Industrial Relations

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 3:49 pm on 18 February 1992.

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Photo of Michael Howard Michael Howard Secretary of State for Employment 3:49, 18 February 1992

Everyone can form his own view of the advertising campaign that NALGO is running, but it is difficult to see that it has more than one objective.

To complete my important point about public sector pay, have we been given any clue by the Labour party about how it will respond to this flood of wage claims from the public sector? No, we have not. The answer from Labour has been a deafening silence.

Then we have the Opposition's determination to introduce a national statutory minimum wage, reiterated only last Friday by the Member for Sedgefield. At least the hon. Gentleman's support for the minimum wage has had one happy result. It has an almost magical ability to bring people together. The leader of the CBI has found himself agreeing with the leader of one of our biggest trade unions. Economists at the university of Liverpool have found themselves at one with those noted monetarists at the Sunday People. Goldman Sachs is now in agreement with the famous free-marketeers at the Guardian. All are united in their criticism of the minimum wage, and are unanimous in disbelieving the claim of the Labour party that a minimum wage would have no impact on the level of unemployment.

Of course, the hon. Gentleman does not really believe that claim himself. That was why he came out with his famous formula, in a letter to The Independent last June: I have not accepted that the minimum wage will cost jobs … I have simply accepted that econometric models indicate a potential jobs impact". My right hon. Friend the Prime Minister desribed those as weasel words. My right hon. Friend was, as usual, being kind. It has often been said that one man's pay increase can be another man's redundancy notice. Under Blair's law, one person's pay increase would be another person's econometric jobs impact.

The truth of the matter is that independent study after independent study has confirmed the devastating job loss that would follow the introduction of the national statutory minimum wage. The hon. Gentleman has become desperate. Asked by Sir Robin Day last Friday if he was able to cite one independent report that confirmed his view, he dredged up a report published by the Institute of Public Policy Research.

A look at the report's inside cover tells us everything we need to know about the independence of that particular institute. Its chairman is the Labour party's education spokesman in another place. Its deputy director has worked as the personal press officer to the Labour party leader and indeed was a Labour candidate at the 1983 general election. One of its trustees was the head of the Downing street policy unit in the last Labour Government. Another was not only a member of Labour's policy review team but is on the party's national executive committee. The Institute of the Public Policy Research is about as independent as someone standing on the Kop at a Merseyside derby.