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Ending this national crisis is what Labour exists to do

September 19, 2012 4:57 pm

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The front cover of today’s Evening Standard, and the story that goes with it, is devastating for anyone who cares about the future of our country.

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Most of those in political circles know – and often discuss – the tragedy of youth unemployment. But considering the sheer scale of the problem and the fact that long term youth unemployment quite literally destroys the lives of many young adults, it should be a cause of national outrage. But for some reason it isn’t. Why the hell not?

There are some who will say that youth unemployment was high – and rising – under Labour. And they’d be right. While the economy was growing youth unemployment wasn’t adequately tackled. Like the growing gap between the richest and poorest attempts were made to deal with it, but never anything quite bold enough. That was short sighted, and what you might call “The Squeezed Youth” may never forgive us for it.

But with a Tory government committed to slash and burn, an economy that is shrinking, and stubbornly high unemployment figures, the crisis worsens by the day. There has been a 100% increase in young people claiming JSA for more than six months since May 2010. ONE. HUNDRED. PERCENT.

Unsurprising, when you consider the fate of the now defunct future jobs fund. It didn’t provide value for money. Giving young people a chance in life? Experience? A job?

Nah. Too expensive. It was cut to save £290 million.

How callous and unfeeling can you get?

And yet since then the response of the government to any question about youth unemployment is a mealy mouthed attempt to blame youth unemployment on the last government. The Tories claim they are cutting to save pain for future generations, well the next generation is suffering now – with teenagers paying the price for a crisis that began when they were taking their GCSEs. What benefit do they receive from the Treasury?

That’s unclear.

The Evening Standard also notes that Olympic boroughs like Newham and Tower Hamlets are amongst the hardest hit. Inspire a generation? You can toss that one in a cupboard with “we’re all in this together”.

And what is Labour’s answer to the youth unemployment emergency? We’d tax bankers to provide apprenticeships. It’s fine, but is it big enough for the task at hand, the crusade to create youth jobs that is needed? Almost certainly not. It’s timid at a time of national crisis, and with youth unemployment in some regions running at 25%, that’s exactly what this is.

Labour needs to come out and say that, despite spending restraints, jobs for young people must be a priority and that whatever funds are necessary to end the crisis will be found – not just because it’s good politics, or because it will save some young people from a life on the long term unemployment scrap heap, but also because it’s good economics. People with jobs spend money, which boosts the economy. People without jobs need state support which squeezes the Treasury.

So let’s take the rhetoric about “growth and jobs” and actually explain how we’ll create the hundreds of thousands of jobs for young people that are needed – now – to save the prospects of a generation and get the economy moving again.

Nevermind “Inspire a generation”, Britain needs to “Employ a generation”.

And that’s a national project worthy of the name, the Labour Party. Often it can seem that Labour lacks a defining project that explains what we’re for. At a time of epic youth unemployment – ending this crisis feels like exactly the kind of thing the Labour Party exists to do.

The clue is in the name.

Related posts:

  1. Youth unemployment: Where’s the sense of crisis?
  2. Closer to crisis? Why Labour must do more to help the low-earners hardest hit by recession
  3. Labour Party to ‘look closely’ at ending unpaid internships
  4. Labour needs to be proud of its role in ending the British empire
  5. The politics of proxy: National Insurance or National Interest?
  • AlanGiles

    I mentioned this article in another thread today. I really do feel you should send a copy of this article to Frank Field, and any other Labour MP who thinks that young people who are out of work are doing it just to be naughty, or because they are lazy and/or workshy, or “feckless” – whatever words the right-wing word jugglers employ

    And of course, an unemployed worker over 50 is likely to find things just as bad.

  • Dave Postles

    £290m – piffling.  Many of these young people achieve their first positions in retail.  From there, they can identify, augment and demonstrate their transferable skills of punctuality, efficiency, initiative, responsibility, customer service, numeracy and cash handling, and progress further.  The proverbial fly in the ointment is that retail is retrenching because the demand side has collapsed (thanks to Osbornomics).  Labour, please abandon this rhetoric of the squeezed middle and establish some thoughtful priorities.

  • Serbitar

    At the time of writing it’s Wednesday, 19 September 2012.

    Is Labour for or against compulsory workfare these days? 

