Lord Freud was right; he should not have been forced to apologise; and should not resign
David Green, 17 October 2014
Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary Rachel Reeves has said that it is ‘unacceptable’ for Lord Freud to remain in his post after he answered a question about the impact of the minimum wage on disabled people. He was recorded as saying: ‘There is a group – and I know exactly who you mean – where actually, as you say, they’re not worth the full wage and actually I’m going to go and think about that particular issue, whether there is something we can do nationally.’
The word ‘worth’ has been seized on. The disability lobby has deliberately confused the overall worth of a person with their market value to an employer. We are all moral equals, but we do not all have equal market value to an employer.
The whole point of a minimum wage is to fix wages above the market prices that would otherwise emerge. In a competitive market for labour people who are not able to find an employer willing to pay them the minimum wage will inevitably be unemployed. We have made a political decision to accept this fact.
Lord Freud has been denounced for recognising what every objective observer knows to be true. Worse still he has been attacked for being drawn into a discussion about the most humane way of providing the dignity of work for people who have been made unemployable by the minimum wage. Is there a case for allowing employers to pay the market price for the services of people who are disabled and for the state to top it up to the minimum wage? If so, would some unscrupulous employers start paying more people less than the minimum wage in order to attract state subsidies? Lord Freud did not answer the question; he just discussed it. And there is nothing wrong in that.
The deeper problem is the confusion of our human identity with the many roles we play. We are each a person with various capabilities and a capacity for moral judgement. We each play a variety of roles: worker, parent, child, patient, customer, neighbour and many more. Even when work is the primary role it is never the whole identity of any one individual.
The politics of identity practised by the disability lobby deliberately confuses our worth as a human being with our market value to an employer. Our bosses don’t know anything about our worth as humans; they only make a narrow decision about our market value in a workplace. It suits disability activists to paint themselves as victims, even when they are not.
As it happens I doubt whether subsidising market wages below the minimum wage could be made to work, but Lord Freud should not have been denounced for discussing the idea in answer to a question.