WHAT MIGHT WE EXPECT FROM RACHEL REEVES?

Labour, according to a piece in the Guardian, wants to reduce the number of food banks in the UK if it comes to power. Rachel Reeves, or as we call her, Labour’s Iain Duncan Smith, says that their use is a sign of a failed Welfare State.

Well, what can we say? Whoops of joy from us at Munguin’s Republic. A real radical government that would like to see the use of food banks reduced!

There are, rather surprisingly in our opinion, no government statistics on the use of food banks, but the Trussell Trust says that 913,138 people used them in 2013-2014. And there are other food banks providers, besides Trussel.

What other changes could we expect from reeves? She would, she says, immediately instruct Jobcentre staff that they would not be rewarded for the numbers of sanctions they distribute. Mr Duncan Smith has always denied that staff are currently rewarded for this, so unless he is lying, I can’t see that it will make much difference. The management of the job centres need to get cost reductions somehow.

Just in case you thought she was being all soft and human about it, Reeves says: “We are not the party of people on benefits. We don’t want to be seen, and we’re not, the party to represent those who are out of work,”  “Labour are a party of working people, formed for and by working people.”

So there you go. Straight from the horse’s mouth and echoing the sentiments of hard right winger, Tom Harris, if you are out of work, Labour is not the party for you. Rachel, of course, may never have met an ordinary person in her life, having attended a posh girls school and gone up to Oxford for her education.

She famously said that Labour would be tougher than the Tories when it came to cutting the Social Security bill so how are they going to be harder and softer at the same time?

As you might expect in the current climate, EU citizens would lose entitlement to benefits for the first two years in the UK. Although, as most EU citizens in the UK work, it’s unlikely that that will make a huge difference, and it may have a reciprocal effect on UK citizens living in the EU. 

She would maintain the benefit cap brought in by the Tories with the intention of reducing it, everywhere except London. So, that's tough if you live in another area with high rents and costs.

She has also indicated that she would legislate to remove the bedroom tax from the statute book, but failed to make it clear whether this was the bedroom tax that the Tories introduced for social housing, or the one that Labour introduced for privately rented accommodation.

She has also said that she would stop the roll out of the Universal Credit fiasco that Iain Duncan Smith has overseen, and hold a review of the policy.

Essentially, it seems, she agrees with the principles in IDS's scheme, but is somewhat dubious about whether or not it can be delivered and whether they can get the notoriously dodgy IT to actually work. 

Her aim is to cut the “welfare” bill by £8 billion, but when she outlines how she intends to meet that target her ideas descend into the realms of fantasy.

 “The big savings to be had are by tackling the root causes of the benefits bill. If every young person who can work is working and if people are paid a wage that they can afford to live on, so they don’t have to draw down on housing benefit and tax credit, then that’s going to save a lot more money than all the talk in the world about shirkers and scroungers.”

Ahhhh Rachel. Where do we start? 

Things must be very simple in your rose coloured, perfect world of Westminster. 

The trouble is that many young people can’t find work, because they are woefully under qualified, unsuited to the kind of work that is available or blighted by illness, addiction or criminal records. Employers are fussy about these things.

Employers are also fussy about paying bigger wages. They have been used to getting away with paying the minimum wage of £6.50*, well under the living wage of £9.15 in London and £7.85 elsewhere. (Although this is clearly ridiculous, as the cost of living is not universal across the rest of the union.) As Labour's own goal is a minimum wage of £8 by 2020, I seeing a disjunct there.

Young people of course are not the only ones who have a problem getting work. Older people often find that they are barriers to work too. Lack of IT skills, lack of stamina, out of date attitudes, lack of street cred in a young person's world. (Seriously, which clothes shop is employing 55 year olds to sell kids fashions? Employers are fussy about this too. It's called image!)

Often when people do find a job, the work is badly paid, or intermittent, with zero hour contracts, on which they cannot afford to live and this makes them dependent on benefits. In many cases they earn less per week than their rent and council tax. 

Because of the lack of council housing, many are forced into privately rented accommodation. And thanks to the mad system, introduced by Labour, of setting an area maximum rent allowance, paid without question or inspection of the property, many of the rents set by these private landlords for slum property, are astronomical.

There seems to me no doubt that a preposterously low minimum wage, and ridiculously low expectation of any increase in it must be accompanied by some very serious control of rents, and a massive building programme of REALLY affordable rented accommodation in the public sector all over the union.

You can’t feel but feel that Rachel has a lot to learn before she takes up a job of this magnitude.

(*Minimum wage will raise to £6.70 in October. It is currently €145 per month, less than minimum wage in France and €165 less than in the Republic of Ireland.)