  • http://twitter.com/redrenie24 Renie Anjeh

    Absolutely agree with this article. The Tories should be ashamed of their record on youth unemployment which is now at a 17-year-high, yet they scrapped EMA, cancelled the Future Jobs Fund and the Connexions schemes – after promising them not to. Over 50% of black men, especially black young men, are unemployed thanks to the Tories.  It is a national scandal and never a price worth paying. I’d go further than current party policy, have a Jobs Guarantee for all funded by the bonus tax, reinstate EMA in whatever guise funded by rigourous crackdowns on benefit fraud and commit to building 500,000 social homes which could free up new jobs in the private sector for young people funded by a Land Value Tax.

    • AlanGiles

       I agree with you about EMA, and Ken Livingstone would have reinstated it, albeit under a different name. I supported the idea back in the spring and still do. I think politicians forget how expensive textbooks and stationery are, and this modest grant must have been of practical help to a lot of poorer students. But I think you over-estimate the extent of benefit fraud. The checks made these days by the DWP on claimants is very rigourous and many people find it hard to obtain what they are actually entitled to, as the CAB will tell you,

      • http://twitter.com/redrenie24 Renie Anjeh

        I am glad you support an invention of the Blair Government that helps young people stay on in education. As for Ken, I campaigned for him in May but no one believed him because it was not fully costed. Benefit fraud costs the taxpayer about £0.8bn which is the same amount that EMA cost.

        • AlanGiles

           No, Renie, my impression of Field’s attitude is not “plain wrong”. I have heard him on many radio interviews 1997-2007, and in an episode of “The Week In Westminster” some years ago he made his views quite clear: he “wanted to put some salt on the tail” (I remember the wording exactly because of it’s very peculiar nature) “of the unemployed”.

          Of course, he is quite an old man now, and rather out of touch – he concentrates his venom these days with the all-party group on immigration which he co-leads with his great pal, Tory MP Nicholas Soames.

          • http://twitter.com/redrenie24 Renie Anjeh

            Frank Field has also attacked the growing crisis of youth unemployment. Saying that you would put ‘salt on the tail’ would mean encourage people to take work which they should be, there should be an element of compulsion for claimants to take work if they can. That is all that Frank Field has really argued for. He has not been calling people feckless.
            As for being mates with Nicholas Soames, there is nothing wrong with being mates with Tories – it happens all the time just as John McDonnell is friendly with Justine Greening or Ken Livingstone is friendly with Steve Norris or in deed the relationship between Michael Foot and Enoch Powell. On immigration, I do not wholly agree with him in fact as it happens I lean towards Boris’ view on immigration which is that there should be an amnesty for illegal immigrants who contribute to our economy.

          • Serbitar

            Wrong. Field wanted to time-limit benefits, especially for the young, such that if they failed to find work within a certain arbitrary time they would lose all rights to receive financial assistance from the State no matter how hard they tried or what they had done in order to secure gainful employment. Here’s the URL of an old article about Field’s ideas.

            http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/jan/27/james-purnell-welfare-bill-workfare

            It would have been better for all concerned if Field had remained a member of his political party of first choice – the Conservatives.

            He really is a venomous and wretched old cove.

          • AlanGiles

             After Field was sacked as a minister in 1998, he became ever more rancorous. Each time one of his successors dreamt up another “reform” (for example, during his tenure Alan Johnson wanted DWP staff stationed in GP’s waiting rooms, so that they could “talk” to the unemployed – even though this would have broken the confidentility rules since the reception staff would have had to give this information out to a third party), Field said that the minister “hadn’t gone far enough”.

            Field is something of a bully – he seems to think people should be punished for being unemployed. You should have been around in his heyday, to listen to some of the stuff he used to come out with, circa 1997.

            “There is nothing wrong with being mates with Tories”. No, if you are on the right wing of the Labour party, I suppose there isn’t because you have a lot in common, as the Field/Soames pairing proves.

          • http://twitter.com/redrenie24 Renie Anjeh

            I am very interested in Field and he has not attacked the unemployed, the people who he has attacked are those on benefits who live indefinitely without looking for work at all. That is not bullying at all. Many of ideas, in his report on poverty, have been very good and to say that it is bullying is purely incorrect.
            I didn’t know that you think John McDonnell or Michael Foot were on the rightwing of the Labour Party!

