George Eaton

Boris Johnson’s promise of “a high-wage economy” has become a cruel joke

Far from encouraging workers to seek higher pay, the government is now telling them to accept lower pay.

Cast your mind back, if you can, to last year’s Conservative conference. A pre-partygate Boris Johnson was riding high and eyeing another decade in power. One of the promises he made, in an apparent break with free-market orthodoxy, was to forge a “high-wage economy”.

“We are embarking now on a change of direction that has been long overdue in the UK economy,” Johnson declared. “We are not going back to the same old broken model with low wages, low growth, low skills and low productivity.”