‘If you earn £6 an hour flipping burgers then Allegra might have good news for you,’ said Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight yesterday. Paxman was of course introducing the mooted Conservative Party policy idea to increase the minimum wage, a story reported by Allegra Stratton. Stratton responded: ‘We’ve learnt that the Prime Minister’s advisors are thinking of turning Tory policy on its head and raising the minimum wage – not yet, but some time before the next election.’
For me, this brief exchange and the rest of the Newsnight piece reflected the state of the debate on this issue in the UK. First, Jeremy Paxman assumed that those flipping burgers would be able to keep their jobs if the national minimum wage was increased ‘significantly’. Second, the added barrier that a higher minimum wage would create for those young people or those with low skills from finding employment was not mentioned once – Stratton briefly touched on Treasury concerns about it causing unemployment, but there was no discussion of how it might affect new net job creation.
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