Foreword

Summary

When Malcolm Torry published Money for Everyone in 2013, I welcomed it with enthusiasm. I welcome Why we need a Citizen's Basic Income with even greater enthusiasm.

Whether this book is a second edition of Money for Everyone or a new book is a significant question: significant, because the fact that so much of the book has had to be newly written shows just how far the Basic Income debate has moved on in just five years. Money for Everyone was mainly arguments for the desirability of Basic Income, with the occasional mention of feasibility and implementation. Now public and policymaker debate is far more about both the feasibility of Basic Income and options for its implementation, so it has been essential to include substantial chapters on those subjects, and also a fully evaluated illustrative Basic Income scheme – lacking in Money for Everyone. The new book also contains a chapter on objections to Basic Income: an essential addition that I also included in my own book on the subject seen from an international perspective.

But however different parts of it might be, this is still in many ways the original book. It is written by someone with a sense of compassion, by a ‘man of the cloth’, as British people used to say with a sense of respect. One does not need to be a Christian or to belong to any religion to recognise the value and appeal of real compassion. And we should remember the difference between compassion and pity, just as we should that between rights and charity. Compassion derives from treating people as equals; pity derives from treating people as inferior, as fallen. Social policy should be about strengthening compassion and rights, leaving pity and charity to individual consciences.

Compassion emphasises our commonality, our human similarity, recognition that while today we may need help and may be in a position to help others, tomorrow it might be the other way round. Pity, by contrast, as David Hume taught us, is akin to contempt. At best it is paternalistic and patronising. Worse, it easily leads lazy minds to think they are superior and are being magnanimous in giving a little to help the ‘deserving poor’.