The Gods must be crazy

Brilliantly incisive Hopi.

I can’t undertand why you guys are not working in Parliament;
you’d surely do a much better job!

Jo

Imagine the righteous furore there would have been if benefits, whose recipients are already condemned to daily struggle to survive on inadequate subsistence levels of income, were increased at some hypothetical increment BELOW the currently very high rate inflation. Even the coalition aren’t daft enough to try pulling strokes like that when unemployment has just rise by over two hundred thousand in the last six months; there are simply too many people struggling to get into the lifeboat for Tories or New Labouristas to justify impoverishing benefit claimants further by blaming their misfortunes on some lack of personal initiative or whatever that qualifies them as being members of the “underclass” or “undeserving poor” as it were.

As far as tax credits and similar goes the emphasis these days from the coalition and, sadly,  the revenant  Labour Party is to move monies away from the very poor towards the “squeezed middle” as Ed Miliband is wont to call it. Right and wrong matters less these days than currying favour selectively with the right demographic groups with a view to winning their support and so increase your chances of gaining political capital as far as local and general elections are concerned: currently this boils down to promises of financial and other help to people who “do the right thing” – which definition changes with the weather – and being a scourge to benefit claimants whether they are healthy, sick, deserving or undeserving. Expect much more of this kind of demonisation of minorities for the foreseeable future, from ALL of the parties, because politicians have come to believe that they can advance their own aims and win elections by resorting to such baseness.

The scheme to help the young jobless that Clegg announced today will fail in its aims as surely as Labour’s Future Jobs Fund would have done. The reasons why schemes like these fail is simple: 

(1)

The lack of worthwhile sustainable full-time private sector jobs with prospects.

(2) 

Trainees on schemes normally only remain placed with private employers for the duration of the subsidy after which they normally end up dismissed. Because trainees are not going to remain permanently with the employer there is no incentive for the employer to lavish any time on or provide proper training for trainees; since they are destined to leave after a couple of months or so there is no benefit to the employer as far as giving the trainee skills or knowledge goes.  

(3)

It takes a long time to learn a trade or master a profession. To become really proficient in anything takes a long time and requires both on and off the job training, i.e., practical work experience coupled with theoretical training at a university, college or other educational institution. Thirty years ago apprenticeships to learn skilled trades and traineeships designed to enable people to enter professions often lasted for five years or more if degree level studies were involved.

The kind of scheme Clegg has outlined normally pays a private employer to take an unemployed youngster and use him/her like a dogsbody for a couple of months or so before sending him/her through a revolving door back into unemployment and then on to the next “work experience” placement or whatever. The trainee will be lucky if he/she ends up with a first aid or health and safety certificate or similar. The youngster will certainly NOT have picked up any real skills, experience, or qualifications that will REALLY end up getting him/her into gainful employment for long. The jam is spread too thin. If there isn’t enough money to help everybody in the way that they deserve it might be much better to institute a voluntary rather than a compulsory “tread water” scheme for a couple of hundred thousand of the most motivated youngsters, devoting enough money and support to them to enable them to be properly trained for, say, eighteen months to two years to enable them to reach much higher levels of skill and experience which might genuinely enable them to secure decent jobs with rewards enough to enable them to support themselves and end up net contributors to the system.

 Unless economic growth and job creation begins the game is over before the game begins.