Sixty billion pounds has been spent on various schemes to encourage employment take-up since 1997. Even more goes out on welfare 'incapacity' benefits. The proposals for reforming this disaster are ineffective and unattractive. The plan is to reassess recipients and ensure that they really are incapable of working. Those on other kinds of benefit may be required to work for their dole, and prove themselves available for employment by signing on every day thus demonstrating under constant monitoring that they are not working in the grey and black economies.
This is supervised poverty. What an inglorious end to Labour as the party of the working people.
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And how much will it cost to watch them, to supervise the watchers, to collate the data and report to the Ministry etc?
The proposals for reforming this disaster are ineffective and unattractive
Do you think ? A distinct improvement on what we had I would have said and entirely driven by the need to neutralise the Conservative Policy announced in January.
The different ways the Purnell presented his case to the Mail and to the Guardina were hilarious.
This is all inspired by the Wisconsin project and was one of the Blair directions dropped by Loser and now hastily exhumed.
Hope you are well HG.
Oh HG, but just think how clean the streets will be!?
It is necessary and good (to borrow a phrase from New Labour) to recognise just how enormous were the shifts in the economy in the 70s and 80s. Moving from mining and heavy industry ,from engineering and mass production, into services, manufacturing and research fields was as a change on the scale of the changes in the early 1800s into coal, iron, ship building, and heavy engineering from agriculture and textiles.
There was always going to be a great body of working people who would not find a place in the new economy, and the earlier solution of mass emigration was not open to them, indeed they were exposed to large-scale immigration from even poorer work-seekers. Unfortunately the response to this was to build a client, regional-based, politically skewed population that was renewed in the next generations by a repellent and relentlessly pressed home ideology that this was all the (Consevative) government's 'fault'.
No-one wanted the horrors of industrialisation revisited, and they were not. But the change could have been managed without the vituperation, the waste of resources and time and the creation of generations of tax and welfare dependents. And the growth of an authoritarian mindset coupled with the installation of a dehumanising regime intent on the preservation of its control of others.
Thank you, N, I am very well and have missed you popping in.
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