          • AlanGiles

            Renie: You speak with great authority. Were you listening to Minister Field as a toddler back in 1997?. I think those of us around at the time will remember his attitude, and have a better impression of what he used to say. Now that it is untenable to “blame” the unemployed, he instead targets immigrants. It’s what he does.

            No offence.

          • http://twitter.com/redrenie24 Renie Anjeh

            This is exactly why I just wish you stick to your promise not to reply to my comments. You create trouble and draw attention unnecessarily in order to be spiteful. I have researched alot of Field’s work, I find him mesmerising to be honest – at first, I did not like him and thought that Brown should have done an exchange with him and Hoey for John Bercow and Quentin Davies. Field has never attacked the unemployed, he has attacked those who stay on benefits indefinitely who do not want to work. Even, your hero Ken Livingstone proposed something very similar in London whereby you get offered a job and if you refuse it you lose your benefits. I don’t hear you attacking him!
            There is a big difference between targeting immigrants and controlling immigration, in fact Frank Field praised Mo Farah and many immigrant communities. However, I do disagree with him on immigration to some extent seen as I believe in an amnesty.

          • AlanGiles

            Renie, it is you who keeps replying to my comments. I am sorry, but you were all of one year of age when Field was a minister, and he ceased that role a year later.

            Please stop telling the rest of us that what we read with our own eyes and heard with our own ears is wrong, just because you would like it to be.

            Congratulations on finding Field “mesmerising”. I bet you’re about the only person in Britain (apart from his agent) who does.  I bet if you are ever forced into “workfare” you won’t be quite so hoity-toity.

            If you want me not to respond to your ill-informed remarks, please stop trying to contradict the truth.

          • http://twitter.com/redrenie24 Renie Anjeh

            Winston Churchill was Prime Minister before most people were born, yet we know a lot about him. Stop with condescending and patronising arguments, please. Also, please stop replying to my comments and stick by your promise. It is about the fifth time I told you not to do it.
            Now, it is you who is clearly very ill-informed seen as you cannot even accept that Field’s proposal is identical to what anti-workfare Ken Livingstone proposed regarding guaranteeing work. I have had plenty of articles under the Sun about Field, I was sad enough to even read his report so I do not need you lecturing me on Frank Field just because you some strong dislike for his mere existence, thank you very much. Can you please, refrain from replying to my comments or are you a Lib Dem who cannot keep their promises?

          • AlanGiles

             You don’t TELL me to do anything Renie. If you keep talking about things that happened before your time I will go on cofrrecting it, when – as here – you get it wrong.

            Churchill is well documented through recordings Many of Fields interviews were made on live radio on Today, Any Questions etc.

            I doubt even you were cognizant of what he was saying in 1997

          • http://twitter.com/redrenie24 Renie Anjeh

            So because something happened before my time, it means I cannot possibly know about it. Honestly, Alan if that is the best you can do then it is best you do not comment on these pages. Leave me alone.

  • AlanGiles

    Mark didn’t put the link to the full article for those outside the Stndard’s catchment area, and of course the situation is just as dire for people in many parts of the country, so here they are:

    http://www.standard.co.uk/news/work/special-report-a-generation-of-young-londoners-with-no-job-no-prospects-and-no-hope-8156404.html

    There are a couple of personal stories, and Mark’s is especially sad and  unfortunate, and proves that misfortune and responsibility is not just something that happens to older people:-

    http://www.standard.co.uk/news/work/marks-story-im-a-whiz-at-electronics-bright-and-hardworking-i-just-need-somebody-to-give-me-a-chance-8156449.html

    http://www.standard.co.uk/news/work/jubbeds-story-i-feel-like-im-living-in-the-land-of-the-unemployed-all-around-me-i-see-young-people-wasting-away-8156468.html

  • AlanGiles

     A very relevant question: I suppose we have to wait for Crudas to tell Byrne what to think before he gives a real answer – and not the dissembling he usually indulges in.

    • Serbitar

      There’s too much ambiguity to have any clear idea about what is going on. One minute apparatchiks like Frank Field and Liam Byrne enthusiastically whip up disdain for “benefit scroungers” (which term seems synonymous with “benefit claimants”, generally, as far as too many of the general public are concerned) and five minutes later do a switcheroo claiming to “feel the pain” and “want to do something for” some subset or other of the very same group. 

