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Number of people out of work for 2 years of more has more than DOUBLED since May 2010

July 9, 2012 1:26 pm

Author:

Mark Ferguson

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The number of people out of work for two years or more has risen from 44,300 in May 2010 to 99,700 in May 2012.

Britain isn’t working.

The coalition isn’t working…

(Source: ONS - claimant count)

AnotherOldBoy

Since the recession kicked in in late 2008 this is hardly surprising.
Billsilver

Well Mark, you tell us how labour would have avoided this. considering that Darling had planned cuts that were almost identical.
And a fact or two rather than conjecture would be good.
Alan Giles

Despite all this evidence, flying in the face of reason both the Coalition and Labour wish to persist in the ridiculous and unjust persecution of the sick and disabled, and both also wish to raise the retirement age!

If able bodied younger people can’t get jobs, perhaps Byrne for Labour and Duncan-Twit for the Coalition could now answer the question – where are all the jobs?
- hp
  
  The location of the jobs depends on the industry:-
  Textiles – China
  Electronics – China
  Manufacturing – China
  Chemicals – China
  IT services – India
  - James
    
    China manufactures mostly for western societies using western designs. In order to have cheaper goods and for some private companies to make bigger profits we sacrifice the lives of millions of our own people on the altar of capitalism.
    - John Dore
      
      Congrats you have outdone both Tre-bore and Partridge.
      - Alan Giles
        
        That little “joke” of yours really amuses you doesn’t it?
        
        That’s right – the “Partridge” one.
        
        Still, if you have nothing more intelligent to say it still allows you to keep your name in the columns to delight your fans.
        
        But I think 25 times in a little under 3 weeks shows a certain poverty of imagination, don’t you agree?
      - treborc
        
        Little thing please small minds and Bore boy is he small minded. and of course he’s a right wing Progress chappie of a about twelve.
      - John Dore
        
        I so love the fact that the LABOUR party thinks more my way than your way; but then you don’t vote Labour.
      - James
        
        Coming from an opinionated moron who doesn’t even know whether his own ars*hole is bored or punched I’m regarding this verbiage as rare praise. Thank you.
    - jaime taurosangastre candelas
      
      For your argument to make logical sense, you need to demonstrate that the mass of people are prepared to buy everyday, or relatively everyday purchases at prices with British labour costs included. Maybe they would – I do not know, but my suspicion is that for the majority of “non-luxury items” – things like children’s toys, a telephone handset, a computer or a pack of T-shirts – the people will be attracted to an item costing half of the price, if in all other respects it is identical.
      
      Of course, some will. Dave Postles is notable on LL for his advocacy for buying British, and that is very noble, but I do not believe that his views are completely mainstream on this. The man in the street probably does not care too much is his mobile phone is built in Vietnam.
      
      And even then, for those running a business, I suspect they note the price the competitor is selling the same product. If only one business decides to do the manufacturing in China for half of the price, then the others in the market are compelled to try to match that, or they go out of business. And so I believe the initial motivation is “staying in business”, not “making bigger profits”
      
      To be clear, I am not saying this is applicable to very expensive or luxury items, such as an Aston Martin car. There seem to be different economics and motivations for buyers of such things. I confess, I would love to buy an Aston Martin car because they are beautiful and sound wonderful, but in reality it will never happen as a normal car is perfectly sufficient. I might rent one for a day as a present to myself on a birthday.
      - James
        
        It’s this simple: if you exploit cheap foreign labour in order to manufacture goods without finding alternative employment for the people excluded from gainful employment you will eventually destroy your own country’s economy and social cohesion. Which is what is happening now, all around us, all of the time. The man in the street may well not care too much if his mobile phone was designed in Europe or America and built by children in sweatshops in Vietnam, but he will when his university educated son or daughter are denied careers which reward them sufficiently to make their way in the world or when he himself ends up thrown on the scrap heap in advance years when his employer moves its production facilities to Brazil or similar. Watch and wait for the social unrest and unravelling just waiting in the wings to burst onto the stage; you don’t have to believe me because if you’re patient you’ll witness the decline first-hand.
      - jaime taurosangastre candelas
        
        It is also this simple: Business people do not have the responsibility to deal with the consequences of their decisions, and government – which does – has not got a good answer. And the mathematics of cost base are relentless. In fact, the differentials rise yearly, as a result of our social legislation. So what do you want – a return to the morals and imbalances of Victorian years, or something else? I don’t know the answer.
        
        If Britain does explode as you describe, there won’t be much change. Business will still manufacture in Vietnam, and sell elsewhere while we burn down the houses.
        
        What we should be doing is taking people on the street by the throat, and telling them to pay a lot more for their everyday non-essential items so that their children can also live in the lap of luxury with all sorts of nonsenses such as £20,000 housing benefit, but yet also tell them that their pay is to be cut by something like 90% to make us competitive, but this is not a vote winning policy.
        
