Dumb and dumber

It is really quite cheering for those of us who don’t want the Tory party to be in power again to see them working towards the same target.

Yesterday’s performance by Robert Jenrick was so suicidally stupid that it stole the headlines from Kemi Badenoch who said that maternity pay and leave was too generous and that the minimum wage was costing jobs and putting firms out of business, (a claim for which there is no evidence at all) only to try to row back by accusing others of “misunderstanding her”. My, she is “misunderstood” a lot isn’t she?

At the same time the Tory party had a session on how to increase the birthrate, or as they charmingly put it, breed enough to provide our own care workers. Let’s face it if the party of free market economics cannot see that cutting maternity payments will reduce the birthrate, then there is little hope for their sanity.

The fact is that while they continue on this downward path of trying to be nastier and nastier, trying to force down wages and benefits for everyone all the time and then tell them to work harder, they are doomed.

You cannot cut the minimum wage without increasing the benefits that are paid to those in work, in short the tax payer is already massively subsidising the wage bill of British business, cutting or abolishing the minimum wage would make that worse not better.

A more radical and in fact a more Tory policy, would be to abolish all in work benefits and instead hike the minimum wage until it is high enough for people to live on what they earn. The benefit bill would be slashed, much more income tax would come in, business would have huge incentives to invest in labour saving and highly productive technology, staff would have to be trained more so that they can make enough to justify their wages.

Now that is a radical policy, one that any small government Tory might easily support, except they won’t. They think that the lesson from the Sainted Margaret is to be nasty to the poor to force them to work for less for lazy incompetent bosses and wrap it up as a triumph for growth and lower taxes, when it is the exact opposite.

We need a highly educated and trained workforce, higher pay and higher productivity, and a higher birth rate or more immigration.

But the Tories want to starve people back to work, stop all immigration and make it far more difficult to afford children, instead.

Well, at least we can see them for what they are, which is very nice of them.

Jonty’s Jottings

Economics, trade and Brexit, not necessarily in that order but the dog always comes first.

By Jonty Bloom Media