      It’s confusing.

      Does Labour hate benefit claimants enough to want to Shanghai them onto chain gangs convict-like in order to be seen to be making them work for the meagre, subsistence amounts of money they receive from the State? Or does Labour now want to seem to sympathise with the plight of these individuals and commit itself to doing everything it can if given the opportunity to help them, educate them, train them, up and get them into gainful employment?

      As I say, it’s confusing.

  • Jeremy_Preece

    Yes. Does anyone else wonder why we live in a society where people who thought that they had reached the end of their hard working lives now have to work for longer and longer, when they just want to retire. How does this make any kind of sense when there are so many young people who want jobs?

    Of course I know from my own experince that you can be employed and then your company hits a bad spot and makes huge numbers redundant, that you can then turn to contract work, and find contract suddenly cancelled and you are out on your ear. Then you try getting back in during the current climate.

    I have worked and been well paid, and have worked on well paid and not well paid contracts, and I have had periods of unemployment, carried along as I am at the moment by my wife who is in the public sector and seeing her salary frozen. I am also in the over 50 group.

    The headline in the Evening Standard is refreshing, as it shows the truth. How hard it can be for anyone, young or otherwise to get back. The Tories and some of the well healed political class of our own party have never experinced this and I am not someone who wishes this on people.

    What makes me really angry is the ongoing attack on unemployed as if they were all somehow evil sub-human scroungers who have gone out of their way to embark on a lifestyle of a never ending holiday. I also over the years have met so many unemploed who are shell shocked and devistated to have lost their jobs through no fault of their own, and who try and try again to get back into work, only to get rejection after rejection. Human beings can only take so much, and I have only ever met a few people that I would consider to be scroungers.

    I see a lot of other people who are really fortunate and manage to work for companies that don’t suffer, or people who manage to be in the right place at the right time, and often who had other social advantages. How few these days seem to say “there but for the grace of God go I”, and how few seem to appreciate their good fortune, while so many try to say that they deserve it because they work hard. As if they are better human beings, while the others are lazy or don’t desrve it because they are somehow inferior.

    It is certainly true that Labour should be getting on top of this. This is about the human of cost recession. How can it be right that some of the richest who caused this recession get away with it and keep their huge wealth, while those who have to carry the can for other people’s mistakes get the blame for existing and thus being a burden.

    Tories like recession and a certain amount of unemployment as it allows them to drive down wages and even to “cut red tape”, that is to use the downturn as an excuse to take away basic employment rights and allow thier own supports to treat their employees unfairly while the latter have to learn to keep their heads down and feel lucky to have a job.

    The cutting of the EMA, and Goves so called exam reforms etc. are simply a way of reviving class warfare and increasing the gap between haves and have nots.

    In times of high employment there is merit in expecting people to work. If the government don’t want high unemployment they should stop their policies which simply make people loose their jobs. When there are not the jobs there, then government needs to stimulate the economy, and needs to bite the bullet in terms of expecting the rich (and the government’s fat little frieds) to pay their share. 

    The reason it makes no sense is that it is only a cover for a bad government to distract attention away from it awful self defeating policies. To do this they villify the unemployed and now even hound the sick (even those dying of cancer) and delcares them too fit to work, in an environment where the are no jobs even for the able bodied. 

    I really think that here we could be on to something as a flagship policy. It would not only be just, but would show how labour really is different to the Tories.

    • Dave Postles

       Wonderful post.

    • Daniel Speight

      Jeremy I think what you are calling for is courage from the party’s leadership. It will take courage because the media will turn on them for asking for a fairer society. It sometimes looks like they are so worried by bad press that they will not commit to anything the slightest bit radical.

      Yet when Ed Miliband did turn his fire on News International, albeit late when the battle was almost won, he found public support and probably the initial turning point of public perception of him.

      • Jeremy_Preece

        Yes Daniel. There is a danger that in trying  not to offend anyone you say nothing and hence seem to dissapear, or at least have no relevant contribution to make. It is a trap that the Labour leadership are in danger of falling into.
        The Labour party knows the truth really and is not out of touch (except maybe in a few quarters). A little courage would go a long way.

