A policy meant to put a floor under insecurity met a room more worried about the cost of building one: No won with 230 votes to 153. The decision was shaped less by hostility to targeted support than by the fear that universality would make an already strained system impossible to fund.
The winning side’s highest-respected argument was blunt: “We cant afford our current handout culture.” Other No voices linked UBI to inflation, weaker work incentives and misplaced faith in AI disruption, while one urged ministers to “Give better wages to carers nurses bin men” instead.
Yes voters made the moral and practical case for a universal floor. Their strongest argument called UBI an “essential economic floor against the expected huge rise in AI automation”, preserving disability and housing support so that a single payment did not flatten genuine differences in need. Another Yes voice pointed to Universal Credit’s promise when it “dealt with the whole of a claim, in one place”.
The two sides were often answering different questions: No asked who would pay and whether work would still pay, while Yes asked what happens when work becomes precarious or the benefits system becomes a source of stigma. Around that core argument came everything from the claim that UBI was “totally unworkable, unaffordable, unnecessary” to a low-respect warning about “Digital ID, CBDC & UBI”; this was a welfare debate, but also a vote about trust in the state and the limits of redistribution.
The room did not close the argument so much as reject its universal solution: targeted help remains easier to defend than a benefit paid to everyone.
18 Opinions
Countless studies have shown that UBI trials actually encourage people to be more productive, not less. With the safety net - you can start your own business without worrying that it might fail. You can volunteer for organisations, charity shops etc.
If you took all the money in the world and divided it equally between every living person then, in no more than 5 years, you would be back to having millionaires and beggars again. There will be those who use the money wisely to build a life, and those who go out and spend it on a good time. UBI is totally unworkable, unaffordable, unnecessary and yet another left wing ideal that could never stand up to the test of reality
It's a utopian idea, that we can be protected from the vagaries of the job market for ever, or that we are owed UBI forever because our job was taken away. It is just that, a utopia.
Put simply, this is completely unaffordable.
UBI is extremely expensive - cost estimates range from £45bn to £67bn per annum. Where on earth will that money come from when the budget deficit, tax burden and national debt are already very high?
Nobody would agree on the amount for UBI since to get rid of testing it can only be a very low amount. and having disability and housing support on top would make it totally unaffordable.
Greed is the root cause of the disparity
We should stop with the idea that we can pay for people to not work.
Its government policy, they just failed to tell you. Devil’s trio is Digital ID, CBDC & UBI. The Fabians intentionally de-industrialize Western Europe particularly UK. They attack farming meat - our food supply, cheap energy by promoting scam of Net Zero & replace us with 3rd World Islamic migrants. Once they destroy small firms you don’t have cash you live in a 15 minute City & you are forbidden to eat meat they ‘give’ you time limited digital cash thru UBI. Communism
You can't import thousands of migrants to fill jobs then give universal basic wage to every one else. Give better wages to carers nurses bin men oops people, maybe then work will pay