Damien Willey (Kernow Damo) 🟢 🔴@KernowDamo
The most revealing thing in this post is that the worker’s need to live never appears as a real business cost.
VAT is real. Business rates are real. Energy bills are real. National Insurance is real. Rent is real. Beans, milk, cups, insurance, accountants, card fees, compliance, all real.
But the person making the coffee needing enough money to pay rent, eat, heat their home, travel to work and not rely on state top-ups? Suddenly that is “silly socialism”.
No. That is the cost of labour.
If your business model depends on paying people less than they need to live, then the state is not attacking your business by demanding higher wages. The state is currently propping your business up by letting taxpayers subsidise the gap between what you pay and what your staff need to survive.
That is the bit you cannot grasp, or do not want to grasp.
You say businesses fail because they are unprofitable. Fine. Businesses do fail. But “I can only make a profit if my workers stay poor” is not a serious moral defence of a business. It is a confession.
You say a cup of coffee has to absorb lots of costs. Yes. Welcome to business. But you are treating wages as the flexible bit that must always be squeezed so your business model survives. Nobody says, “If you can’t afford coffee beans, just get the taxpayer to provide the beans.” Nobody says, “If you can’t afford electricity, tell the staff to sit in the dark and call it prosperity.” But when the unaffordable item is the person being doing the work, suddenly everyone is supposed to become very mature and economically literate about poverty pay.
You also get VAT badly muddled. VAT-registered businesses can generally reclaim VAT on goods and services bought for business use, and the VAT registration threshold is turnover above £90,000. So this line about 20% VAT and inputs not being claimable is not the killer argument you think it is.
The bigger point is simpler. Workers do not get to tell landlords, supermarkets, energy firms and train companies that their boss has “compounding costs” so everyone must please wait quietly while they are paid less than a living wage. The worker’s bills have compounded too. Their rent has gone up. Their food has gone up. Their energy has gone up. Their council tax has gone up. Their travel has gone up. Funny how “proper economics” always discovers pressure when it lands on the owner, but turns into a lecture on realism when it lands on the staff.
The Green proposal is £15 an hour by April 2027. The real Living Wage is already £13.45 across the UK and £14.80 in London, calculated on what people need to live, not what a struggling employer would prefer to pay.
And even before that, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation found that a single working-age adult on the National Living Wage was nearly £7,000 short of the gross income needed for a minimum acceptable standard of living in 2025. So spare us the sob story that £15 is some wild Bolshevik fantasy. It is much closer to the actual cost of surviving than poverty pay dressed up as realism.
You say jobs will disappear. That is always the threat. Every time wages rise, the same people emerge to announce that civilisation will collapse because a cleaner, waiter, carer or barista might be able to pay a bill without choosing which meal to skip. Yet the Low Pay Commission’s latest judgement was that recent National Living Wage increases have not had a significant negative impact on employment.
That does not mean every business has no pressure. Of course small businesses are under pressure. Business rates need reform. Energy costs are brutal. Rents are often obscene. Big chains can absorb shocks that small independents cannot. But none of that proves workers should be the shock absorber. It proves the economy has been built so badly that the smallest businesses and the lowest-paid workers are set against each other while landlords, energy firms, banks and large corporations walk away with the margin.
Your welfare argument is even worse. Universal Credit is explicitly available to people who are working but on low incomes, and as earnings rise, Universal Credit is tapered down. That means low wages and public spending are already linked. The taxpayer is already helping cover the living costs that low-pay employers do not meet.
So when you ask “where does the money come from?”, one answer is: from the business that uses the labour.
That is not extremist. That is basic decency.
Profit is not ugly. Profit made by selling a product people want, paying suppliers properly, paying workers enough to live, and still having something left over is perfectly defensible. Profit made by underpaying staff and then expecting the public to top them up through benefits is not heroic enterprise. It is a business model leaning on the state while pretending to despise the state.
And this “read a book” routine is always funny from people whose entire economic theory seems to be: owners must be protected from hardship, workers must be exposed to it, and taxpayers must quietly make up the difference while being lectured about socialism.
A liveable wage is not a luxury add-on. It is the price of employing a human being.
If a business cannot pay rent, it cannot use the building. If it cannot pay suppliers, it cannot use the stock. If it cannot pay energy bills, it cannot keep the lights on. And if it cannot pay workers enough to live, it should not expect applause for creating jobs that keep people poor.
