While we offer real help, the Tories still believe in ‘sink or swim’

By James Purnell

Today’s unemployment figures are bad. We will never forget that behind the statistics that will be banded around, the media today are real people. We will not repeat the mistakes of the 80s and early 90s and will never say, like the Tories did, that unemployment is “a price worth paying.”

That is why as unemployment increases, Labour is increasing the help we give. Whenever big redundancies are announced we will be there to help people with our Rapid Response Service.

We are putting cash in to encourage employers to recruit and train people without jobs. We are stepping up the help we give to get people the training and support they need to get back to work. We are giving more help to pay the mortgage so that losing your job doesn’t mean losing your house. And thanks to the protection labour has put in place for pension funds losing your job won’t mean losing your pension too.

David Cameron’s big idea today is to bring back ‘job clubs’ from the 90s recession. But this is exactly the sort of help that we are already keeping up and expanding upon. It is precisely why we have put nearly £2bn into back to work help since the end of last year. And it is exactly the sort of help Cameron has opposed. Unbelievably, his Tories say we shouldn’t spend this money to offer this help when people need it most. He would repeat the mistakes of past recessions when whole communities were abandoned and the unemployed were pushed onto incapacity benefit without any help to get back to work.

We face a choice. We can spend millions today on supporting people into work or we can spend billions in the future as another generation becomes trapped on benefits. In the end, the debate between us and the Tories is the same as it ever was. We believe that politics and government can make a difference, they still hold to the same sink or swim philosophy that says that recessions and unemployment are a necessary and unavoidable fact of life.

We don’t believe there is anything inevitable about unemployment. So our promise to people out of work is this: we may not always be able to save your job but we will never write you off. The longer you are out of work the harder we will work to help you get a job. We will not forget about you because you are disabled or because you are an older worker. We will do everything we can to prevent short term job losses from turning into long term unemployment.

Giving everyone the opportunity to work was one of the reasons our party was founded. It was the subject of the first speech by the first Labour MP, Keir Hardie. It was Kinnock, Smith and Blair’s campaigns against Tory unemployment in the 80s and 90s that inspired many of us to join Labour. In these tough times it is more important then ever that our Labour government is there for the people who need us most.