This is a policy that could make a radical difference – as long as it’s not watered down like the green prosperity plan
It will cost jobs. It will harm the UK’s competitiveness. It will make the labour market less flexible. For those with long enough memories, the push back against Labour’s plans for a new deal for workers has a familiar ring to it. The same arguments were wheeled out before the national minimum wage was introduced a quarter of a century ago. All proved groundless.
Confounding the doomsters and gloomsters of the late 1990s, the minimum wage has raised the pay of millions of Britain’s lowest-paid workers by an average of £6,000 a year without lengthening dole queues. It has been described by one thinktank as the most successful economic policy in a generation.
Larry Elliott is the Guardian’s economics editor
