Tory Kemi Badenoch says UK minimum wage is harming businesses

Basit Mahmood

Yesterday

Left Foot Forward

Badenoch is out of touch...

Tory leadership contender Kemi Badenoch has once again raised eyebrows with controversial remarks, this time claiming that the ‘minimum wage’ is harming businesses.

Badenoch, who hit the headlines only a few days ago for claiming that ‘maternity pay is excessive’, even though the UK has one of the lowest rates of maternity pay in the OECD, has also said that the minimum wage is also ‘overburdening businesses’ and causing some companies to close.

She made the comments during an hour-long question session on the main stage at the party’s conference in Birmingham.

The Financial Times reports Badenoch as saying: “There’s a café in my constituency that closed down, and the lady who owned it said, ‘I can’t afford to pay the wages any more. I can’t afford minimum wage. I can’t afford for my staff to go on [paid] maternity [leave]’.”

Badenoch continued: “We are overburdening businesses. We are overburdening them with regulation, with tax. People aren’t starting businesses any more because they’re too scared.”

Many will of course remember that the Tories made the same arguments when the last Labour government introduced the minimum wage, claiming incorrectly that it would lead to fewer jobs. Instead the minimum wage proved highly successful.

The Resolution Foundation found that ‘the introduction of the minimum wage 25 years ago is the single most successful economic policy in a generation, boosting the wages of millions of Britain’s lowest earners by up to £6,000 a year.’

Basit Mahmood is editor of Left Foot Forward