The biggest mistake in politics is to judge a policy by its intentions, not its ayesults. The Living Wage sounds like it’s helping those at the bottom: the over-25s are on £7.20 as of today, up from £6.70 under the old minimum wage. Within four years, it will be over £9. So a massive pay rise for the poor!
Except it’s nothing of the kind. What a £9 minimum wage does is ensure that anyone whose skills are not worth £9 will be unemployed. How many people are we talking about? The OBR says 60,0000. Prof Ray Barrell, from Brunel University, fears it will be closer to 300,000. While the precise number is in doubt, the overall principle is not: higher unemployment is the price paid for a minimum wage. In my Daily Telegraph column today, I ask why no one seems to care about these people who’ll be dumped on the human scrap heap, locked out of the economy by government policy.
The truth: that their unemployment is seen as a price worth paying for a pay rise to millions.
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