The article implies that basic income necessarily leads to food stamps. But basic income is orthogonal to that. If the UK government wanted to introduce a food

The article implies that basic income necessarily leads to food stamps. But basic income is orthogonal to that. If the UK government wanted to introduce a food stamp system it could have done it already, and it'd be much easier to do without a basic income. If everyone receives food stamps, the administrative overhead for the government, businesses, and the people would be huge. With basic income it's quite likely that people currently at, or just above, minimum wage - some 30% of the population - would find almost all of their income replaced with 'food stamps'. The article also observes that the state will be subsidising more businesses. True as it may be, not everyone considers subsidies to be automatically bad, and the article makes no case for why we should think that this would be a problem. Then the article goes on to suggest that basic income would mean businesses would increase their profit margins because they wouldn't have to pay as much in wages. Possibly true for some businesses - things are a bit more complicated than that: costs would increase because the basic income has to be funded somehow - but it's rather at odds with the Independent's usual editorial line to paint this as a bad thing.