WHY DOES ANYONE BELIEVE ANYTHING THAT COMES FROM THE DWP?

Cameron has been making much of the dramatic fall in unemployment, bragging about it like he has brought it about. 

But if one jobcentre can take 2,700 off its books in one month by sanctioning for minor misdemeanors, and get away with it, then surely we can wipe out unemployment, if not overnight, then at least within a couple of months. 

Simply sanction everyone for some perceived fault. Then Iain Duncan Smith can add that to his list of lies.

Having worked at jobcentre, I know that sometimes sanctions have to be used, but, in the absence of enough suitable jobs, and with tight targets to meet, there are reports of people being sanctioned for being a few minutes late from an appointment, although they are clearly dependent on unreliable privately-owned public transport; people being sanctioned for not having enough money on their cell phones to phone for jobs; people losing money because they got two interviews on the same day, at the same time, and failed to turn up for one of them; people being sanctioned because they moved home and were transferred to another jobcentre, and their details got lost in the system. 

Is it too much to ask that the DWP treat people like human beings?

GOOD NEWS FOR SCOTLAND ON UNEMPLOYMENT

Good news for Scotland on the unemployment front is contained in the UK figures for the three months from February to April.

Unemployment in the country dropped by an amazing 6,000.

The figures also show that actual employment increased by 47,000 in the 3 months, that the number of people claiming JSA dropped by 700 over the period, and that youth unemployment dropped by 6.1% over the last year.

These figures compare well with the UK figures for the same period.

Unemployment in the UK overall is down by 5,000 (meaning that it has increased elsewhere in the UK: a fact that the BBC somehow neglected to mention).

The news on youth unemployment is particularly encouraging. The UK figure is 19.5%, so the figure of 15.2% in Scotland is extremely good news.

As the article goes on to say, our government has announced an investment of £88 million in work and support for small businesses. The money has the potential to create 10,000 youth jobs in the country.

We have a long way to go, but at least we can say ...so much for all the scare stories from Osborne and his like about how the fear of uncertainty would blight the Scottish economy. Like on so many other issues, it seems he was either ill informed, or lying.

For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath*

Rumour, and the Sunday Telegraph have it that one way that the Tories are going to save money, having ditched the Liberals idea of a Mansion Tax along with most other Liberal policies, is they will make the poor pay even more.

Yep, that's it. The bankers and the government drop the country into a stinking cesspit of debt and the government responds by cutting people's benefits to make up the deficit.

So the latest proposal is that the government will dock 10% of JSA after 6 months of unemployment and then a further 10% after a year.

Those under 25 currently receive £56.25 a week under Jobseeker’s Allowance. This rises to £71.00 a week for the over 25s and £111.45 for couples.

So, after 6 months the under 25 year old would lose £5.62, and after a year £11.24. That would mean that they would be down to £45.01 a week to live on. That doesn't go far when a loaf of ordinary white bread in Asda costs £1.20; the bus fare into the town around £2 and 6 apples £1.80.

If you add this reduction to the already proposed freeze for 2 years of all benefits, while inflation (officially at 2.5%), is in reality far far higher...gas and electricity are set to increase by around 10% for example, you are looking at complete misery at the very least and starvation, food banks and death at the worst.

You might think that people should be able to get a job within 6 months, but this depends hugely on a variety of factors like where you live, how old you are, what kind of skills or experience you have, how your health is, if you have any disability, if you are overweight or, sometimes, whether you are good looking or plain. Things are tough out there. The jobs pages in local paper which used to be worthy of a pull out supplement, now barely fill a column.

One comment on the Telegraph site impressed me. I think it is worth repeating here:

"I've got 30 years experience as a Board-level PA/Executive Assistant. Last year, I was made redundant and I have been out of work for almost exactly a year.  I have applied for literally hundreds of jobs. At the last interview I went to, I made some enquiries about the post: for a 20 hour a week job, they had over 800 applicants. 

"Then I was sent on the "Mandatory Work Placement Scheme", run by a company whose Chief Executive draws a salary of £3.5million, according to information in the public domain.   We were summoned by letter to the HQ of the company, and told that we would be starting "work" the next day - no notice, no time to organise childcare, no nothing.  In my batch of people there were 40 people; all of us were being sent to "work" in charity shops.  This is despite a) us being told in the letter that our skills and experience would be looked at and "a placement appropriate to your experience" found, b) there being white collar workers, single mums, scaffolders, IT professionals, a butcher and an ex-animator /film maker in the group.