        The only way to fight wrong is to fight it – to speak out and bring the debate into the open. Ignorant assertions have to be challenged and unfairness has to be met head on and faced down.  Underneath the gloss there needs to be some real guts.  

    • AlanGiles

       Totally agree, Jeremy. I was very lucky in that I was never unemployed – but that was due to the fact that I came up in the 50s and 60s when there really was more or less full employment. The only ropey days were the early 70s when Uncle Ted invented the 3 day week, but even then luck was on my side, and I never got my P45. Just because I was lucky, I was and am more than aware that sheer bad luck and personal circumstance can conspire against others. Reading Mark’s story in the Standard – his father dying when the lad was about 11, then a couple of years later his mother developing cancer, and the lad having to become her carer and a guardian to his younger brother – it is no wonder his schoolwork suffered – there are people who are totally unlucky and when I was in a position to do so, this is exactly the sort of lad who I would give a job to – being a good worker is not only about excelling at school.

      You are spot on about making older people work beyond 65 – to have kept to the old retirement age would have meant more jobs for youg and young-er people, and if you think about it, it would do whichever government that was in power good, because it would reduce the unemployment figures overnight.

      I hope that the right wingers who describe themselves as “Labour” supporters and cheer on Byrne, and regard Purnell embracing Freud as brave – read your very insightful post, as well as the Standard articles and perhaps think about their position, at the very least.

  • http://twitter.com/youngian67 Ian Young

    Mainly
    due to the inflated rents, rather than the measly dole rates, it does
    not pay for many to get their foot back on the ladder because
    successive governments still deduct low paid part-time work Pound for
    Pound (after paying for transport it means a claimant paying to go to
    work).

    Allowing
    the unemployed to earn a certain amount legally and also introduce
    some kind of tapering would go a long way to tackling this poverty
    trap (and combat cash-in-hand fraud) which would cost little in terms
    of increased public spending.

  • AlanGiles

    From the front page of today’s (20th September) “Metro” newspaper:

    ”
    “Young people should busk if they can’t afford train fare, says Tory MP

    Britain’s million young jobless should busk to
    raise cash and work for less than the minimum wage, says Conservative MP
    Damian Collins.
    Read more: http://www.metro.co.uk/news/912565-young-people-should-busk-if-they-cant-afford-train-fare-says-tory-mp#ixzz26ysBQ600

    Desperate stuff, eh?. Just think I got my first job at 15 and I didn’t have to get my flugelhorn out to get it!

    • Daniel Speight

      I said in another thread today that Tory MPs seldom disappointed me. You know exactly what you are going to get. The only difference between them are that some are either too thick, or are in a safe enough seat, to care if the public sees them as they truly are. Thank you Damian Collins for proving my point.

    • Daniel Speight

      I said in another thread today that Tory MPs seldom disappointed me. You know exactly what you are going to get. The only difference between them are that some are either too thick, or are in a safe enough seat, to care if the public sees them as they truly are. Thank you Damian Collins for proving my point.

  • Dave Postles

    No increase in the minimum wage in the Budget for young  people was supposed to create more jobs for them – another Osborne mirage.  Easier dismissal would allow employers to dispose of them at age 21.  If – if – these young people find employment, they are still penalized.  Their only salvation will be the unions – allow every young person, employed or otherwise, free membership of unions for three years.

  • JoeDM

    There is plenty of work out there for those who really want to earn and contribute to society.

    This story, which I read on the train home last night, struck me as just journalistic hype and headline to make people look twice at the paper  and pick up as they walked by.   There was no real substance.

    My son left Uni this summer with an Archaeology degree and no job. Yet he picked up a job as a trainee in an insurance company in the City within 2 weeks of learning of his result !!!

    • AlanGiles

       Joe: Have youy not considered your son was lucky?

      Luck – being in the right place at the right time – can play a large part in whether or not we succeed or not. I was lucky when I was 15, and went on being so. But I knew and saw a lot of my contemporaries who didn’t get the breaks I got.

