I often seem to be a bit behind the times with news stories and catch up a bit later which makes my blogs a few days behind, but still here goes. One story that did make me fairly angry was Conservative MP Philip Davies saying that people with learning difficulties should be allowed to work for less than the minimum wage to get a' foot on the ladder'. This I feel is just simply wrong.
I am usually against most market interventions by the Government, however I agree with the concept of the minimum wage. This is set as the minimum fair amount to pay someone for their time and effort for doing a job for you. I admit I am often overly critical of Labour, however introducing this one piece of legislation is something that they should be proud of.
By allowing exceptions to this as Philip is suggesting it is effectively saying that they don't believe that people whom have unfortunate conditions are as worth as much as those who don't. Just because someone is disabled or has some other difficulty does not mean that they will not be as productive as someone else. By implementing this suggestion it would lead to just pure discrimination with employers who would have previously been happy to pay the minimum trying to drive down the cost of any person who could fit into such category.
I do like when stories like this come out though, at least at the moment, the reason for that is that I can't see any sensible Prime Minister ever adopting this as policy and at the same time it helps to reinforce the differences that exist between the Liberal Democrats (the thought of this suggestion is unlikely to cross anyone's mind) and the Tories, who I'd be surprised if they didn't view lots of the public as second class citizens.
A good blog on this by Spidey.
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