"Three of us were sent to a small local charity shop - three of us!  to do 30 hours a week for a month.  We had been told that "since the A4E problems (a euphemism if ever I heard one), placements could not be made in commercial companies.  The shop already had its full complement of volunteer staff, so we were basically in the way.  The shop manager had to find 90 hours' worth of work for us three that month.  The existing volunteers hated us because we were taking over their roles - some of them were told not to come in for a month - so even though they were volunteers, we were putting them "out of work" for a while.

"I made some new friends, but I didn't pick up any transferrable skills to get me another job in my particular field.  And A4E made approx £350 out of the government for each of us - by phoning a charity shop and getting us a temporary "job" there.  And when things went wrong, A4E were nowhere to be found.

"And on top of working there 30 hours a week for a month, I was still expected to find the time and energy to continue looking for a proper job.  30 hours a week to receive standard JSA benefits works out at appreciably under the National Minimum Wage.

"An acquaintance of mine (retired) announced recently that she had been thinking of taking a part time volunteer post at her local charity shop to give her something to do a couple of mornings a week but was turned down because the charity shop had taken on Mandatory Work Placement people - of which there would be a constant, ever changing stream, so there were no voluntary jobs there for the foreseeable future. 

"People think that the unemployed should work for their benefits. I don't see Messrs Cameron and Osborne offering to do without their salary to help the economy." 

Basingstoke67

PS: I also enjoyed this comment from another contributor:

How about anyone found to have evaded tax for over a year gets to work in the community and get a 20% increase in their tax liability?

*Matthew 13:12

"Political Betting" is one of these rather cliquey blogs on which there is absolutely no point in posting if you don't belong: I don't the latter, so I don't the former.  Their blog is run by some old guy who goes by the name of Mike Smithson. I've kept his title on the blog list because occasionally I like to pop over and read the comments, which always seem to me to be a competition in bitchiness.  Well, that's always good for a laugh, isn't it? Smithson appears, rather like Admin the Numpty at the twee Labour "Hame", to dislike criticism, but where Admin operates a policy of disallowing comments he doesn't like, Smithson simply bars people who make comments which are disagreeable to him. As they now appear to have barred everyone who ever spoke up for the Nationalist cause, I have decided that they no longer serve any purpose on Munguin's Republic, so, I'm taking them off the blog roll, if no one minds.

Poor old Cameron. He goes all the way to the USA, gets a 19 gun salute, gets to ride on the super cool presidential plane Air Force One, and is relegated to the second half of the 6 o'clock news on the BBC by that devastating accident in Switzerland, and the fact that unemployment is up again. Now he's been knocked off the headlines in the Telegraph by the attempt on the life of the American Defence Secretary who was visiting Afghanistan today. And still Cameron makes a speech saying that what our troops are doing in Afghanistan will make the UK safer. We know he is out of touch, but by that much?


Talking of Cameron, does any know if they teach table manners at Eton? I suspect they do. Maybe he just thought he was being one of the guys or something, but when it got round to him on the news, the BBC showed him at  a, no sorry, THE baseball game, which the President was NOT going to miss for anyone, getting "tore in", as we say in Dundee, to some burger, or hot dog, or some other item of American cuisine. I know he has a big mouth but I was wondering just how much more he could cram into it. Wouldn't it be embarrassing for us, I thought, if he choked to death. But all was well, he didn't, so threat of embarrassment over.

Talking about embarrassment, although not for Scotland, ?Sir? Dave Richards (they hand them out to anyone with a few bob these days), chairman of the English Premier League made a cringer of a speech accusing Fifa and Uefa of stealing football from the English... shortly before he fell into a pond, at a gala dinner in Doha. Well, there's always one, isn't there? 


The joy with which employment ministers met the 'slowing of the increase in the upward rate of unemployment', was perhaps a little over optimistic. They expressed themselves sure that this was sign that the UK had turned a corner: George Osborne's policies were after all working. (Yeah right, and I'm Harry Potter.) They were positively gleeful that public sector redundancies, at 37,000, were more than matched by private sector jobs created at 45,000 in the last three months of 2011. But only a few hours later, I read that, in the same period, the number of people working part time, because they couldn't find full time work rose by a massive 110,000. It may be marginally better than being unemployed, but if you need a full time job, only having a part time one (sometimes with no guaranteed hours) is plain miserable.  No things aren't getting any better, but at least ministers can make the figures look that way, if they feel like it.

如此您有所有工作，请？Assim você tem todos os trabalhos, por favor?

There are moans aplenty about “foreigners coming over here and taking our jobs”, but the lack of prospects in the UK is starting to push young people to consider moving abroad and taking someone else’s jobs!