      A few comments only:

      Your son has a degree in Archeology, which, I am sure is of immense benefit to an insurance company, but one of the Standard articles features a young lad, who, through family circumstances, had to take on the responsibilities of an adult at 15, thus his school work suffered. Your son was lucky enough for you not to die when he was 11. University was not an option for this lad, and for many others.

      I doubt the Standard manufactures stories as a “come and buy me” – for one thing it is free of charge these days, also, many Standard readers were more than happy to believe all the pro-Johnson, Anti-Livingstone material in that newspaper prior to this years Mayoral election. I bet you didn’t dismiss that as “journalistic hype”

    • Serbitar

      Trainee? Just out of interest, trainee what? Broker? Actuary? Salesman? Cleaner? 

  • http://www.facebook.com/jim.crowder2 Jim Crowder

    We should be asking the question “What did we do to make our young people unemployable?” 

    Did we fail to provide them with the qualifications that employers want? Did we fail to instill in them the attitude that employers want? Did we fail to make it easy for companies to employ them? Did we fail to show them that working and paying taxes were the main contribution to society? Did we care?

    Some might also say “Did we show them that Beveridge was wrong and benefits can be long term?”

    • Serbitar

      Youth unemployment is a phenomenon that seems to be happening everywhere. It is difficult to believe that most countries affected by this scourge have all made the same mistakes. 

    • Monkey_Bach

      Eeek! The cause of this growing problem is obvious. If business sloughs off a majority of its unskilled, semi-skilled, skilled, and sub-professional technical jobs (which used to provide millions of Britons with careers and livelihoods) to places like China and Brazil in order to lower production costs and make more profit what do you think the end result of the process is? Eeek! Look around you! We’re living through the results of thoughtless globalisation right here, right now! Eeek! If foreign workers are making your goods and providing your services the workers in your own country are going to be out of a job. Pay peanuts you’ll end up employing monkeys… it’s just… well… it might be better to hire British monkeys to do the work for you and give them a job than give all your work to foreign monkeys of other nationalities while complaining piteously about youth unemployment and similar. 

  • http://twitter.com/redrenie24 Renie Anjeh

    He was a One Nation Conservative when he was very young before he saw the impact of child poverty that was happening and then he defected to Labour. There is nothing wrong with time-limiting benefits, in fact Labour sort of did it in government and gained popular support, through the Future Jobs Fund. People should be offered work within a year and then after that no more Jobseeker’s Allowance until they get unemployed again. He also has been passionate about dealing with youth unemployment, which I respect.
    Calling people venomous and wretched old coves is no answer.

    • Serbitar

      Anyone who would eagerly be willing to strip support extended to young people who have been unemployed for some length of time, even though they have done everything they can and more than has been asked of them in order to find paid work, IS in my honest opinion an extremely venomous and wretched individual…

      … as well as spectacularly stupid…

      … which Frank Field is in spades.

    • Monkey_Bach

      Eeek! You’re not getting it my little friend. I think you should eat more bananas… they’re full of potassium and might enable you to think more clearly about matters concerning primates. 

      When Field talks about “time-limiting” benefits he isn’t talking about select fixed-term training schemes like the Future Jobs fund. On programmes like that participants simply yo-yoed between part-time minimum wage allowances and Jobseeker’s Allowance when the programme came to an end and they still needed support from the state in order to survive. What Field was talking about was forcing the young unemployed to labour for sub-minimum wage benefits while unemployed and looking for work and after some arbitrary interval stopping all benefit payments to such people entirely if they failed to find work no matter how hard they had tried or what they had done: this would leave hundreds of thousands of vulnerable young adults with no income whatsoever, possibly making them homeless and destitute if they happened to be renting or contributing to the cost of their own accommodation at home or elsewhere. 

      Eeek!

      Your hero Mad Franky Field is one bad and cold-hearted crypto-Tory, little one. Even supposedly less evolved monkeys like you and me usually draw the line at deliberately seeking to abuse the young of other in such a shameless and cruel fashion.

      Eeek.

  • AlanGiles
  • John_Dore

    Everyone in Westminster knows that spending money doesn’t yield jobs, even the LL MP of the month knows this, as soon as you turn the tap off the jobs evaporate. Either come up with a REALstrategy or quit moaning, its not helping solve the problem.

