Parliamentary reporter @TrinderMatt

CALLS for a £10 minimum wage are “desperately outdated,” Labour MP Andy McDonald told Unite’s policy conference in Liverpool today.

Addressing the union’s delegates, the former shadow employment secretary said the demand — currently being made by Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer — was “over half a decade old” and inadequate after the great sacrifices workers have made during the Covid-19 pandemic.

It was his first major speech since resigning from the shadow cabinet during last month’s Labour conference, citing the leadership’s refusal to back a statutory minimum of at least £15 per hour, a rate backed by Labour delegates as part of a Unite motion on worker’s rights.

Mr McDonald slammed those who “do not have greater ambition than poverty wages.”

The Middlesbrough MP said: “After many months of a pandemic when we had made commitments to stand by working people, I simply could not look those same workers in the eye and tell them they are not worth a wage that is enough to live on.

“It ought to be a basic point of principle for our movement that we fight for workers to be paid enough to raise them out of poverty and have a decent standard of living free from financial insecurity.

“Yet, thanks to this government and the ruling class that it represents, with their singular focus on extracting the value created by working people, far too many are currently denied the basic necessities and rights that they should be entitled to.”

Mr McDonald reiterated demands for a new deal for working people, which he said would allow workers to “live fully flourishing lives, not simply survive.”

He also called for protections against unfair dismissal, a single status of “worker” for all but the genuinely self-employed, proper sick pay and the repeal of anti-trade union legislation.