In a survey of 1,982 people conducted by Student Currency Exchange, more than half of 18 to 25-year-olds said they were seriously considering emigrating to Australia, Canada or even China. And nearly two-thirds of those surveyed said that they had given it some thought.

Job prospects in the UK are at their worst for 17 years. Youth unemployment at its highest-ever levels, with around a million 16-24 year olds looking for work. The trend is upward and with no real prospects of an improvement in the foreseeable future, and ready availability of information on prospects elsewhere, young people with good qualifications can, more easily than at any time in the past, get work abroad.

It makes sense to go where there are jobs, and both Canada and Australia seem to have been little touched by the banking madness of the last few years which has so bankrupted our economies. China and India, of course, are booming and their industries are looking for clever and well educated people.

A lack of language skills has always held Brits back from taking opportunities anywhere but the English speaking countries, but now that the real money will be made in countries with other languages, Brits seem prepared to make the effort to learn.

South America is an economic growth area and people with knowledge of Spanish or, more particularly, Portuguese, have excellent opportunities to earn good money and enjoy a much better quality of life than they could expect here.

We must be aware of the fact that we have an ageing population (within a few years we will have more over 65s than under 15s), and that if our intelligent young people are emigrating for want of work in the UK, then we will have little hope of affecting a real and long lasting recovery. We simply won’t have the people to man it (or person it, if you want to be politically correct!)

It's down to George Osborne next week to make the economic conditions such that our intelligent youth don't desert us for a better future.

DOES THE GOVERNMENT KNOW WHAT'S GOING ON?

Yesterday the inflation figures were released. It surprised me to find that with the price of electricity going up by 6%, gas by 9%, with petrol galloping out of control, food prices going through the roof, transport costs up by 10%+, clothing up by 6%... the inflation figure managed to stay under 4%.

Odd you might think, but who am I to argue? I'm, er, sure the Treasury knows what it is doing...

So as surprised as I was to see such a low inflation figure given the pressures on my wallet, I was even more surprised to hear that the figures came as a shock to the government. Not because they were so low, but because they were so high!

Apart from wondering how the shops where Mr Osborne’s servants shop keep their prices down when “ordinary people’s” shops are putting prices up at a fair wallop, I was also a bit worried that the government was so unprepared for this. No one else is.

Then today I listened with amazement to a news item saying that the government was once again shocked at the rise in the unemployment figures, and I wondered if Mr Duncan-Smith had perhaps taken a longer than normal holiday in the past month. Every day I hear about companies shutting down or paying off. So why, I wonder, would it surprise the government that all these redundancies would result in more people being out of work? Am I missing something here, or don’t the two normally go hand in hand?

I do hear that manufacturing industry is soaring and I take great comfort in that. Mrs Thatcher seemed, for some reason, to despise manufacturing. Perhaps it was because that was where lay the industrial trades unions, comprising working class people who wanted their share of the pie, and whom she had pledged to obliterate.

If one didn’t have manufacturing, it followed that one wouldn’t have manufacturing trades unions. So she shut it all down so she could claim to have achieved her goal. 'Twas a bit tough on the rest of society, but Mrs Thatcher could be guaranteed to see only her own selfish ends.

Of course it could be that she, now mixing in circles of financial elite, had the upper working class – lower middle class snobbery about factory workers and dirty hands and decided that a country she “led” would have none of it. Or maybe a mixture.

We've seen some of the consequences of that "white collar" revolution over the years with mass unemployment, disintegration of society and the growing of a permanent underclass. Recently of course the lid blew off that side of the economy too. Given freedom to do what they wanted, it seems that financiers, people of Margaret's own circle, are every bit as irresponsible as the trades unionists from another time, just luckier in their outcomes.

Manufacturing's recovery, welcome though it may be, is based mainly on the fact that with interest rates at an historic all time low of 0.5%, the pound is worth very little (even against the Euro with all its problems), which makes our products cheap, if nothing else.

Unfortunately, of course, that only benefits those companies which are exporting. So those manufacturing for the domestic market are not benefiting.

Additionally, with inflation taking off, it will not be long before interest rates rise, probably quite steeply and rapidly, and this benefit will be lost...along with much else.

In the meantime, it would be nice if next time there is announcement of some figure or another, the government wasn’t 'gobsmacked' to hear it. Given the momentous proposals for change they are trying to push through, it might give us a little more confidence if we thought that they had some idea of what was going on on their watch.

Pics: (1) Don’t jump... oh well OK go on. (2) I’m just popping out for a paper. (3) The nightmare from hell. A visit to the uncaring, target driven, sneering, dirty, understaffed, unpleasant, smelly Jobcentre “plus”, although plus what exactly is a mystery to most. (4) Manufacturing: what the country needs; what it has always needed and always will and what some silly old woman got rid of.

