in 1919. The following year a fuller book by Milner explaining the scheme was also published by George and Allan Unwin under the title Higher Production by a Bonus on National Output. A proposal for a minimum income for all varying with National Productivity. 

Thus the idea of what we now call Universal Basic Income (UBI) was born. It was discussed at the Brighton Conference of the British Labour Party in 2021, and then seems to have been largely forgotten.  

However, elements of UBI have been introduced by different governments over time and applied to sections of their population as a universal benefit: old age pensions and child benefit being the most common; but to date nowhere has tried to apply it across the whole population, as was mooted by Milner and Pickard.

Applying it to the whole populations seems to have been reborn as an idea in the 1980s, often without people realising its earlier iteration. It was Walter Van Trier who in 1995 published his PhD thesis, entitled, Every one a King which put Milner and Pickard back on the map as its originators.

Now UBI is increasingly being discussed and even experimented with. It would seem worthy of consideration in an age of increasingly precarious employment and gross income disparity, with threats of automation, especially with the advent of AI, and globalisation, further disrupting lives.  Is it time for yet another great Quaker idea?