Writing about current events and ‘live topics’ makes demands on the author, particularly when it comes to discerning what is likely to genuinely matter for the future. This concluding chapter hopes to establish some of the longer-term significance of the current struggle for higher minimum wages in the English-speaking or liberal welfare states. To do this, it makes sense to return to the typology presented in the Introduction (Table I.1) as a basis for evaluating trends and prospects for living wage politics. As elsewhere, English-speaking welfare states have continued to develop and, in some areas, expand as societies age and healthcare needs have grown more expensive. Governments have been reasonably responsive in part because the Anglo-American political right is now highly electorally dependent on older voters, as the UK general election of December 2019 further demonstrated.

Nevertheless, there is a strong sense, supported by equally strong evidence, that the labour market foundations of the liberal welfare states are insufficient to avoid deteriorating living standards for lowincome workers and their households and, increasingly, middleincome households. Although the English-speaking countries have developed a more active political ‘left’ over the past decade, there have not been many major breakthroughs where radical social democratic programmes have produced electoral majorities. The only possible exception is the Ardern Labour government of New Zealand (2017–), which has been the most socially reformist government of the liberal countries in the past decade at least at a national level. Given the strength of the political right in policy and electoral terms, the search for policies that have succeeded in dealing with labour market inequalities takes on even greater importance. Assessed on these pragmatic grounds, the forces promoting a ‘thin’ version of living wages policies, understood as relatively isolated measures to increase minimum wages, have made significant gains.

A thin policy of minimum wages

The Anglo-American model of deregulated labour markets, tough income support policies, and privatised social services has followed and, indeed, extended the path to post-industrialisation that Gösta Esping-Andersen (1999) mapped out two decades ago. Liberal economists and conservative politicians can – and do – point to ‘headline’ improvements that underscore the successes of the neoliberal route out of the dilemmas of rich industrial societies.