THERE ARE TIMES FOR CUTS IN PUBLIC SPENDING: THIS IS NOT ONE OF THEM

The Herald today headlines the situation in North Lanarkshire where 2 000 job losses are anticipated due to cuts being enforced on Scotland from London.

It is important to make the distinction that the budget cuts are as a direct result of a smaller block grant from the UK to run Scotland’s affairs (as predicted by Mr Osborne), and not because the government in Scotland has any wish to see jobs go.

There are some frightening figures involved when the anticipated cuts are looked at across the whole of the country. Half of Scotland’s councils have announced job losses amounting to 13 000, but it anticipated that a further 20 000 are yet to be announced.

The sum of these, already announced and anticipated job losses is a frightening figure. And 33 000 is not the end of that.

33 000 more people on the dole with little chance of jobs means another 33 000 people not spending money in shops, pubs, council facilities, sporting fixtures, which will mean in turn that the people who provide retail, sporting and leisure facilities will also feel the pinch, and have to further reduce their established employment figures.

Added to this there are an additional number of Civil Service posts in Edinburgh and throughout the country which the government will reduce, and then there are posts which are controlled directly by the London government, delivering reserved functions. It is a frightening thought how many more people may be thrown on the dole scrap heap by these cuts.

But we need to remember too that job losses are only a part of the picture. A reduction of this size in staffing in councils and the civil service will mean a reduction in the quality of service we receive from these bodies.

The theory is that they should become leaner and meaner, and that the staff will simply step up to the plate and do the work of dismissed colleagues. Of course that won’t happen. Queues in council offices will be longer, telephones will go unanswered, and more errors will be made.

Roads will deteriorate, sporting and leisure facilities will close, children will have farther to go to school, and fewer police will be on the beat, despite the efforts of the government and the Tory opposition to increase their numbers.

Parks will be left uncared for, grass will not be cut, ponds will not be cleaned, graffiti will stay in place, roads will not be swept, and bins will be collected less frequently.

In these situations it does not take long for towns to deteriorate into eyesores.

Additionally it is anticipated that costs of services will have to rise. So best to save for your care when you get old, and for creation when you die...

We are going to be paying dearly for the excesses of bankers and the incompetence of the London governments over the years ...

Unfortunately for the country, at times like this the most competent people tend to look around the world for somewhere else to live.

I’m starting a Norwegian course shortly. These two may or may not be connected....

SO WHO IS GOING TO BRING 800,000 PRIVATE SECTOR JOBS TO SCOTLAND?

The Tories have promised to get people off Incapacity Benefit and JSA and into jobs.

They have also promised to drastically reduce the size of the civil service, presumably by sacking staff, and to increase the age at which men and women can retire.

This is a subject I’ve visited before on the blog, and I do so again because according to the Dundee Courier a new study by the GMB union shows that there are 650,600 people of working age in Scotland who are economically inactive and 175,200 people registered unemployed. But, as of this week, there are just 21,700 notified job vacancies across Scotland.

The Tory’s policies will increase unemployment by large numbers. Each year a certain number of people retire to be replaced by school or university leavers on the job market, but with the age for female retirement rising from 60 to 61, then 62 and by stages to 65 to make them at long last truly equal with men, there will be fewer people retiring and fewer vacancies to fill.

Then there are the civil service cuts that the Tories have promised. They will be swingeing; vast numbers of staff can be expected to go and in addition there will be the people who depended on these civil service personnel to spend their money in their shops, restaurants, gyms, hotels....etc. They will downsize too. And so the miserable cycle of unemployment will begin.

The Tories say that the private sector will supply the new jobs, but exactly how that is going to happen I’m not sure. Mrs Thatcher managed to created quite a number of jobs in finance and insurance, but ...well, the bottom has kinda fallen out of that market here, and in any case most of the existing or soon to be unemployed would, had they been capable, have taken that kind of job with big fat bonuses when they were in supply.

Where are the jobs going to be for the people who actually live in the country and aren’t some fairy tale dream that the politicians have created? You know, the ones that find reading and writing hard; the ones that can’t spell too well; the ones that speak with heavy regional accents and bad grammar; the ones that swear lots and punctuate with F***s rather than commas and semi-colons?

Currently in Dundee 5100 people were chasing 797 jobs and 20,300 people of working age were recorded as economically inactive. That’s around 25,000 people chasing 800 jobs (31 people for every job) and that’s before all the redundancies from councils and civil service.

And one of Dundee’s biggest private sector employers D C Thomson, the Courier’s publisher announced over 300 redundancies today.

