[Guinness]

So there is talk of the minimum wage rising from the current £6.31 to £7 an hour by October 2015.

In principle this is great news, but at what cost? I don't think this will hit big business, it will hit small to medium business HARD, and it will have a knock on effect on unemployment.

Lets give an extreme example, a supermarket buys milk as cheaply as it can, the dairy farmer has to pay his labourers to get this milk, he can afford £6.50 an hour and make a small profit for himself, suddenly he's told he has to pay £7 by law and he begins to make a small loss...he asks the supermarket for more, they say no, we need to keep our prices down..farmer goes out of business, labourers become unemployed, milk becomes scarce and the price for consumers goes up.

Alternatively the farmer fires his English labourers and pays an EU agency, they ship in EU labourers and pay them £10-£40 a day, he keeps his small profit and stays in business, the agency creams the rest and British labourers become unemployed.

Only losers are British low paid.

Surely if the government truly cared for the low paid they would lower their tax rate or increase the threshold before you have to pay tax.

As a rough guide £7-20% = £5.60...£6.31-10% = £5.68

You know, the use of EU agencies is becoming more and more appealing to small businesses particularly those in the service industry, (restaurants, hotels, care, transport etc..), especially when you factor in the cost of the upcoming automatic pension enrolment in 2014/15.

Rambling a bit now but these service industries dominate our economy...we mess with them at our peril!