Abstract
Abstract Historians of British social policy have long seen the 1940s as a critical juncture, in which the Beveridge Report marked the formation of a new social security settlement. One of the consequences of Sir William Beveridge’s success, however, has been to overshadow the rival proposals canvassed by his contemporaries. This chapter examines how Universal Basic Income emerged as a policy option in the context of mid-twentieth-century welfare debates: Dennis Milner published the first scheme for a tax-funded UBI in 1918, and Juliet Rhys-Williams revived the idea in the 1940s as an alternative to Beveridge’s proposals. Though Rhys-Williams’s campaign was unsuccessful, it has had a major impact on how basic income has been understood in Britain. By presenting UBI as a step towards tax-benefit integration, Rhys-Williams squeezed out alternative conceptions of basic income as a ‘social dividend’ which had circulated between the wars, and tethered it firmly to redistributive market liberalism.
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