Why Osborne is copying – and bettering – Miliband’s minimum wage pledge

During the last Labour campaign, there will be been a few moments where George Osborne will have looked at Ed Miliband proposals and thought: damn! Wish we’d come up with of that.

Take a pledge to raise the minimum wage to £8 by 2020. That was Miliband’s pledge; Osborne says £9. Doesn’t cost the government a penny. In fact, it’s better off because of lower welfare payments. So the politician gets to come across all generous, while saving about £200 million in lower welfare! Result! A higher minimum wage could be a massive (and revenue-raising) spoonful of sugar to make the medicine of tax credit reform go down.

So it’s now £9/hr by 2020 (and £7.20/hr by April next year). He has given it a different name (‘living wage’) but make no mistake: this is Ed Miliband’s policy. That doesn’t necessarily make it a bad thing. Certainly, in the chamber, Osborne admitted that it will render about 60,000 people unemployable: if your skills are not worth £9 an hour, then you’ll be on the dole.