So who will create these jobs? We might need around 800,000 of them across Scotland.

I’ve worked in the employment business for 10 years and more now and I can’t see foreign companies bringing manufacturing jobs here unless we bribe them with all manner of costly concessions, and allow them to employ eastern Europeans. For the life of me I can’t.

Getting Britain Back to Work: The Challenges that the Politicians Don't Know About

One of the biggest problems in trying to find work for people who are Long Term Unemployed is employability.

It’s awful easy for political parties to boast that they will get everyone back to work, but the politicians and their advisors who promise this never actually meet the people that they are supposedly going to get working.

I start with the premise that if you can work; you work. It’s not a choice (unless you can find yourself a rich partner). There should be no choosing a life on the dole. So you must work. That’s how the world works. We can surely all agree on that.

But then we come to the stumbling blocks. As I’ve said I’ve worked for 10+ years on a variety of projects with 15-16 year olds, 45+, with people wanting to return to work after illness, and on general programmes which include anyone unemployed.

In many of these projects I’ve worked with employers too and I’ve been shocked at the expectations on both sides. There is a lack of realism from employers as to what they can expect for, often, the minimum wage. On the other hand how little some people expect to do for their money and how much they expect when they offer so little by way of skills, is quite incredible. We need to bridge that credibility gap. Companies need to be encouraged to play a part in the society in which they operate, but looking to employ locals.

People of all ages who have been out of work for a while face real problems, especially when there are so many recently-redundant people, who are used to the disciplines of work, in the job market.

But quite apart from that we are faced with a mismatch of talents/abilities and skill demands. We used to be a manufacturing nation. There were in my own town, jute works employing thousands to do skilled, semi skilled and unskilled factory work. The same could be said of the engineering works and the boat yards, the jam, chocolate and frozen foods factories, the battery factories and the ones that made fridges and false teeth or printed newspapers...... Thousands and thousands of people worked in these jobs and on the farms that surrounded the town.

Now there is Michelin, which I guess employs only a few hundred people.

The people of the town haven’t really changed. Most of them still want, and feel they can do, that kind of job. They are uncomfortable in the call centres for Tesco, BT, Tax Office, Work and Pensions office. At the risk of being politically incorrect we stopped having the jobs, but we didn’t stop having the people who were at home doing them.

We have people of all ages who can’t read, write or count, and some who do not have the social skills for face to face work with customers, and, although stores provide, as Allan said, warehouse work, the numbers are tiny by comparison.

But there are many people who are unemployable for other reasons than skills mismatch. Put yourself in the place of an employer. Do you want the guy who is just out of prison; the mother with 5 kids; the man who clearly has a drink problem; the girl on a methadone programme; the painfully thin, ill looking girl; the grossly fat boy; the disabled person for whom they are going to have to do structural alterations; the person with the disfigurement, or the skin problem; the guy with the front teeth that have rotted; the person with so much debt that she’s made it clear that the wage is not going to be enough, or the lad with a worry about the Child Support Agency coming after him?

For sure Mr Duncan Smith will have problems getting these people into work. I’m available as an advisor... at a price Iain, if you’re reading this.

Top pic: Cox's Stack. Lochee's jute mill employed at one time 5000 people. The mill is now gone but the stack remains as reminder of more prosperous times for the suburb of Dundee. Jute workers were notoriously badly paid, so it wasn't the workers that were prosperous.

Getting Britain Back to Work. Is Iain Duncan Smith the Man for the Job?

Iain Duncan Smith has been handed the poison chalice that is the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP). He seems a reasonable choice for the job. Although being something of a catastrophe as leader of the party and, despite touted as being more right wing than Norman Tebbit, he seems to be a man with both a heart and a head.

He will need both.

The objective is to get people back to work. A hard task. Unemployment is rising, and will continue to do so as the results of the recession long after recovery starts. There are fewer jobs at lower salaries, with fewer hours, and ever more people are being thrown on to the dole by the government’s own plans to cut costs.

It will seem to IDS that just as he gets a few hundred back to work, some government department will pay off 4,000 and he’ll be even worse off than before.

Welfare to work is important: for everyone. The taxpayer shouldn’t have to maintain any more people than necessary, and the jobless must work for a living. It’s how life is. You work, you eat!

But at the same we have to be cautious. There are many reasons why people are not working, besides the fact that currently there are few jobs.

Much is made of the Eastern European influx to do work that Brits won’t do, as there was in the 50s and 60s (in England) of Windrush Caribbeans. People from ex-communist countries are imbued with the culture that you worked or you were thrown into prison. Good, some say, let’s do that here... but you need to remember that there, the state provided jobs for everyone. We can’t do that here.

