 Free money for everyone. Sounds bonkers, right? Well, maybe not. This week, the People's Chancellor John McDonald and Green MP Caroline Lucas supported a report from the New Economics Foundation, which suggested that the government should implement a £48 weekly payment for everyone in the country earning less than £125,000. The idea is that this would be funded by the abolition of the tax-free personal allowance, which at present enriches the most wealthy households seven times faster than the poorest households. According to the New Economics Foundation, or NEF, this would take over 200,000 families out of poverty, and for 88% of earners, their post-tax income would either stay the same or indeed go higher. Unlike true universal basic income, the NEF plan is means-tested and it doesn't seek to replace other forms of welfare like tax credits or housing benefits. You might call it diet UBI, but what it does still do is offer a tantalising glimpse into what society could be like if it was run by a socialist government pursuing a radically redistributive agenda and where income was no longer dependent on employment. As is, work just isn't working. 60% of those in poverty are also in work, four million people in the UK experienced food insecurity last year and over a million people in the UK who are also in work are dependent on housing benefits just to keep a roof over their heads. In the past decade, the cost of living has soared as real average wages fell and even taking into account the Tories' war on welfare recipients, it's the public purse which has been making up the shortfall in people's pay packets. Against this bleak economic backdrop, advocates of UBI argue that the answer isn't to be found with more means-tested benefits, with more or less stringent exclusion criteria. Instead, they propose that the solution is an unconditional social safety net for all. The precariously employed, those dependent on the gig economy, although simply with unstable incomes, would be granted much more solid economic futures as well. And it's worth saying that this isn't a particularly new idea. Thomas Moore, who was a 16th century theologian and also Henry VIII's frenemy, first proposed it in his treaties Utopia, arguing that would be a much better way to deal with thieves than, you know, hanging them. Critics of UBI argue that it erodes the incentive to work and basically would turn the nation to a bunch of indolent layabouts. However, the biggest trial of UBI in Finland found that 2,000 recipients were much happier and no more or less likely to seek work than the control group. What's more, high employment alone isn't a particularly useful indicator of what is or isn't a healthy economy. At present, Brits on full-time contracts work on average the longest working week in Europe, but our productivity lags far behind comparable countries like France or Germany. So we've got the weirdest of all worlds. We're job rich, but time and wage poor. It's worth pointing out that I don't think that UBI is the silver bullet which will magically bring about socialism. Income isn't what drives inequality. It's wealth. The rich don't live off wages. Their money for the most part is made by already having it and using their wealth and their power to control access to the resources that the rest of us depend on. So without a programme of universal basic services, a state guarantee of services like transport, housing, health care, communications and utilities free of the point of use, all that public UBI money just ends up back in the hands of private landlords and corporate shareholders. Decoupling living standards from employment isn't just some mad utopian experiment. In coming years, it may well prove a necessary move as automation begins to really kick in. Don't get it twisted. It's not just manufacturing jobs that are on the chopping block. Traditional white collar jobs like accounting, insurance, software engineering are all ripe for replacing human labour with algorithms as improvements in artificial intelligence continue to be made. Even Google is plowing funding into automated newsrooms, meaning that in the near future, Navarra media could be brought to you by silky voiced robots who get in fewer fights on the internet. With 10 million jobs set to be eliminated by machines in the next 15 years, it's not UBI that looks unreasonable. It's the idea that the survival of people needs to be tied to the existence of work at all.