Brexit Day (no 3) +11 - the "can this bunch really be serious" election

Iain Duncan Smith celebrating
announcement of the "national living wage"

The minimum wage has not been a big election issue so far, though Labour and the Conservatives have both made a pitch. But today came the announcement of new Living Wage rates. (For the purposes of this piece, and indeed for anything else I write, George Osborne's "national living wage" is the minimum wage rate for over-25s).

The current rates are therefore:

• Living Wage: £9.30 per hour (£10.75 in London)
• minimum wage 25+: £8.21
• 21+: £7.70
• 18+: £6.15
• 16+: £4.35
• apprentice: £3.90

Sajid Javid's proposal came at the Conservative conference in October - the minimum wage for the top band would rise to £10.50 by 2024, and the age for receiving this rate would fall to 21 by the same date. We haven't seen the 2019 manifesto yet, but what have the Tories said at previous elections?

• 2010: "we will keep the minimum wage"
• 2015: "take everyone earning less than £12,500 out of Income Tax altogether and pass a law to ensure we have a Tax-Free Minimum Wage in this country... the National Minimum Wage should rise to £6.70 this autumn, on course for a Minimum Wage that will be over £8 by the end of the decade... nobody working 30 hours on the Minimum Wage [should pay] Income Tax on what they earn"
• 2017: "A new Conservative government will continue to increase the National Living Wage to 60 per cent of median earnings by 2020 and then by the rate [of increase] of median earnings"

The Labour offer has come from John McDonnell - the minimum rate for all workers would be £10 per hour "immediately", then rise with living costs [not earnings?] so that "everybody over 16 years of age will be earning comfortably more than £10.50 an hour by 2024". And in previous years?

• 2010: "We will end for good the concept of a life on benefit by offering all those unemployed for more than two years work they must accept, and we will make work pay better with the goal of a minimum wage rising at least in line with average earnings and... a new £40-a-week Better Off in Work guarantee [and] the Low Pay Commission’s remit will have the goal of the National Minimum Wage rising at least in line with average earnings over the period to 2015"
• 2015: "raising the National Minimum Wage to more than £8 an hour by October 2019"
• 2017: "raise the Minimum Wage to the level of the Living Wage (expected to be at least £10 per hour by 2020) – for all workers aged 18 or over"

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Even Brexit Party Ltd promise they'll announce a full set of policies and present them in a "contract with the people" rather than a manifesto (though how such a contract could be enforced any better than a manifesto I have yet to hear) but we know what they want. The SNP, Lib Dems and others are making it primarily a Brexit election, along with Johnson's "Get Brexit Done" party and Corbyn's "Get Brexit Sorted" party, but  most of the time it's hard to work out what anybody's actually planning. Just waiting for the results... but (where have I heard this before?) they'll have very little time to do anything in Parliament by the time the election's done with.

One trade specialist is wondering: "Both Labour and Conservative are committing to completing a fundamental negotiation with our main trading partner next year. Yet in this election campaign so far dominated by triviality we have little idea of what they'll negotiate".

Emily Thornberry inspiring her colleagues

In interviews today, Emily Thornberry did outline what Labour has in mind and, as I said a few days ago, I find it hard to believe. "We want to be able to negotiate the sort of deal that we have been talking to the Europeans about for more than three years," she told us. "It is being in a customs union, in a single market, in a close alignment of rules and regulations." That menu surely can't be done under the EU27's current negotiating mandate - one of the Barnier mantras throughout has been that a permanent relationship can't be agreed under Article 50.

And yesterday Labour's campaign coordinator Andrew Gwynne told Andrew Marr that Labour would seek to strike "reciprocal agreements with the EU27 that allow British citizens to enjoy some of the freedoms that they will lose as a result of Brexit”, with Thornberry supplying further detail: "if a Labour government left the EU, the post-departure immigration policy would include controls on EU nationals, although those already in the UK would face no restrictions". All in three months? This means major amendment to the existing withdrawal agreement, which is all Barnier is allowed to negotiate, and - again - couldn't be done under Article 50.

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Today's main performance came from Brexit Party Ltd. At a campaign launch in Hartlepool, Richard Tice's newly adopted constituency, Farage told the world he'd been thinking (after complaints and even resignations by many of his - still - potential candidates arguing that putting up 600 candidates was daft), and he'd decided that they really shouldn't stand in seats which were won by Conservatives in 2017.

Having concluded, after careful study, that the new proposed withdrawal agreement "is not Brexit" and must be opposed across the country (except Northern Ireland), the proprietor saw a single tweet which converted him to this new strategy. Johnson spoke to him, and he was enlightened. We can get a "a free trade agreement on the model of a super Canada plus arrangement..." was the message. "... not based on any kind of political alignment... a fantastic new free trade agreement with the EU by the end of 2020. And we will not extend the transition period...".

And that did it for him. Such clarity of thought! I haven't come across anybody serious who thinks this is remotely possible, and the Tory-Brexity insistence that this mess is all about trade - in goods, not even services - and not also about the many other sorts of cooperation that this kind of Brexit would throw away (and which would certainly change that "plus"into a "minus") still doesn't seem to concern anybody much in the media.

I've seen an extreme Brexiter tonight on Twitter who was fully in agreement with Farage yesterday, and is now fully in agreement with new-Farage. It's easy!

Until the next rethink.