One of our problems is a mismatch between what is needed and what people can do. We live in an increasingly technological age. Of the few jobs that are available, most require trained and skilled workers. We don’t have them. Until recently we have always had heavy factory work for guys, and we don’t any more. The failure in the DWP and its predecessors’ management is that they have failed to understand that. You just can’t take a lad who wants, and is equipped to spend his days lifting, digging, sweating over a heavy load, and put him in a callcentre.

Much is made of people’s apparent unwillingness to work, but many I’ve worked with would do anything to get a decent job. Employers though don’t want telesalesmen with heavy local accents, and no natural inclination for keyboard work. Within a generation typing has gone from being something girls do, to a job for everyone.

We need to look very carefully at what successive governments have done to help create this situation.

The closure of most of our manufacturing industry; the stopping of assistance for apprenticeships; the competition between privatized exam boards selling the easiest exams to schools so that they will be able to get the best results in the league tables; the league tables themselves resulting in those who will not shine in exams being discarded; the ‘university for all’ at any cost, producing graduates for whom there are no jobs, and who end up taking the callcentre/pub jobs that might have gone to the less educated.

This subject is far too large for a single post. I will return to some of the many reasons I have found why people can’t get work, even when there is work.

I’d appreciate hearing other people’s views on surely one of the most contentious of all government problems.

NADINE DORRIES PROVES THAT THE UNEMPLOYED NEED £114 A WEEK TO LIVE

I'VE ALWAYS had mixed feelings about politicians who take part in experiments involving living like ordinary people do.

In a way it does no harm for them to see the dilapidated housing, the poor public transport and the rotting infrastructure that is so much a part of millions of Britons’ lives. On the other hand, it can’t possibly give a real feeling of what it is like to live like that.

Sure, it will be unpleasant having to cope with living in a tower block for a week, of having to listen to next door’s music competing with downstairs’ telly blaring and upstairs’ baby screaming. It will be a real hardship going to the shops knowing that the £64.30 that you have in your pocket is going to have to last 7 days, and buying the very cheapest of everything from food to washing powder, from toothpaste to toilet paper. If it runs out before the next payment... you go without.

However, the “experimenter” can only get a taste of the misery and hopelessness that the real “job-seeker” lives with all the time. He or she knows that come the end of the experiment there is a comfortable centrally-heated house in a nice part of town, a first class meal in a nice restaurant, and possibly a couple of weeks in the sun to wash away all discomfort.

So I was less than impressed when I read about the Channel Four reality television show where 5 MPs live with families on a council estate. This is even less realistic than other attempts. They are surrounded all day by film crew....

But, after all that we have heard about MPs’ dishonesty over the last year, I would have thought that at least they would have learned a lesson and have tried not to cheat.

Wrong!

Nadine Dorries, MP for Mid Bedfordshire, after spending only one night on the project, broke the rules by hiding a £50 note down her bra. Of course she maintains, as we would expect, “no wrong doing”.

"I did have money in my bra," she admitted to the Telegraph. However, she added: "I was staying with children, and it being two weeks before Christmas, I wasn't going to leave my family without leaving some Christmas presents behind for the children, so I popped £50 where any self respecting female who knows how to get what she wants would – down my top.”

I don’t know how long she was going to be staying with the family, but I suspect that she would have left by Christmas. So, if she wanted to get something for the kids she could have done it after filming had finished.

Additionally, Mrs Norris, £50 between four kids and the mother equals fairly niggardly gifts from someone on your salary, if you don’t mind my saying so...No. I don’t believe you. You couldn’t face being in the situation of an unemployed person for one week without back up. You insulted the experiment; you insulted the poor people you were supposedly trying to find out about, and you cheated.

Well, you’re an MP so we shouldn’t be surprised about that. Your party leader might be interested to know that, as well as being a cheat, you have just admitted that you think that it is impossible to live on the money that the government pays the unemployed, of which there are rather a lot. I wonder if he will be happy to know that you think that they require an extra £50 a week to live on.

Stupid woman.

Is Dan Hannan right?

The Church of St Andrew Undershaft (1532) with the Swiss Re Building (the Gherkin) (2003) behind in St Mary Axe in the City of London

I was interested by this interview with Daniel Hannan. I thought it would be good to link to it here from Calling England’s blog.

Dan Hannan is an interesting man, with a formidable brain and I have respect for what he says. I particularly enjoyed his speech in the European Parliament when, in front of the Prime Minister, he told him like it was, or at least like he saw it with no holds barred. Can you imagine how angry and humiliated Brown must have been at that?

