In Chapter 3 we reached the conclusion that a Citizen's Income would be difficult to implement because it might reduce the number of civil servants. Civil servants construct the reports and statistics that ministers read, and it is not difficult to write a report that proves that a Citizen's Income is an unrealistic proposition.

Civil servants are examples of what De Wispelaere and Noguera term as ‘readily identifiable actors with distinctive interests, roles, capacities, and intentions’. Other such ‘identifiable actors’ are members of parliament and government ministers, and they might be considering the following questions in relation to a proposal for a Citizen's Income: 1. Does it fit with our party's political convictions about the kind of society and the kind of economy that we want to build? 2. Does it fit with our current policy directions? 3. Are there any serious objections to it? And possibly: 4. Might the policy gain all party support? If a government were able to answer ‘Yes’, ‘yes’, ‘no’, and ‘yes’ to these questions, then we could say that a Citizen's Income was politically feasible and therefore that it could happen.

In this chapter we shall ask whether a Citizen's Income would be coherent with a variety of the UK's political ideologies, whether those same ideologies generate objections to a Citizen's Income, and whether a Citizen's Income might cohere with today's policy directions.

The New Right

This ideology sets out from the position that we are self-interested individuals. Our relationships are economic and contractual, and are for mutual benefit. The public sector is inefficient, so as much economic activity as possible needs to be in the private sector; and this economic activity might include such public services as healthcare and education. It is a mistake to call the New Right ‘conservative’. It is not. It is quite happy to dispense with time-honoured institutions. It is in many ways a radical version of classical liberalism, with an added dose of moral prescription.