A ‘Citizen's Income’ is an unconditional, non-withdrawable income for every citizen: but who is a ‘citizen’? – and what does it mean to be a ‘citizen’? This matters, because, as Tony Fitzpatrick has pointed out, ‘the ideological debate concerning [Citizen's Income] is, at its heart, a debate about citizenship’.

A ‘citizen’ is ‘a member of a state,’ but ‘citizenship’ can also have a broader meaning in terms of our membership of a variety of communities. Some countries’ residents are formally citizens but have few rights, and it must be asked whether they really are citizens at all. In most of the UK we are formally subjects of the monarch rather than members of a state, but a variety of rights and duties have evolved that constitute a degree of citizenship. In addition, we now experience elements of both global citizenship and regional citizenship, as in the European Union.

The history of the citizenship debate in the UK

The terms of the modern debate on citizenship were set by T.H. Marshall when he formulated his three stages of civil, political and social rights: legal rights relating to contracts, followed by rights to participate in a representative democracy, in turn followed by rights to the benefits of a welfare state:

Thus the National Health Service is

A rather different picture emerges in Martin Golding's discussion of the history of rights. He points out that the oldest known discussions of rights in Roman legal texts are about concrete property rights, suggesting that welfare rights, broadly defined, came first.