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The pledge is there, on page 60 of Labour’s election manifesto, dealt with in little more than three lines: “And we will explore other innovative ways of responding to low pay, including a pilot of Universal Basic Income [or UBI].”

That’s it – an offhand nod, big on unspoken ambition but short on detail. But still enough to set off the enthusiasm of the local activist groups that, all across Britain, have been clamouring for a universal basic income policy to be tested, and to be tested in their cities. As soon as the manifesto was unveiled, on November 21, pro-UBI groups in Sheffield, Liverpool, Leeds, Newcastle, and Kirklees took to Twitter to share and re-share screenshots of the sentence, accompanied by jubilant captions.


“BREAKING NEWS 🥳 @UKLabour have committed to a pilot of Universal #BasicIncome in their general election manifesto,” UBI Lab Sheffield posted, before embarking on a retweeting spree of supportive statements from a variety of sources: from the Labour Party’s own pro-UBI pressure group, to a self-identified member of the “Yang Gang” – the supporters of US presidential hopeful and tech entrepreneur Andrew Yang, also an advocate of UBI.

UBI Lab Liverpool was more laconic. “Well done @UKLabour,” the account tweeted. “#LetsTryUBI.”

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Universal Basic Income has been popping up with increasing frequency over the past few years – with trials run all over the globe from Finland to California, and the policy making appearances in various political parties’ manifestos. While there are different versions of UBI, at its core it is the unconditional payment of a regular sum of money to all the citizens or residents of a certain country.

News that the Labour Party would trial a Universal Basic Income scheme if elected to power first emerged in summer 2018. In an interview with The Independent, shadow chancellor John McDonnell said that he had commissioned a review of the policy, and that a pilot of it might well be included in the party’s next manifesto.


The review was finally published in May 2019. It was not officially party policy, but it was expected to be hugely influential on Labour’s position on the subject. Penned by McDonnell’s advisor and SOAS academic Guy Standing, the document devoted 81 pages to explaining what Universal Basic Income was, delving into the reasons that made the policy necessary, and expounding on how and where a pilot might be conducted.

In short, Standing posited that today’s Western societies – the UK chief among them – are plagued by the spectre of “precariat”: the economically insecure, indebted, underemployed and overworked masses, that arose out of the contradictions of late capitalism, from preposterous inequality to austerity and the erosion of the welfare state. Means-tested benefits and schemes like Universal Credit, according to Standing, just make the problem worse.

“We've got this rising class, the precariat,” Standing says. “And politically, this is a dangerous class. Unless politics addresses the insecurities of the precariat, we will see the emergence of a political monster.” In his reading, precariat plus automation plus climate change plus populism beckon various flavours of disasters – from fascism redux to the extinction of humankind. Enter the solution – UBI.

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Providing all citizens with a regular, no-questions-asked injection of cash would help alleviate some of the factors behind the rise of precarity – by reducing indebtedness, boosting security, providing a buffer against technological unemployment, and arguably clawing the dissatisfied precarians away from the lure of proto-fascistic politicos.


Standing recommends that the scheme be funded by imposing a new levy on private usage of the “commons” – land, water, air, the environment, public spaces. But he says it would not be necessary to create new taxes. “In the UK, we have 1,156 forms of tax relief. And they are regressive, in the sense that the people gaining from these tax breaks are the wealthy and wealthy corporations,” Standing says. “Government data show that those tax breaks cost the public exchequer £430 billion per year. You have all the money there.”

Of course, in order to gauge how exactly a UBI scheme should work, the UK needs to run some pilots. The paper sketches out five models of how the policy could be tested. These include providing all people in a certain community with a weekly allowance (the amount ranges from £50 to £100 depending on the model) either instead of or on top of means-tested benefits; allowing a select group of people to receive benefits unconditionally; or paying a monthly sum to all the homeless people in a given area. Standing recommends that the pilot last ideally for two years – and in any case for at least one year – and that it should be allocated a budget of up to £5 million. “This is small money,” he says.

So where should the pilot happen? In his review, Standing argues that “every community in the country should be encouraged to consider applying to be a site for a pilot.” But he explicitly name-checks two cities: Liverpool, and Sheffield. That is because both of those cities have been readying themselves for months.

Liverpool decided it wanted to be part of that straight away, says Labour city councillor Patrick Hurley. “On the first of August last year, so literally a day later [from McDonnell’s interview in The Independent], we agreed that we would bring a motion to our city council meeting.” They would demand that the mayor of Liverpool officially ask a future Labour government to consider the city as a candidate site for a pilot; the motion was passed in October 2018. In the meanwhile, Hurley says, he started to build up support for the idea among Labour's big shots.

