Living Wage

George Osborne is coming in for lots of flak recently (from the Labour party in particular) for hijacking the concept of a 'living wage' which the chancellor used to great effect in his latest budget.

The Resolution Foundation which has been campaigning for the introduction of a 'living wage'  criticised the government and one of its policy analysts, Conor D'Arcy, is quoted as saying: 

"The new 'National Living Wage' is a welcome policy with a somewhat misleading title. It has legal clout - which the voluntary Living Wage doesn't - but it also fails to reflect how much families need to earn to have a decent standard of living."

Now fair enough, but it's a start and the Government's commitment to £9.00 an hour by 2020 is an awful lot better than the £8.00 an hour that Ed Miliband and the Labour Party campaigned for during the general election, which they lost very badly of course.

But instead of claiming some credit for moving wage protection up the political agenda, all the 'numpty' Labour leadership can do is to squawk endlessly about how some people will lose out on tax credits which will leave lots of families £260 a year worse off.

Now as far as I can tell I'm a 'loser' from the budget as well, yet I wouldn't count the loss of £5 a week as a national disaster or even a personal tragedy.

The fact is that the system of tax credits mushroomed out of control and went from £1 billion a year to over £30 billion a year in the space of a decade or so and the policy has been fiercely criticised for using huge amounts of public money to subsidise low pay across all sectors of the UK economy. 

So a start has been made, arguably a better one than if Ed Miliband had won the general election which speaks volumes about the Labour Party these days.