  • http://twitter.com/redrenie24 Renie Anjeh

    Let’s just establish a few things. Firstly, I am not your little one or for that matter nobody’s little one. Secondly, Frank Field is not my hero. Thirdly, what the hell are you on about regarding bananas. I am sorry but like Alan, you have completely stultified yourself. The proposal that Frank Field has made is to guarantee unemployed people work and if they refuse then they lose thier benefits. This is something that has even been supported by Ken Livingstone, Alan’s hero.
    Fourthly, there are aspects of what Frank Field has said which I disagree with for example his proposal to cut off child benefit at 13, even though it would save  a hell of a lot of money and when he said we should introduce National service, I thought for a second that he was on crack! He may be a maverick but he is radical and on some issues he speaks with wisdom, which people Labour, Tory, Lib Dem, Green or Monster Raving Loony should listen to.

    • AlanGiles

       Renie: The fact is you cannot possibly know what Field said in LIVE radio interviews when you were 1 year of age. Some of us heard them, you are trying to pretend we didn’t know what we were hearing.

      Your constant insistence that you know all about everything is making you sound more obnoxious each day. If you don’t want me to respond to your mitherings, then stop using my name to spread your bile.

      Livingstone is not my hero – I have made it clear I have reservations about him, but he would have been better for the Londoners you claim to care about than Johnson is.  But you are at times very contradictory.

      Do be careful about accusing people of being “on crack”. Even Field is entitled not to be libelled, and one of the reasons LL was changed is because a poster from the old days was always accusing people of such misdemeanours and worse.

      • http://twitter.com/redrenie24 Renie Anjeh

        It is you who is being obnoxious, Alan. As I have said, stop replying to my comments. You said you wouldn’t, the Editor made it very clear that he did not see any rudeness from you or from me for that matter. I find Frank Field very interesting, I have read his stuff, watched some of his TV interviews and there is stuff he says which is good but others which are not so good. You are trying to paint him as some sort of demon, when that is not the case. On the crack, comment it is what people call a joke. Anyway, I think that it is incredibly sad that a grown man has  got nothing better to do than spend literally all day on a political blog, harassing and bullying a teenager online trying to constantly belittle them because of their political views. It makes me feel sorry for you. Now please, can you refrain from replying to my comments because you are stultifying yourself.

        • AlanGiles

          “  a grown man has  got nothing
          better to do than spend literally all day on a political blog, harassing
          and bullying a tteenager”
          Ah poor little victim. A teenager who has the temerity to pretend to know what a politician was saying in live radio interviews when he was 1 year old. A teenager who is consistently arrogant to everyone who dares to disagree with him.

          My heart bleeds f0r you.

    • Monkey_Bach

      Eeek! You seem not to know much about the people or the things you ceaselessly write about, little one.

      Mad Franky DID advocate time-limited benefits for the under 25s. With the help of his researcher Patrick White he authored a paper called “Help! Refashioning welfare reform to help fight the recession”  which was published by Reform in which he expressly recommended exactly what I claimed earlier.

      You don’t need to believe me because the paper is still available and can be read and/or downloaded here:

      http://www.reform.co.uk/client_files/www.reform.co.uk/files/refashioning_welfare_reform.pdf 

      You have much to learn, little one. By continually posting half-baked nonsense on this site you are only making yourself look silly.

      I’d find some better and more worthy heroes to worship if I were you and eat some bananas for the sake of my brain.

      Eeek.

  • http://twitter.com/redrenie24 Renie Anjeh

    That is not what Frank Field has proposed or any Labour MP for that matter.

    • Monkey_Bach

      See my comment above, little friend, and find yourself a better hero to “mesmerise” you than the shallow reactionary husk who goes by the name of Francis Field. 

  • AlanGiles

     I agree. Time-limiting benefits is totally wrong when you have areas that, even in relatively good economic times suffers from chronic unemployment – the North East, Wales, Scotland, even parts of South east England and London have unemployment blackspots. When you have unemployment to the degree we have today it is downright inhuman.

    As Mr Anjeh is not yet in the labour market, he can perhaps be excused for just approaching things theoretically, When he does enter the world of work, hopefully he will realise, and see for himself,  that things are not so cut and dried. Of course for Field he gets his £65,000 P.A. and his expenses, even though he is past retirement  age, regardless of the economic realities for ordinary people.

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