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“Behind the scenes, there was a lot of lobbying that went on,” he says. “I know people who work for the Labour party's front bench. We were making representations face-to-face with those people, to say that when this manifesto pledge is enacted, if you do get into government, we want Liverpool to be front of the queue to the to be a trial pilot city. We got that commitment from them verbally in around November or December 2018. ”

“The reason why we're confident Liverpool will be included is that we've effectively been given those assurances by the shadow chancellor’s team.”

In Hurley’s opinion, Liverpool would be a perfect testbed for the policy. “We are a core city of the UK. We have a lot of potential for people to do a lot of good work. But right now, we don't have the kind of economic opportunities that perhaps London or some other cities might have,” he says. “But we just need a bit of a kickstart.”

Liverpool’s poverty figures are grim, with about one out of three children in the region estimated to live in poverty as of 2017. And while Hurley doubts that each of the over 500,000 Liverpudlians would receive the basic income in the pilot – trialling the scheme would help make a powerful case about the city’s possibilities. “What we can offer to the people who run the trial is that we can fulfil our potential to re-energise a city with huge economic potential.”

Now that the political support has been secured, Hurley says, the city is working with economists, academics, and business leaders to devise a more detailed plan of how a Liverpool pilot might work.

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In Sheffield, that plan has been ready for about nine months. Unlike the politics-first approach adopted in Liverpool, Sheffield’s bid to host a pilot stemmed from months of debate about UBI among various parts of the city’s civil society – from the local universities, to non-profit organisations and think tanks, to local activists and journalists. In 2017, the conversation ultimately congealed around something called UBI Lab Sheffield.

“The idea of this is that it would be something both about research – about finding out if basic income is a good idea – but also about raising public awareness of the idea,” says Jason Leman, a member of the lab’s team. Since 2018, the group has also encouraged communities around the UK to launch their local UBI Lab chapters – and four groups have already formed, including UBI Lab Liverpool.

Universal Basic Income, explained Government Universal Basic Income, explained

In March 2019, UBI Lab Sheffield published a 30-page proposal detailing how the scheme could be implemented in the city, putting forward three possible models – similar in some regards to those outlined in Standing’s review. According to Leman, Sheffield’s very topography would make it perfect to test the effects of UBI within a circumscribed community.

“One of the interesting things about Sheffield is that it's not a ‘city-city’: it's very much a sort of collection of towns, a collection of communities. And that means there's this potential to get quite different communities involved in a pilot,” he says. “That provides an ideal place to experiment and see what happens in different areas.”

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In Sheffield’s proposal, the focus on the effects UBI would have on a community as a whole is crucial. Rather than zeroing in on the consequences UBI has on a given individual’s employment prospects, Leman says, the pilot should try and gauge the impact on relationships among neighbours, families, and citizens.

In June 2019, Sheffield’s city council – persuaded by UBI Lab Sheffield’s proposal – approved a motion to make the city a candidate for Labour’s scheme. One month earlier, in an interview with The Guardian John McDonnell said that the Sheffield group really had “worked hard.” He said that Liverpool, Sheffield and “somewhere in the Midlands” were probably going to be the sites where a pilot would be tested.

While Liverpool councillor Hurley admits that there is a “friendly rivalry” between the two cities, both McDonnell’s and Standing’s reassurances that Labour would launch “UBI pilots” rather than only one “pilot” means that while the two groups might be vying to host the first pilot, this is not exactly a dead heat.

And other cities might be applying, Standing says. Over the past months, he has been meeting people interested in UBI in cities across the UK – including Doncaster, Norwich, Coventry and Lincoln.

Standing says that there should be at least one pilot in each of the UK’s countries – opportunely, Scotland has been researching the feasibility of a UBI scheme since 2017 – and that variety is of the essence. “You'd have to have one urban city area, one semi rural area, one declining industrial area,” he says. More specific criteria will have to be established by the chancellor, but he thinks that the candidates should be ready to make some money, some local infrastructure, and some local expertise available.

The major question remains, however, of whether Labour will be in a position to usher in Britain’s first UBI experiments. But Standing says all the candidate cities must still be prepared. “It would be wrong for me to say which city is best placed,” he says. “In all the places I've spoken, I've said that everybody must be ready.”

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