BRITAIN is in a state of terminal decay.

Take a few news items from the last week.

The Chartered Institute of Housing says the freeze in housing benefit by the UK Government may provoke homelessness, because the rate paid to private tenants now fails to cover even the cheapest rents. London is in the worst situation but Scots are in the same boat.

The Scottish Burden of Disease Deprivation report reveals that poverty doubles the risk of early death and ill health. The NHS Health Scotland found that one third of early deaths and ill health could be avoided if all Scots had the same life circumstances as the richest. Drug-related deaths and ill health were 17 times higher in poorest areas, alcohol dependence was 8.4 times greater.

Unequal Britain also has the highest number of problem drinkers in Europe, topping a list of 13 EU nations according to the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto. Almost 1.2 million working-age Britons are drinking at levels that will knock two to three decades off their lives.

This portrait of everyday despair was supported by a report from the University of Southern California, which says Britain is the only western country (apart from the opioid-ridden US) where life expectancy is actually plummeting. They suggest poverty, loneliness, overstretched hospitals and the struggling elderly care system are contributory factors.

Mercifully Scotland has a better system of elderly care thanks to the farsightedness of the Scottish Parliament led by Henry McLeish in 2002. The free personal care system isn’t perfect but it has extracted Scots from the pitiful situation facing pensioners in England, which was labelled the poor man of the developed world in social care funding this week by Age UK.

Farsightedness in the early days of our parliament, courage on the part of Scottish Labour leaders who defied Tony Blair, an emphasis on social justice by the SNP and court action by brave Scots claimants fighting the bedroom tax have all created the foundations of a more liberal welfare system in Scotland and protected thousands from the worst excesses of Theresa May’s collapsing crony capitalism.

But now it’s time to go further.

Scotland must prepare for a change that’s about to sweep the world – even though we are not independent and control only 15% of Scotland’s welfare spending.

We must prepare to become the first country in the world to go beyond the post-war settlement that created Britain’s welfare state and introduce an enabling, empowering system to stop hundreds of thousands of people falling through the net – an unconditional payment that restores dignity, choice and control to those without paid work, that supports voluntary labour in education and care and is the right of every citizen – even those in work – in the same way the NHS and education is available to all.

A Universal Basic Income (UBI).

Yes, we are talking about the state handing out money with no strings attached. Yes, right-wing think-tanks have tried to argue that it will bankrupt any country that considers it. But critics said the same thing 70 years ago about the idea of a state pension. Back then a society scarred by war and near economic collapse produced a generation of Labour politicians, who highlighted the shambolic alternatives, ignored the scaremongers, took the plunge and changed history.

The same bold leap needs to happen again.

The question is which country is best placed to lead the way.

Strangely enough, it’s not likely to be a Nordic nation. At the Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN) conference in Tampere, Finland last week, it became clear that countries with good welfare systems are least inclined to favour wholesale change – even though automation means 40% of their citizens will possibly lose their jobs to machines by 2030 if the direst predictions are correct. And even though their welfare systems – like all others – currently fail to give control, freedom and dignity to those choosing important unpaid occupations like creativity, care, education or the early, risky stages of becoming a social or commercial entrepreneur.

So ironically, our current catastrophically inadequate welfare system gives Scotland and the UK a perverse incentive to be the first to experiment wholeheartedly with a different approach. Clearly, Theresa May won’t be taking that plunge – though a pilot in Finland was begun by right-wingers.

Labour’s John McDonnell has excited some within the basic income movement by asking for a paper offering possible options for inclusion in the next UK Labour manifesto. But actually, Scotland is already ahead of the field.

The Scottish Greens have long supported a UBI. So too have Labour activists like Glasgow councillor Matt Kerr – and that is actually unusual.

European Social Democrats are very wary of the UBI concept because it accepts full (paid)employment is now an impossible goal and erodes the recruitment base of trade unions. And of course, support for a basic income by tech billionaires like Tesla boss Elon Musk and Virgin’s Richard Branson is bound to make the left fear that UBI will become a wage subsidy for employers that simply entrenches precarious work.

But Scotland has a different collective attitude.

Nicola Sturgeon included basic income pilots in her Programme for Government last year – now a quarter of a million pounds is available to four councils keen to run pilot schemes. All four are SNP-led, but were Labour-run when the pilots were first proposed. That’s important, because with goodwill, every progressive party in Scotland can back this scheme.

Heavens ter Betsy, even Ruth Davidson might be influenced by Conservative support for the pilot in Fife. And cooperation matters.

Council leaders in the Canadian province of Ontario were in the first year of a pioneering basic income pilot when provincial elections in April produced a Trump-like victor who cancelled the experiment on the grounds that poor people given money without strings attached would squander the money or drink it. Basic income supporters say the pilot would have proved precisely the opposite – that most people manage their own lives far better than a micro-managing state.

All of this has particular relevance for folk attending the SNP’s second National Assembly in Aviemore this weekend – because the Growth Commission report under discussion is missing this entire debate and with it the chance for Scotland to become the first country with a radically new approach to social justice.

One which doesn’t tinker with a broken, mean, conditional, humiliating welfare system; one which knows that people can do better things with cash than bureaucrats; one which recognises the terrible impact of the current cruel system on claimants and its administrators; one which is signed up for a more progressive taxation system so that well paid workers will return the value of their basic income (and more) in taxation; one which looks automation in the face and doesn’t flinch, prevaricate or lie; one which is determined to set up a new country freed from the terrible, humiliating, centuries-long distinction between the “deserving and undeserving poor”; one which ends the increasingly false distinctions between full and part-time labour, paid and unpaid work, self-employment and unemployment, permanent and precarious jobs – in short, a country with systems designed for the 2020s not the 1940s.

Across the world a network of academics, activists, Greens and women’s groups are pushing basic income.

According to UBI champion Jamie Cooke of the RSA; “We have reached a stage where communities are rejecting tinkering at the edges – the problems we face require radical new ideas. Politicians are there to facilitate communities in the ideas they bring, not just present policies to them”

Robbie Mochrie, associate professor of economics at Heriot-Watt, made another important point writing about the SNP’s first National Assembly on CommonSpace.

“If the SNP wants to energise its membership and develop an economic policy framework which resonates widely, and can be sold on the doorstep to people concerned about voting for independence, it needs to [be] more innovative about policy, and take more risks than the current policy framework contemplates.”

Well quite.

Independence won’t be won by a set of statistics but by a vision, a story and an acknowledgement that transition will be difficult but hugely worthwhile. Breaking free from the failing British welfare state with a citizen’s basic income is just such a visionary reality.

There isn’t room to list the difficulties that will likely beset the Scottish pilots and the first country to take the plunge and implement a fully functioning system. It will be hard. But there will be huge social, economic, health and emotional rewards too.

Finnish pilot participant and artist Juha Jarvinen said this at the Tampere conference last week; “We are all emotional beings as well as rational ones. My basic income payment was the day I become free – a signal I could dream of something better.”

The citizens of an independent Scotland deserve no less.