Your lead story (The great wages crash, 30 January), about a finding by the Institute for Fiscal Studies that young workers in the UK’s private sector are among the biggest victims of falling living standards, should not surprise anyone familiar with an old economic finding that real wages don’t rise in a sector facing an unlimited supply of labour. In recent months, those of us who worry greatly about the unbalanced economic growth that government policies here have given rise to have been told repeatedly on the pages of the Guardian that unrestricted immigration from within the EU to the lower rungs of the service industry imposes no cost to our economy. To question it has been deemed a “rightwing” position. The caricature serves the interest of the wealthy because we like our lattes to be served by energetic workers from the EU, employed at rock-bottom wages. But a systematic policy of pampering the wealthy, be they domestic or foreign, allied to a callous disregard of the interest of our own young, has led to the economic polarisation we see today. No amount of “left” versus “right” rhetoric should allow us to duck the question of whether we care about our young and their futures.
Partha Dasgupta
Frank Ramsey professor emeritus of economics, University of Cambridge
• It’s sad that, in your report, a Treasury spokesman should obfuscate the full truth about low wages. Although the tax threshold has indeed been raised, this does not help those earning less than this. And although council tax has been frozen, it has been introduced as a new charge on those in receipt of benefits. Similarly, the raising of the VAT rate is regressive in impact, so that cumulatively these and other measures have actually deliberately made the poor poorer. And above all this, the austerity measures, by stamping out demand, have prolonged the recovery.
Michael Miller
Sheffield
