the brilliantly leaping gazelle

There are many things governments are noted for, but having a whimsical, almost mischievous sense of humour isn’t one of them. So ii is all the more gratifying to see both of the governments England and Scotland impressively rising to the challenge set by no-one and and introduce into law on the same day – today,  April Fools Day – two vastly different, legislative pranks of the very highest order. 

In Scotland, today sees the introduction of their new Hate Crime Bill, which is to is going to be the subject on another post but and manages to be both arbitrary  to arbitrary and prescriptive at the same time. Whereas in England, we have the implementation of an increase to the National Minimum Wage (NMW), which might seem to be a good thing, but actually isn’t. 

because From today, the NMW will increase by 9.8% in cash terms and 7.8% above inflation. Sounds great doesn’t it, until one realises that a percentage increase by a small amount of an already small amount isn’t going to make that small amount substantially larger. So that impressive sounding 9.8% means that the NMW will actually increase from £10.42 an hour to £11.44, to the rather less impressively sounding £1.02 an hour. (And because the NMW is age dependant, that only applies if one is 21 or over. More on that in another blog.)

Its hard to imagine it seeming even less impressive than that, but since the NMW was introduced in 1999, “it has driven up the pay of millions of Britain’s lowest earners by £6,000 a year, making it the single most successful economic policy in a generation”, according to a someone at a think tank who will never have to set foot inside a food bank. 25 years multiplied by 52 weeks equals 1300 and if we divide that by £6000, we get the princely sum of just over £4.61 a week.

Its not like the cost of living has gone up much since 1999, is it?

I was thinking about on this when I thought of Chancer and of him proving that foot and mouth disease can be passed to humans, with his assertion that £100,000 a year salary didn’t ‘go that far’. I suppose if you live in a world in which the company you co-founded sold for £30m in 2017, and despite you quitting it in 2009, the 48% stake in it netted you over £14m, then £100,000 a year isn’t that big a deal. He has to scape by on his MPs salary of only £84,144.

If someone thinks that this is somehow ‘the single most effective economic policy in a generation’, then that someone needs to urgently contact the Nigerian prince who a few years ago was always pestering me to give him my bank account details so he could get his fortune out of the country.

That same so called think tank pointed out that that its analysis of the UK showed that between 1980 and 1998, hourly pay growth in the UK was twice as fast for the highest earners as it was for the lowest earners – 3.1% versus 1.4% a year. They only pointed this out however, so could make the claim “that since 1999 this trend has reversed, and hourly pay inequality has fallen with pay growth for the lowest earners five times that seen by the highest earners – 1.6% versus 0.3 per cent per year.” But as I’ve pointed out, whilst the numbers may well be factually accurate, their practically meaningless, as a small percentage increase on a very large sum will have a greater overall effect on the total than the same percentage increase on a much smaller sum. 

All of which left me thinking that the increase to the NMW, is in fact a coded message to both the poor and the business sector. To the poor, that the government has to go through the motions of pretending to care, but really all it does is take the piss. To business it reaffirms the governments ongoing commitment to facilitate payment of the NMW, by means of such corporate welfare instruments as Working Family Tax Credits (WFTC).  In plain English, WTC effectively guarantees that the government will top up the wages of the lower paid if they meet certain criteria, which employers are only too aware of and will ensure their workers meet them.

I had this one job and it paid me 50p an hour. But I was only 15, did it after school and on Saturdays and because I knew I was being ripped off, so whenever I was on the till I topped up my hourly rate to something more agreeable. But that shop isn’t the government and a government use its taxpayers money on something that will improve its citizens lives in a more practical way than saving a few minutes off a train journey from London to Birmingham.