So what’s the Tory response to soaring unemployment? Force the banks to lend to businesses, when such lending is at present flat or even negative, in order to preserve jobs or create new ones? Forget it. Launch a big public investment programme in housing and infrastructure, manufacturing, energy conservation, skills training, public services, or green jobs in industry? You must be joking. Cut taxes on the rich and hammer the poor? You’ve got it. The ‘new’ plan is being unveiled at the Tory conference tomorrow. Actually it’s virtually a carbon copy of New Deal plans already tested to destruction by New Labour – but let that pass. What matters is that almost everything about it is wrong. It won’t work, it’s class-ridden, it’s punitive, and it’s a privatising ramp at the expense of the unemployed.

It won’t work for several reasons. When unemployment is already 2.5 million and rising fact and job vacancies are less than a third of that and reducing fast, the mathematics – let alone the hard, practical realities of forcing people into often lousy jobs – shows how misguided this approach is. Obviously unemployment is so high, not because people are refusing jobs, but because there aren’t enough jobs going. Many people have applied for 50 or more jobs, have hardly got any interviews, and have constantly failed, but certainly not for want of trying. Even if the jobs were available, it would still require matching people to them both geographically and in terms of appropriate skills, and that would involve a very different approach.
It’s class-ridden when bankers, directors and senior managers are regularly reported to be sacked from highly-paid jobs and walk away with massive compensation for failure, yet disabled persons, single mothers and other longer-term jobless are to be penalised with benefit cuts if they don’t join privatised schemes which will earn large bounties for the private companies whilst pressurising people into often insecure, short-term and unsuitable jobs. As always with the Tories, it’s big rewards for the rich, and a hard kicking for the poor. It’s all been tried before by New Labour with quite disreputable consequences, including private companies pre-selecting from the unemployed those judged most likely to get work and rejecting those judged least likely, or doing deals with employers to take jobless persons short-term in order to get their bonuses for success (and improve the statistics for the scheme).
It’s also punitive and counter-productive. The job-seeker’s allowance at £60 a week (and shamefully only £35 a week for a youg person) is already far the lowest in Europe, only a sixth of the average wage in Britain, and scarcely half the level in the EU as a proportion of each country’s average wage. To force that level down lower still would be gratuitously vicious, and simply consolidate a demoralised under-class into a resentful, angry, bitter minority pressured into criminality.

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