Don’t blame unemployed people

By Richard Exell

The Sun reports on yesterday’s employment stats with a feature today, headlined “11 million Brits Not Working.” As they note, if you add the 8.19 million ‘economically inactive’ people to the 2.47 million unemployed you find that “10.66 million – or 28% of the working age population – are not in a job.”

Who is to blame for this? The Sun can’t quite make up its mind. The article itself blames “the staggering failure of the Labour government”, but a leader headed “Work not Shirk” turns to “the growing dependency culture, where increasing numbers just give up and rely on handouts from the rest of us.” Following a lead from Chris Grayling, the Sun complains that “there are still 500,000 jobs going begging.”

The Sun’s sub-heading for the main article is “Labour’s Shocking Legacy”, but they seem to suffer from a memory problem. The recessions of the 1980s and 1990s both saw unemployment rates that reached over 10%, making today’s 7.9% look anaemic. As for the economic inactivity rate, that is almost exactly the same now as it was in May 1997, and again lower than in the Thatcher or Major recessions. I don’t remember the Sun talking about “The Tories’ Shocking Legacy”, however.

On the same page there’s an opinion item from Steve Hawkes, the Sun’s business editor. He complains that, in the last two years, as private sector employment fell, Labour created 329,000 public sector jobs. This takes hostility to the public sector to ridiculous levels – would it have been better not to create these jobs and see unemployment a third of a million higher than it is?

But that’s enough about that. The last government are big boys and girls, they can defend themselves well enough. What upsets me far more is the attack on unemployed people.

I can understand it when reactionaries talk about laziness and malingering during periods of full employment. I don’t agree with them, but you can see why they might not understand what’s stopping people getting jobs at a time when there seem to be plenty to go round. (In fact, some people find they’re still being turned down for job after job, even when the economy is doing well, but that is a story for another time.)

But this attitude stops making any kind of sense at a time when unemployment is sky high. Does the Sun really think we have an extra 800,000 unemployed people now than immediately before the recession because 800,000 people have become lazy?

Were people exceptionally lazy under Mrs Thatcher and John Major?

But hard working and responsible under Tony Blair?

Yes, there are a bit under 500,000 vacancies. Are they suitable for unemployed people to fill them? In fact, there are five people on Jobseeker’s Allowance for every vacancy at Jobcentres. And if you take all those economically inactive people into account the picture would be even worse: there would be 21.5 people queuing up for every job that is on offer.

The truth is that the moral failings of the unemployed have nothing to do with the unemployment figures: there simply aren’t enough jobs to go round.

Ironically, immediately under the Sun’s story about unemployment there’s a short item about a man leaping from a bridge to his death while “heartless motorists” shouted “jump”. According to the story, he was a “jobless gentle recluse”.

Unemployment is heartbreaking. It splits up families, damages your health and drives some people to suicide. Blaming unemployed people for having “simply stopped looking for jobs” is a bit like the behaviour of the motorists who shouted “jump”.