This is a vile argument for a £15 minimum wage, tantamount to evil

This might not be the wisest argument ever:

Workers deserve a pay rise, and we should be fighting for a £15-an-hour minimum wage.

We’re worried about a wage/price spiral so let’s raise wages. Hmm, perhaps not.

As to why it’s £15, this is just taking the American idea of the Fight for $15 and bringing the nominal number over. Despite Britain being a poorer country, with lower overall wage levels and using a different measurement - £ instead of $ - to boot.

The government actually employed an American professor - Arindrajit Dube, both a leader in the analysis of minimum wages and someone fully in favour of higher than the US one at present - to study what the minimum wage “should” be. The answer being that anything above the 55 to 60% level of the median wage was harmful. That’s when the unemployment effects become significant that is. Further, the correct wage to be using as the reference is the full and part time median wage, not the full year, full time one (we checked all of this in direct correspondence with Prof Dube).

This means that the currently proposed £10.50 is in fact “too high” by the standards of proper economic analysis (median hourly pay apparently being £14.10 for all employees, so the minimum is being set at 74% of median). And that’s analysis by someone in favour of both the minimum wage and quite high ones too.

Setting the minimum pay above median is really not sensible at all. But we did say that the argument is vile and to us this part of it is:

Even accounting for the increase in public sector wages, the government would still be £25bn per year better off from the change, as a result of spending less on universal credit payments and collecting much more in income and other taxes.

They really are saying that the poor should be taxed more to pay for government. That this is good, that more be taken in tax off those who are earning, by the very definition of what a minimum wage is, the smallest amount that it is moral someone be paid for their labour.

We’ve spent the last two decades arguing that the taxation of the poor should be reduced. In fact, that the personal allowance and also starting point for national insurance should be that very minimum wage itself. We partly won that argument too - the current £12,500 target for both is what the full year, full time, minimum wage was when the pledge to raise the allowances was first made.

We therefore repeat our full and initial insistence. We’re not in favour of there even being a minimum wage. But if there is to be one then the full year, full time, minimum wage must be equal to the tax and national insurance allowance. Equally, whatever the tax free allowances are must be that minimum wage.

The moral case in favour of a minimum wage is that this is the minimum labour is worth. OK, fine, so government gets none of it because that’s the minimum that labour is worth.

After all, if you want the poor to have more money then stop taxing them so damn much.