Nope. All spin. Too many people have been underpaid for far too long.
EDIT: New thread to continue this line of discussion:
https://www.railforums.co.uk/thread...-the-solution-to-the-issue-of-low-pay.233190/
Because wages do not form the full cost of providing a product or service, giving everyone a 10% pay rise doesn't cause 10% inflation. It does however cause
some inflation, so realigning wages would come with some pain.
That's why I think a better way to fix it is to make life more affordable, and the highest single cost to most people is housing, often taking as much as half of income, but certainly around a third for most people. So fix housing by building to rent for life, not for profit.
It might actually be worth using quantitative easing to "print" the money to do this. Building houses of the kind needed (a modern equivalent of the vast swathes of Victorian terraces, plus quality European style flats) is pretty cheap and easily arranged. I'm pro-HS2 so don't take this the wrong way, but you could build a
lot of houses for the cost of HS2. A quick Google suggests HS2 is costing £96bn (might have gone up since then, but let's use that). Building a house of that kind costs about £150K or so including land, maybe £100K for a flat, and there are ways to bring that down. So for our £96,000,000,000 we could build 640,000 houses. If we work on families of 4 (the average is slightly lower but it makes the maths easier) that's able to accommodate 2,560,000 people. That's not anywhere near the full population of about 70M, but it's a lot, and many want to buy anyway. So it'd make a huge difference.
And if we can afford HS2 (and we clearly can), we can afford the likes of that.
