'National pay grades and scales must be scrapped if Cameron is to rebalance the economy fairly; as must the national minimum wage.', writes Raedwald. An obvious piece of scorched earth that must be reclaimed from the Thirteen Years (and more, unfortunately) of misrule.
Now that universality of benefit from the intervening state has been rejected, it is time to face up to the trade unions and end distortions of the market that result in wages being higher than is competitive in many parts of the UK, and too low in the South-east and London; particularly as the trade unions are heavily skewed towards representing workers in the public sector.
What reason can there be to pay out more than the market demands for teachers, health service staff, general clerks, and manual worker grades other than that in other times and under other ideologies unions were permitted to impose inappropriate rewards at the expense of tax payers?
The destruction wrought by Labour in its atrocious failure to restrain brownian pseudo-economics must at least bring down a trade union-imposed folly of paying far too much to some and far too little to others just because the work they do is similar. And there can be no national minimum wage once we have to abandon universality of support for children and the old.
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Congratulations on being so bold. My only quarrel is that I would not be keen on abolishing the minimum wage - period. Given that the low paid face high effective marginal tax rates, simply abolishing the min wage means that employers can pay way below the min wage, with the state making up the wage to a socially acceptable take home pay level. Plus employers can make up for any resulting deficiency in pay by offering cash under the counter to employees, or other perks. Effectively, employer and employee are exploiting the taxpayer.
My favourite solution to the latter problem is to let employers employ people at ridiculously low rates, but limit the time for which a given employee stays with a given employer. At the end of that time, the employer faces a choice: 1, admit that the employee is relatively productive, and hence that the employer can perfectly well afford to pay the min wage or above. Or, 2, claim the employee is genuinely not much use, in which the case the employee is no longer allowed to stay with the employer concerned.
The above is rather a bureaucratic solution, but it could be the least bad solution.
I realise wages are an imperfect market, M, but it's not the technicalities I'm on about. If we are so badly off now that the universally beneficial aspects of state intervention can no longer be afforded, then the market should be left alone to sort things out.
It's Labour's own fault; they went too far, and let Brown go too far.
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