You get what you pay for - well, you should at least

It’s not exactly a surprise that we’ll disagree with something said by John McDonnell. Yet it does still need to be said:

First, the self-employed and dependent contractors (those who are self-employed but provide a service as part of someone else’s business, such as Uber drivers) are not covered by the scheme’s guarantee of up to 80% of their wages. The self-employed are a diverse group, including cabbies and child-minders, plumbers and actors. The Federation of Small Businesses has been calling for the self-employed to be valued and protected. We agree.

It’s true that there is some variation in what self-employed people are paid. But the same job retention-scheme cap of £2,500 can apply to the self-employed. Recent average earnings can be used to estimate their income. Any inaccurate reporting can be picked up in tax returns filed for 2019-20. The self-employed deserve the same support as everyone else.

No, the self-employed do not deserve the same support as everyone else. For the self-employed have not been paying in to the system of social insurance in the same manner, or to the same amount, as everyone else.

National insurance really is what it says on the tin, a national system of insurance against the vicissitudes of life. Against happenstance, economic cycles and all that may ail employment prospects. The self-employed pay into this system at different and markedly lower rates than the employed. As a result they have fewer rights to payments from that national insurance scheme.

This is as it should be, you get what you pay for. The statement that people should - as McDonnell suggests - gain what they have not paid for strikes us as being wrong, simply and purely incorrect.

That something might be done is true, that it should be could be and that it will strikes us as likely. But this insistence that people should gain the insurance cover they’ve not paid for we still regard as wrong.

Just for the avoidance of doubt this particular piece comes from someone who is:

a) self-employed

b) unlikely to be offered anything under any scheme

c) not going to apply for or accept if they are.

For we around here think that conjunction between the walk and the talk to be important.