Tag: Economics

Rethinking The Minimum Wage: The need for a Basic Living Standard

Today, the establishment offers us ‘The Minimum Wage’ and ‘The Living Wage’.

However, neither the Minimum Wage nor the Living Wage are genuinely representative of what it costs a single person to live independently, without having to rely upon Benefits or Welfare, Charity such as Food Banks, or going into Debt of some kind, in order to meet the real Cost of Living or threshold for independent living.

The reality that government subsidises low wages through income support, housing benefits, tax relief is overlooked by many, because the ‘official’ or ‘establishment’ narrative is that if you received the Minimum Wage or its equivalent, you have enough money to live.

Sadly, the many truths that surround life experience where there is lack, reliance upon others and a culture that looks down upon anyone who needs financial help in ways that too often suggest guilt is overlooked by the very people who should know better.

Every Person should have the ability to live and support themselves independently in the lowest paid work, irrespective of background, qualifications, experience or any factor that could be used to excuse some form of prejudice on the part of others.

Creating and implementing A Basic Living Standard would provide an equal financial or material footing for Every Person is both a necessary and required foundation for the Just, Balanced and Fair society, that we all deserve.

The Basic Living Standard

“Adults, working a full working week in any job at any level, must be able to feed, house, clothe and provide adequately for their own transport needs, whilst providing basic necessities such as communication themselves, without the need for credit, loans, benefits or third-party support of any kind.”

To work effectively and as it should, The Basic Living Standard would become the key requirement of all business and economic activities.

Every economic activity and transaction would be made and progressed with The Basic Living Standard in mind and no economic activity would exist that does not place People and the impact and consequence to People at its core.

The Basic Living Standard will help flip the value set across society and address every wider social problem that society faces, leaving the Public Sector to take care of those who have genuine problems that have not been caused by societal conditioning or environmental factors, as it always should.

The Basic Living Standard could either be adopted as a voluntary change, or as the way to move forward, should the unthinkable happen and we experience some kind of system collapse, where a new form of governance is finally accepted as being essential for change.

The Basic Living Standard Explained_Poster_PDF_Vers2b_24Oct25Download

The Contemporary Politicians Dilemma

You’ve just been elected as an MP and your political group or party holds the majority of Seats in Parliament.

Your group or party now has power over everything. Can change anything. Can be anything. Can do everything that you all promised the people who voted for you when you were successfully elected, just the other day.

In the briefings and within the advice that was never available to you and your political colleagues before the election took place, you are told very clearly, that everything the last government was actually doing, no matter what they were saying publicly, was the only way that they were able to keep government and the public sector running.

The alternative was that the economy, quickly followed by the government and then all public services would simply collapse.

As you catch your breath, you realise that all the things that have been hurting people, whether it was the cost-of-living crisis, inflation, house building, immigration, the benefits crisis or many other of the other social issues you have promised to tackle are all connected to the economy.

You now understand that everything in The System relates to money and specifically to ‘growth’ and the GDP that sits behind it in some way.

People of all kinds, all ages and all backgrounds are struggling.

You saw it only too well as you campaigned before the election was held. Pain and suffering was lurking in just about every direction that you looked.

You are told that you can keep the economy running. Just as long as you keep finding credible reasons to spend.

‘Credible’ reasons are what you need to build and maintain the narrative that justifies the reason to borrow and print money. So that ‘growth’ hides all of the problems, and the money you have created keeps flowing in all the directions that The System demands that it should.

However, there is a cost.

The cost of ‘keeping the economy going’ will be that you cannot step back or away from any policy that already exists, no matter how you sell it to the public.

This will mean there will need to be a growing number of people within the population and reasons to spend on all the goods and services that they will need, so that you can justify spending more and more of that created money, and that money can keep being passed between all the different parts of the economy that provide goods and services to meet the basic needs of people.

This is the way that the problem and more importantly the size of that problem, can continue to be hidden from view.

You know what you promised. You know what you said.

You were going to be ‘The difference’, ‘The change’ and you are now faced with making things worse instead.

The question you now ask yourself; ‘Is it better just to keep managing things, in a state of ongoing but ‘managed decline’, or do you do the right thing and deliver on your promises, knowing that the immediate after effect is likely to be a complete ‘System Collapse’, that is probably now inevitable, but could be delayed if you ‘keep the plates spinning’ instead?

What would you do, if this was you…?

The Contemporary Politicians Dilemma PDF_Vers1_5Sep25Download

The reality of today’s Minimum Wage: The baseline of our Economic Crisis

The biggest elephant in this economic room and probably the reason why Kier Starmer was falling over himself over the use of the term and definition of ‘working people’, is there is a growing underclass of the population who cannot earn enough money to pay for the basic essentials that they need to live each week or month.

The ‘Minimum Wage’ – even at the £12.21 it is expected to reach in April 2025, will not meet the basic cost of living.

The Minimum Wage is not enough for a single person, living alone, to be able to meet all of their basic or essential needs and expenses, without having financial help, receiving benefits of some kind, getting support from a charity like a Food Bank, or by going into debt.

In October 2023, I calculated that the real hourly rate that a single person would need to receive for a 40-hour working week would be £14.00 per hour – and that figure will certainly have grown in the year that has passed since.

The Politicians who do know and understand this – and please be under no illusion that those at Cabinet Level really should know what it really costs to live, also know that if they were to openly and publicly recognise that the National Minimum Wage isn’t anywhere near enough for a single adult who is living alone to live on, they would then be required to act.

Acting would require an immediate uplift of the Minimum Wage to a figure that is today likely to be around £15.00 per hour.

However, whilst the truth that this economic model can only make some rich by making many poor cannot be ignored, the imposition of a genuine Minimum Wage overnight would have immediate knock-on effects for everything and effectively bring the entire economy to a halt. For no better reason than the economic model that we currently have can only exist and function by exploiting people in this way.

When asked, most people who understand how business and money works will recognise that there is something very wrong with the way this economic model works. But will inevitably return to the response ‘It’s just the way it is’ and ‘Nothing can be done about it’.

This false position of inevitability or that it is impossible to change would be fine, were it not the fact that the people taking this position are typically not those being affected by it.