The Spectator’s Notes | 8 November 2012

President Obama’s victory is the first major victory for incumbency in the West since the credit crunch began. It was to help achieve such a victory that the eurozone leaders listened to Mr Obama and Tim Geithner and postponed their own day of reckoning. All excellent news for the status quo, but possibly not for the rest of us.

This is Living Wage Week, according to someone or other. The Living Wage is a brilliant propaganda idea. It probably owes its intellectual origins to Pope Leo XIII, who argued that ‘wages ought not to be insufficient to support a frugal and well-behaved wage-earner’. Now it is not just a principle but a specified amount, reported utterly uncritically by the BBC. The ‘right’ wage has just been increased to £8.55 per hour in London and £7.45 everywhere else. Shamelessly, Boris Johnson backs it. Ed Miliband wants public procurement contracts to go only to Living Wage employers.