But, I would have to say first off that I think he was wrong in his first assertion that socialist government always ends up like this. It’s only in Britain it always ends like that. Social Democracy has been pretty successful elsewhere in Europe.

He’s right, of course, about the bankers in that they have us over a barrel. They can do whatever they want and we can't do a damned thing. If they break the banks again next year, then we will have to bail them out again. These banks are far too big to go bust, and we need the money that they generate. If we tax them they can go to Singapore, Tokyo, Switzerland or wherever, lock stock and barrel. They can, and according to some, they will. The City will be left with a load of very desirable property, heading for dereliction. And we have built an economy with huge dependence on Financial Services.

So, here we are over this barrel. I’m interested in how we pay off the money we had to borrow to bail them out the first times. I accept that my understanding of economics is as meagre and naive as was Mrs Thatcher’s when she told us that she would run the country like she ran her household. So, I’m just asking how we do it. The next government will have to face this problem, and I imagine that they will not be in favour of a massive tax on wealth earners.

The people who have none of this global freedom of movement are the poor and the moderately off.... They haven’t got us over a barrel. Are we going to tax them more, reduce their pensions? They are nice easy targets, and in apathetic Britain they will probably put up with it, turn their heating down, eat less, and stop buying treats and moan a lot.

If we cut public spending, then we will have more unemployment, a lot of the moderately off will join the poor. The “economically inactive” figure is already at around 8 million. That’s costing a huge amount in welfare benefits, but it also causes considerable social problems: drugs, drunkenness, crime, prostitution, derelict shopping and town centres. Look at what happened in the industrial belt of Scotland when heavy industry was closed down in the 80s. Where will we find 8 million plus private sector jobs?

WE MUST PROTECT THE YOUNG FROM THE SCOURGE OF UNEMPLOYMENT

Today’s unemployment figures are horrific.

A total of 2.5 million people are counted as unemployed and the number of people who are "economically inactive", ie on long term sickness benefits, looking after a relative (and saving nursing home places), or who have simply given up looking for work (many of them claiming nothing at all, living off their partners’ earnings) has reached an astonishing 21% of the available population, or 8 million souls. The number of jobs available, according to the Office for National Statistics is just over 420,000. So all those who are shouting for people to get off their lazy backsides and look for work should be aware that what they are demanding is an impossibility. There are an incredibly small number of jobs for an incredibly large number of “economically inactive” people.

That’s a proud record for Labour to have as it limps towards a General Election. And that’s certainly not as bad as it will get in the near future. The banks, for example, are promising further job losses, with over 8000 notified this week alone, but yet to take effect.

Mr Cameron (it's not unreasonable to assume that he will be the next Prime Minister) will face a mammoth task in his first few years of government, trying desperately to find work that people can apply for. Because no amount of talking tough about people on benefit can hide that fact that 8 million people out of work does not go readily into 420,000 vacancies. Tough talking in this case only really pleases the non thinker who believes that if the unwashed just got off their backsides and did a decent day’s work the all would be right with the world, but totally disregards how this might be brought about.

Mr Cameron’s economic team may have many ideas about how to get Britain working again but I’m not sure where he will get 7 ¾ million jobs from.

I’ve worked for years with people who are unemployed, both with Jobcentre and with private companies trying to help people into work, and I can tell you without doubt that unemployment is a tragedy. It ruins lives, tears families apart and causes untold misery. The great bulk of unemployed people want a job. Yes, some of them are unreasonable in their demands, and some of them wouldn’t work if their granny’s life depended on it, but that’s a very small proportion.

Huge numbers are unfit for work because of drug and drink habits, low educational attainments, low intellectual abilities, or a string of dependent children. There are other barriers to getting people into employment, but the biggest of all is the lack of jobs.

In my opinion, given the problems that will face Mr Cameron in trying to make good his promises, he must concentrate on the young. Youth unemployment, that of people between the ages of 16 and 24 is close to 1 million, a record high of nearly 20% of that age group.

It is this age group who must be found work. Of course my solutions wouldn’t be of interest to Mr Cameron, because they involve public expenditure. Finding work for people by building an infrastructure suitable to the 21st century, training young people in trades as they go, building railways, roads, public housing to replace the failed and totally unaffordable private housing, improving public transport and trying to bring Britain up to the standard in these things of other northern European countries is how I would create that employment. In itself it would soak up large numbers, who, instead of claiming benefits would have wages, which, being young, they would spend, creating more work. Yep, it’s a well worn idea. Nothing original there!

I know that won’t be Mr Cameron’s way, given his politics, and I respect that, but, what I know for sure is that he cannot allow a million young people to be idle. If he does they may well be idle for the rest of their lives.