Editor’s note: On September 30th the newish chancellor of the exchequer, Sajid Javid, said that he planned to raise Britain’s hourly minimum wage to £10.50, or two-thirds of median earnings, within five years. As we wrote earlier this year, Britain already has one of the world’s highest pay floors

T HE WORLD has gone minimum-wage mad. Left-wing Democrats in America support the “fight for $15” movement, whose goal is to double the federal wage floor. France’s gilets jaunes protesters are also fighting for a higher minimum—and Emmanuel Macron has acquiesced to their demands. Yet Britain is going madder than most. In 2015 the Conservative government rebranded the hourly minimum wage for the over-25s as the “national living wage”, and since then it has risen by 17%, twice as fast as median earnings. On April 1st it will rise again, to £8.21 ($10.84). Britain now has one of the world’s highest minimum wages—and the government thinks it could go a lot higher.

It is quite a turnaround for a country that for most of its modern history had no national minimum wage at all. Instead trade unions used to battle it out with employers to reach pay settlements. But the decline of Britain’s industrial base in the 1980s, and with it the power of unions, prompted politicians to worry that workers were being exploited. Although some on the left were sceptical about the idea of a national wage floor, arguing that the Labour Party should commit itself to resuscitating unions instead, Tony Blair promised one in his manifesto in 1997, and won. Britain introduced its minimum wage 20 years ago on April 1st.

Many economists predicted that chaos would follow. Patrick Minford of Cardiff University, who has since made a name for himself as the hardline Brexiteers’ favourite wonk, foresaw a huge jump in unemployment, as firms decided they could no longer afford to employ as many workers. At the time this newspaper was among those worrying that the imposition of a wage floor would hurt low-paid workers more than it helped them.

Yet these fears have not come to pass. Even as the rate for the over-25s has risen from 45% of median earnings in 1999 to what will soon be 59%, unemployment has fallen. At 3.9%, it is at its lowest in more than 40 years. The employment rate among working-age people, meanwhile, is at an all-time high. The gains for those at the bottom of the labour market have been real. In 2017 the proportion of employees receiving “low pay” (ie, hourly earnings below two-thirds of the national median) fell to its lowest level since 1982, according to the Resolution Foundation, a think-tank.

Flushed with success, the government wants to go further. In the spring statement, a half-yearly fiscal update, on March 13th Philip Hammond, the chancellor, said he had the “ultimate objective of ending low pay”. Most experts interpret that as meaning raising the minimum wage until it reaches two-thirds of median hourly earnings. Britain’s wage floor might thus become the highest in the rich world (see chart). The Labour opposition has promised a £10 minimum wage, which would put Britain even higher up the international league tables.