BLINKING groggily at the Scottish election campaign over the last few days, I have gradually discerned something quite extraordinary. It was probably the battle of virtue between Sturgeon and Rennie on a TV hustings that set it off – not too inspirational, you’d think.

But their topic was inspiring: basic income. Willie thought he’d be able to convince Boris Johnson of its merits for Scotland. Nicola scorned this, saying a “citizens basic income” would need the powers of independence.

Yet there they were, suits gripping podiums, competing to be the most credible voice on a policy that, for most of my adult life, has been described as “idealistic nonsense” (by the supposed grown-ups).

More incredulity: I also see that the “four-day working week” is now an explicit manifesto aspiration for both the Scottish Greens and the SNP.

The latter intends to devote £10 million so that Scottish companies could test it out – though full implementation would still need independence, meaning full control of employment and welfare law. In Westminster, MPs from Labour, SNP, Plaid Cymru, the SDLP and the Green Party signed an early day motion calling on the UK Government to set up a commission to consider the proposal. Good luck with that.

But nevertheless, here we are. The two favourite policies of left-green dreamers (or “post-industrial utopians”, to use the academese) for decades (maybe even centuries), are now steadily floating towards the political mainstream.

You may easily be able to guess why: the upheavals and disruptions of the pandemic. In a moment when governments are directly subsidising private-sector jobs, and when patterns of working hours have been ripped apart, basic income and the four-day week are “the ideas lying around, waiting for a crisis to pick them up” (to paraphrase Milton Friedman).

But they come with a history. And it’s worth recalling what some of that history is, before these ideas become meekly functional to some elected government’s norm.

The first concept of a basic income was also birthed in a time of systemic crisis. The American revolutionary pamphleteer Tom Paine wrote in 1796’s Agrarian Justice about a “national fund”, ready for the “heavenly opening” of post-revolutionary America.

This fund would be “an indemnification of the loss” to citizens of their “natural inheritance”, namely the “COMMON PROPERTY OF THE HUMAN RACE” (this is Paine’s own capitalisation). “Landed monopoly” had produced the “greatest evil … a species of poverty and wretchedness that did not exist before”.

Paine’s policy didn’t land. But intellectually, it did forge a relationship between being a citizen of a nation, and thereby being guaranteed enough resources to exercise that citizenship –no matter what markets and “cultivation” demand.

Paine ultimately rested his claims on divinity: “It is wrong to say that God made Rich and Poor: he made only Male and Female, and he gave them the earth for their inheritance.”

There’s a dark irony here. The idea of the state directly providing our collective income is currently thinkable – but that’s precisely because we have trashed Paine’s “earthly inheritance”. An untrammelled capitalism of agri-business and extractivism smashes its way through our eco-systems, releasing the viruses that chase us from our places of work and trade.

Sturgeon’s speech at the manifesto launch identified “security and resilience”, both individual and national, as the desired outcome of a “citizen’s basic income” (along with the “minimum income guarantee” that prepares us for it, pre-independence).

It would be good if building this security and resilience was about more than just alleviating immediate economic need. A Scottish state should indeed step in to support us, as we make unprecedented climate-driven changes in our work and lives.

We will have to consume much less, and produce very differently, if we are to address what major media outlets have now decided to call our climate “emergency” (not “change”, or even “crisis”). These radical shifts in behaviour will be aimed at regenerating, not despoiling, Paine’s “common property of the human race”. Universal basic income will help us do so.

Next, take this election’s cross-party fervour for a four-day week. Again, we should look to Covid: like a wrecking ball, it has clattered through most of our assumptions about what a standard work pattern should be (for example, we’ve compressed about a decade’s trends towards remote working into a single year).

So we now seem open to the vast panoply of arguments for pushing back the imperium of the working day or week, without loss of pay. The pandemic has certainly sharpened the edges of their case.

Over the last decade, there have been plenty of experiments – whether at a company, sectoral or regional level – showing clearly that four-day work weeks make for happier, more motivated, more productive employees. People feel they can balance their labours, their caring and their recreations much better.

Our many Covid experiences – caring for convalescents, home-schooling children or other direct relationships – will doubtless leave a residue of demand for a less job-centric society.

YET there are even harder-nosed reasons why a progressively shorter working week may be moving from “nice” to “necessary”. There are simple things, like the raw energy that’s saved as office presence is reduced.

Then there are the challenges of automation. Leaps in AI will offer humans the chance to move away from routinised labour – or in the Amazon warehouse and Uber model, subject ourselves to ever more micro-labours. Can we find a clear ground to stand on, from which to make a choice between these two pathways?

And in terms of the climate emergency, and the lifestyle revolution required, we may basically need more time to turn our existences around. If we need to replace compensatory consumerism with other gratifications – learning, passions, relationships, exploration of self and world – this won’t happen overnight.

A four-day week (heading for three) will at least open up a temporal zone, whereby citizens can start to decide on how they best cope with the future.

To many who are still gripped by the puritanism of the work ethic – and that often includes the shelf-stacker as much as the CEO – the combination of basic income and four-day week could seem infernal.

What will ever be achieved in such a pampered and dependent society and economy? What a surrender to laziness and indolence!

Yet as the Glasgow-born adman Phil Teer argues in his superb and pithy book on basic income and creativity, The Coming Age Of Imagination, there really is another way to think about human beings.

We are the animal that is literally configured, and has concretely evolved, to overflow with imagination and stories: it’s the default state of our brains. If we express this nature, “the more people who get the chance to pursue their creative passions, the better”, says Phil. He adds: “Every connection between an inventor and an artist is pregnant with the possibility of a new market. How much more will be created if we all have more time to tinker and invent and push the creative boundaries and get curious?”

We need a lot of joyful and caring ingenuity, coming from every corner of society, for us to collectively make the best of this demanding century. So beneath the ding-dong and poisonous partisanship of these elections, let’s enjoy a micro-second of delight. There seems to be quite a policy consensus, amongst our progressive political parties, to structurally support this kind of flourishing.

In that not-so-small respect, we may all win on Thursday, May 6, 2021.