Justin Mullender

So the minimum wage just went up and the government is very proud of itself. Here is what they are not telling you. Your wage goes up. Your tax goes up. Your National Insurance goes up. HMRC takes its cut before you see a penny of that £1,500. Now your employer is paying more for every single person on their books. They are not absorbing that. Nobody absorbs that. So prices go up. The coffee you buy on the way to work costs more. The lunch you grab costs more. The haircut costs more. All of it costs more because the people serving you are now on higher wages too, and their employers did exactly the same thing. So you got a pay rise, and everything got more expensive at the same time. Almost like it cancelled out. If they actually wanted workers to keep more money they would cut their tax. That's it. That's the whole idea. But that would mean the government collecting less. So instead they raise the minimum wage, taking a cut on the way in and benefit from the price rises on the way out through VAT, and call it a historic day for working people.