Peter Sloman. Transfer State: The Idea of a Guaranteed Income and the Politics of Redistribution in Modern Britain.

Abstract

Can you identify the fact among these fictions? The promise of a guaranteed income has long figured as a progressive fantasy. Indeed, few issues have exerted such an emotional hold on the moral vision of the left. Support from the labor movement, however, proved no match for opposition from the likes of Milton Friedman, Enoch Powell, and the British Treasury. The universal basic income has therefore come nearest to fruition not in the United States or Britain, but in the Scandinavian welfare states. Peter Sloman is a slyly counterintuitive historian, whose study of the basic income in modern Britain reveals the surprising origins of this increasingly visible public policy. In Transfer State, a history of the politics of a guaranteed income in Britain since the First World War, Sloman subverts every premise (save the last) in that seemingly commonsensical paragraph. Joining the history of ideas with policy studies, he...