25 years of the National Minimum Wage

This week marked a quarter of a century since the Labour Party introduced the National Minimum Wage.

Having emerged from Labour’s 1983 Manifesto, the one joking referred to as the ‘longest suicide note in history’ due to its perceived radicalism, the policy remained a source of vigorous debate right through to its implementation.

Yet, under recent Conservative Chancellors they have attempted to claim credit for the policy through the adoption of measures such as the ‘National Living Wage’, not that it in any way tried to reflect the actual cost-of-living in the way Living Wage Foundation accreditation requires. Nonetheless, a recognition of the popularity of the policy and an attempt to suppress memories of the efforts the Conservatives went to in order to oppose the National Minimum Wage back in 1998.

They say that history repeats itself, first as comedy and then as farce, so here we are again with the Conservatives once again trying to claim that the measures set out in Labour’s New Deal for Working People are going to be some kind of economic calamity despite the fact other countries already have these rights and certainly perform far better than the UK currently does.

People deserve better than insecure and low paid employment. Labour is committed to changing the world of work for the better. The Conservatives appear to have learned nothing from the last 25 years. Maybe 25 years from now it will be the measures set out in the New Deal that they will be trying to adopt for their own.