The Covid-19 pandemic is making people think about how a "good" society should operate. Every day we are all making real sacrifices in our lives (like foregoing our wages and our liberty) to protect the lives of people we don't know and will never meet. And it has become starkly evident that for me to be OK, I need other people to be OK too. Again, people I don't know and will never meet. Even if I could buy 100 masks and 100 bottles of sanitiser, it would be better for me if I had one mask and one bottle, and I knew that 99 other people had theirs too.
Those of us who believe in UBI think that it needs to be part of this "good" society, so that we know when we get up every morning that everyone else will also be seating down to breakfast and not having to wonder where the money for their next meal is going to come from.
According to a recent poll, "Britons want quality of life indicators to take priority over the economy".
This month a campaign was started for a new social contract post-Covid, which puts strong universal services and individual wellbeing at its heart.
And also this month, Positive Money released a report calling for the end of GDP as the sole measure of the health of an economy.
The Covid crisis continues to generate political debate around Basic Income. Two of the leading contenders for the leadership of the Liberal Democrats, Layla Moran and Ed Davey have come out in support of a Citizens Income.
The Labour Party is officially unconvinced, but its membership is for it, according to Labour List, which found overwhelming support for the idea of Emergency UBI in a poll of 6,000 readers.
In the policy field, meanwhile, this month the right-leaning think tank The Institute of Economic Affairs released a report, "Redefining the State of Welfare", which argues that the Covid pandemic is one of those major crises that leads to radical changes to the welfare system.
The pandemic, it argues brings "to a head discontent with the existing system that has been growing for some time and will bring certain ideas for reform from academia and think tanks to the centre of the policy debate".
One of these ideas is Basic Income and, the paper argues, "there is the clear possibility of a consensus forming around that idea because it has supporters on all parts of the ideological spectrum and can be defended from different ideological starting points".
Coronavirus is a crisis for the developing world, but here's why it needn't be a catastrophe, by Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee, who won the 2019 Nobel prize in economics for their work on poverty alleviation. They argue that "A radical new form of universal basic income could revitalise damaged economies" .
Watch this discussion about UBI: How We Live Next: Is UBI really fair or feasible?, with Lord Willetts, former minister and now President of the Resolution Foundation; and Michael Pugh, Co-Founder & Director of Basic Income Conversation at think tank Compass.