        Mathematics. What do you want to do?
      - derek
        
        If you reduce the earning potential to 20 pence per hour , you’ll need to bring back old monies where everyday goods cost half pennies and thrupence to buy and the mountain of un-paid debt would be massively larger under a new lower income based monetary system.
        
        Europe should create a debt bank that services the European debt annually and Britain should also create a bank to service it’s accrued debt from this recession.
        
        Standards aren’t advanced by backward motions, that seems perfectly scientific to me.
      - jaime taurosangastre candelas
        
        Yes Derek, but the problem is that many of those everyday goods are sourced from abroad. It does not matter what you think they should be priced in, it only matters that the international seller wants some certain price, and if we are not prepared to pay it, he will shrug his shoulders and sell it to someone else for the price he wants. So it does not matter the price we offer in shekels or sea shells or old or new pennies: he wants $50 or equivalent in exchange currency, because it cost him $45 to make them and ship them to Britain.
        
        I do not know about your second paragraph. Britain already has a Bank of England who service the debt if indirectly via the Treasury. Europe seems to have no equivalent, and is descending into financial chaos.
      - http://www.facebook.com/people/Mike-Homfray/510980099 Mike Homfray
        
        Import controls and more self-sustaining production, No more globalisation. No alternative.
      - jaime taurosangastre candelas
        
        I thought we had already had this argument some weeks ago, and the result of thinking through the effect of such a policy was a series of retaliatory price tariffs and a collapse in the economy?
        
        I know that for the hard left such as yourself it is probably a good result and acceptable to achieve this as the price for some doctrinal victory over capitalism, but for 99% of the country this seems a bit harsh.
        
        You still have not answered the questions asked in the original debate about from where we would be gaining the money to pay for the increased social costs of economic collapse, or even what to do about the fact that here in the UK we would be unable to find the raw materials for manufacture of very many things without importing them. But this is a question of reality, and that must not be considered in your socialist paradise.
        
        Here are some facts to consider: the UK cannot make batteries without importing over 90% of the raw materials, the UK produces 0% of the world’s cotton (and the EU only 1% of the world’s cotton), the UK produces 0% of rare earth minerals that are critical in all electronics, the UK has not been self-sufficient in food production since 1945 and even then wheat was in short supply with a population of 50 million, and the UK would be unable to manufacture 79 of the top 100 drugs prescribed in the NHS without imports from abroad.
        
        There are many occasions when I read your views and wonder if they are not more suited to the Communist Party, but with this agenda of import controls, you seem to take economic la-la land to a new depth.
        
        And as for the apparently automatic 1 “Like” your posts also attract, I would say that you have got your own lunatic fan!
      - John Dore
        
        Jaime,
        
        You are absolutely correct. all that would happen is that the price of everything would skyrocket. Mike doesn’t realise that we would end up having to pay a fortune for imported raw materials (in retaliation for our tariffs) and we would all be worse off. Trade would collapse, we would not be able to manufacture most of the stuff we import as even the hint of this policy would mean the collapse of confidence and then our ability to trade. This is madness.
        
        Nobody in the Labour has suggested / floated such an absurd and stupid idea and yet Mike persists in repeating it.
        
        Come on Mike tell us why we’re wrong?
      - James
        
        Mathematics has nothing to do with it since the matters under discussion are economic and moral choices not obedience to cosmic law. In the West we have chosen to try to improve the lot of workers, e.g., children no longer work 12 hour days in mills and factories where they risk having limbs torn off by unguarded machinery and similar. The moral conscience of the nation coupled with a better educated and informed population forced commerce and business to accept regulation to protect the lives and livelihoods of workers and not to regard them as simply another resource: biological entities than can be connected to mechanical devices to produce good or provide services at the lowest cost possible without regard to their health, safety, welfare or happiness which increases the cost of production, obviously.
        
        (David Cameron in his recent preposterous speech concerning welfare reform showed that the Tories still regard human beings in this way when he referred to welfare claimants as “stock and flow”, i.e., people who had been on some sort of benefit for some time as opposed to recent claimants, which I found profoundly creepy. Nonsense straight out of the mouth of the arch-idiot Baron David Freud I bet. )
        
        The clock will never be turned back on advances like this; any government which tried to do so would never be elected to office. So what should an unscrupulous businesses do in order to maximise profits? The answer as far as mass production goes is often simply to move production to a developing foreign country where the workforce can be used and abused in a manner as bad or worse than existed in this country not that many years ago. There is noting mathematical about this beyond business wanting to make more profit by moving their facilities to places which allow them to best exploit men, women and children in ways that would be unacceptable here at home in Great Britain.
        
        In this country the minimum wage is not sufficient to live on without top-ups from the State. Impoverishing the poor to enable us to be more competitive with the developing world won’t help matters because the people affected will simply not be able to pull themselves up by their bootstraps unassisted and unaided.
      - jaime taurosangastre candelas
        
        I certainly agree with you about the moral basis, and I can see now how you could read my earlier reply as being in favour of making retrograde steps. However, the opposite is my feeling – I am fully in favour of those advances made.
        
