Follies of the Minimum Wage

[Hugh]

Very well thank you, but I can also say I have never voted for them. It was case of being in the right job at the right time and no more. I will not vote for cons or labs it will be libs or independent, depending on the candidate. If they had got rid of Brown I would have given Labour some thought to. Sorry I just don't like or trust him.
I can be thankful both my sons are unmarried and no children which is a blessing in many ways because I can see in this country in the coming couple of years a lot of poverty. New labour in theory did a good and righteous  thing by bringing in the minimum wage but did nothing to stop our jobs being taken from us.

[Papaumau]

We can argue as much as we like about minimum wage but at the moment there is no work at any price and unemployment is growing at an alarming rate. In my life time I have never known it so bad. Most of our works gone abroad, and a lot now being taken by immigrants at home as John says. One illegal managed to get a job in the House of Lords. Just shows how much interest the powers to be are taking on the matter. Many young people have spent a small fortune to get an education only to find there is no work for them to repay their loan and with retirement age going to rise its not going to help young people get a life off the dole. All the minimum wage as done so far is to give our work to others and pushed many people into poverty and more to follow.

Hugh....

It is the "incomers" ( the illegal and legal immigrants to Britain ), that actually encourage the use of unlawfully low wages, as when they come here for a better life they are prepared to work for wages that our indigenous population will not work for. The gangmasters know this and take advantage of it. These people are also willing to do jobs that we are not prepared to do any longer and that is one of the main reasons why they find it easy to get a job while our more-selective workers can not.

THIS is a proven fact!

As pointed out by Ivanhoe.....

The technique of using unemployment as a tool to keep down costs was practiced by our old friend Thatcher long before New-Labour used it. When she was at her best three million unemployed was normal practice.

Today's unemployment rate is running at just over TWO million and that is coming out of one of the worst world recessions we have seen since the big depression just after the last war.

[Ivanhoe]

Papaumau, I agree with you about the minimum wage, but not the recession.

Britain might be included in a world recession, but our British recession has been self created by almost 30 years of right wing policy in Britain beginning with Thatcher, because the bottom line is that decent incomes and decent pensions being awared to the majority of British workers and pensioners, they havent got the money to spend, hence our homer made recession.

[Papaumau]

I do not think that ANY kind of political dogma would have or could have protected us from what happened to the rest of the world over the past two years or so !

The economic crash was hard enough to effect all economies no matter whether they were left wing ones or right wing ones.

While I agree that New-Labour are now wayyy out on the right I do not think that a Tory government or even a Communist government, ( what a thought ), could have stopped what happened.

There is no doubt that if Thatcher and her pal Reagan had not been allowed to remove all of the regulations that controlled the banks on both sides of the pond, if there had been a crash it would not have been nearly so bad.

It was almost impossible for Brown and his gurus to unilaterally re-apply these lost regulations on the British banks as we are just a weak extension of America. The FSA did not have the power and neither did Chancellor Darling or the Bank of England have these capabilities either.

[Ivanhoe]

Papaumau.  Im not talking about the Banks, im talking about people's spending process re- desposable income, if they havent got it, they cant spend it,  hence shop closures around the country, hence home built recession.

[Ivanhoe]

///////New labour in theory did a good and righteous  thing by bringing in the minimum wage but did nothing to stop our jobs being taken from us.////

Again, that's because New Labour continued Thatcher's deregulated free market, other than investment and subsidy as what happens in Europe.

[Papaumau]

Papaumau.  Im not talking about the Banks, im talking about people's spending process re- desposable income, if they havent got it, they cant spend it,  hence shop closures around the country, hence home built recession.

Sounds like a fair enough Idea BUT....there was no such thing as a "home-built" recession, This "recession" - that we are in at the moment - is part of a world-wide happening and nothing Britain could have done would have stopped it from happening here.

This world-wide crash was triggered by what the American banks did during the sub-prime lending debachle and it was the Fannie and Freddie scandal that was the "Jenga"- type set of building blocks in America that started the world recession

See this: http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/12/g-o-p-lawmker-pushes-to-dump-fannie-and-freddie/

I DO agree that any country's economy depends on ALL of it's people being able to spend money and if a large proportion of the population do not have money to spend that economy is bound to stagnate.

[Ivanhoe]

/////I DO agree that any country's economy depends on ALL of it's people being able to spend money and if a large proportion of the population do not have money to spend that economy is bound to stagnate.////

That's one way of putting it.