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

The idea of a guaranteed minimum income has been central to British social policy debates for more than a century. Since the First World War, a variety of market economists, radical activists, and social reformers have emphasized the possibility of tackling poverty through direct cash transfers between the state and its citizens. As manufacturing employment has declined and wage inequality has grown since the 1970s, cash benefits and tax credits have become an important source of income for millions of working-age households, including many low-paid workers with children. The nature and purpose of these transfer payments, however, remain highly contested. Conservative and New Labour governments have used in-work benefits and conditionality requirements to 'activate' the unemployed and reinforce the incentives to take low-paid work - an approach which has reached its apogee in Universal Credit. By contrast, a growing number of campaigners have argued that the challenge of providing economic security in an age of automation would be better met by paying a Universal Basic Income to all citizens. Transfer State provides the first detailed history of guaranteed income proposals in modern Britain, which brings together intellectual history and archival research to show how the pursuit of an integrated tax and benefit system has shaped UK public policy since 1918. The result is a major new analysis of the role of cash transfers in the British welfare state which sets Universal Credit in a historical perspective and examines the cultural and political barriers to a Universal Basic Income.

Table of Contents:
Preface Part I: The politics of redistribution 1: Introduction 2: Redistributive Market Liberalism and its critics Part II: In search of a guaranteed income 3: Social dividends and social contracts, 1918-55 4: Negative Income Tax comes to Britain, 1955-70 5: 'The pragmatist's solution to poverty': The Heath government's Tax Credit Scheme, 1970-4 Part III: Cash transfers in post-industrial Britain 6: Redistribution in a cold climate: The politics of guaranteed income in the 1970s and 1980s 7: New Labour's tax credits, 1997-2010 8: A crisis of the transfer state? Distributional politics since the 2008 financial crisis 9: The return of Universal Basic Income Part IV: Conclusion 10: What kind of transfer state?

About the Author :
Peter Sloman is Senior Lecturer in British Politics at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Churchill College. He was a Junior Research Fellow at New College before moving to Cambridge in 2015. His first book, The Liberal Party and the Economy, 1929-1964 (Oxford, 2015) examined how British Liberals engaged with economic thought in the era of John Maynard Keynes and William Beveridge. He has also published articles in a number of leading journals and has contributed to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

Review :
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. The book is an impressive piece of work. Sloman has carefully and thoughtfully complied historical accounts to show a detailed and rich tapestry of ideas, policies and ideologies underpinning guaranteed income floors. The Universal Basic Income (UBI) is much discussed. Peter Sloman examines its history in relation to that of UK redistributive welfare policies... Sloman present a clear account of the emergence of UBI and the arguments for and against, without raising hopes that it is realistically on the horizon. In UBI histories, the normative and the descriptive easily shade into one another, often at the expense of history itself... Cambridge historian Peter Sloman's 2019 book Transfer State is a rare and notable exception. More than a conceptual hagiography, Sloman's book offers a history of the 'idea' of a basic income in British thought over the last 100 years, tracking its travails through policy circles, trade unions,and government cabinets... [and] recontextualizes the UBI within a wider timeline of conceptions of redistribution and social policy. Peter Sloman's aim in this thoroughly researched book is to 'illuminate a neglected dimension of British social thought, and help explain the enduring appeal of providing an income floor for citizens through cash transfers'... Any future history of the social security system in the UK, and any future history of reform proposals, will have to stand on Sloman's shoulders. Peter Sloman has produced a fascinating, comprehensive, detailed, forensic economic history of UK welfare philosophy, politics and practice, which he interprets and evaluates against the criterion of fit to the concept of universal basic income. This book is a foundational contribution to the historiography of the guaranteed minimum income...The future of the transfer state may be uncertain, but Sloman's book is undoubtedly the landmark history of its development.