        However, as a matter of opinion, I believe that rather than maximising profits, it is the motivation of business to remain competitive with the competitor businesses. It is a small nuance, but important I feel.
        
        If a Chinese company can make a toy for £10, the exact same quality of toy made in Britain but costing £20 (or whatever the difference) is unlikely to sell very well. So as soon as one company “goes cheap”, then others will naturally tend to follow.
      - http://www.facebook.com/people/Mike-Homfray/510980099 Mike Homfray
        
        No. The problem is that these items are available on the back of low wages. Remember the days when an item was bought and lasted for many years – being repaired when broken? Nowadays cheap goods, poorly made, are disposed of on the altar of ‘fashion’ and its not worth getting anything mended. This is not a sustainable way of doing things. There will need to be more local production – and we will have to abandon the consumerist, throwaway society. people may not like it at first, but there will be no option. Its just a matter of when, not if….
- JoeDM
  
  We live in a global market for goods, services and labour.
  
  If we are not as productive as the Chinese, Indians, Taiwanese, Brazilians, etc…… then we won’t have the jobs in the UK.
  - Alan Giles
    
    Exactly, Joe. Therefore it is otiose for fools like Duncan-Smith, Byrne and right wing LL readers and writers to berate people for being unemployed. It is even more absurd for them to think if able bodied people can’t find work, that the long term sick or disabled will stand much chance of finding employment.
    - John Dore
      
      No it is otiose for you to hold your opinion. Byrne is no fool he knows whats fair and isn’t blinkered, he knows its about competing. Germany does it and is the strong man of Europe and it has better relationships with its employees. It does not have the benefit culture we do. A change of culture and we could as well, attack the benefits culture and the feckless as hard as you can. Red, Yellow and Blue agree it needs to be done.
      
      The point is that we need to encourage people to do their own thing (capitalism), find a way to make their companies successful and compete. I think many workers do this, but there are people who don’t, their are people who work hard and their are the FECKLESS.
      
      If the country is more successful we have more to spend on essential services, looking after our old and sick. Instead we have people who are happy to let eastern europeans travel thousands of miles to pick fruit, as benefits are OK.
      
      Then their are the people who apologise for the feckless, because they see any attempt to deal with the issue as an ideological attack on the so called working class. Well the feckless don’t belong to the working class. The clue is in the title “Working Class”.
      
      Vote Byrne!
Brumanuensis

Rather timely report this: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-18765519
Pure Blue

David Cameron’s latest wheeze is to cut Jobseeker’s Allowance (and possibly other benefits) by a fixed percentage, 10% say, after two years unemployment, ongoing. I think this is a good thing because it will save some money and put more pressure on the unemployed to accept whatever work is going or to move, like thousands of Scots had to do after being driven off their land during the highland clearances. Other than that perhaps unemployed people and families could be encouraged to fast for one or two days a week as a punishment for not working. Money could be saved and most people affected wouldn’t become ill or die. Sick people and children under 5 should be exempted from the fast IMHO. If all the long-term unemployed skipped a few meals a week imagine the savings that could be made.
Alan Giles

Sadly the figure is set to increase even further:

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/remploy-plants-closure-confirmed-150346429.html
Dave Postles

Remploy: confirmation today that another 27 factories will be closed by December this year. GMB days of action are: 19 and 26 July. The full list is: : Aberdare, Aberdeen, Abertillery, Acton, Ashington, Barking, Barrow,
Birkenhead, Bolton, Bridgend, Bristol, Chesterfield, Cleator Moor,
Croespenmaen, Edinburgh, Gateshead, Leeds, Leicester, Manchester,
Merthyr Tydfil, Motherwell, Newcastle, North London, North Staffs,
Oldham, Penzance, Pontefract, Poole, Preston, Southampton, Spennymoor,
Springburn, Swansea, Wigan, Worksop and Wrexham (some may already have closed; according to treborc, the Welsh ones may be saved by the Assembly).
- treborc
  
  Five are by me, what really annoys me are that UK disability worked on this for the Labour party and then Tories and they have agreed it’s best to close these factories, but of course they hope to be getting some 0f the work and share of the £320 million saved as they have stated they will use resources to help people back to work. I love these charities bet they did not ask to many disabled people working in the factories.
Alan Giles

As announced yesterday, Duncan-Smith, in his infinite ignorance, has decided to close down the remaining 27 Remploy factories (and the Conservatives on LL doesn’t have to remind me that Peter Hain started it 4 years ago – something else we can be embarrassed about).

Remploy has a factory in nearby Barking, and as an aside, one of it’s employees carried the Olympic Torch last week.

It is an especially cruel (and short sighted) action, especially with the current unemployment rates and the lack of investment, and I doubt that many of those made unemployed will find other jobs, nonetheless, Smith feels the money currently spent on giving Remploy workers a secure job and a sense of independece “can be better spent elsewhere”.

Unite are going to send a card to all the remaining factories, and if you would like to sign it, and perhaps write a message to the workers, here is the link:

http://uniteforoursociety.org/solidarity-with-remploy

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