We don’t lack grit. We lack jobs

David Cameron’s policy on unemployment is based on the 1.6% of people in workless households who have never had a job. It is based on the 0.7% of the benefits bill that is fraudulently claimed.  It’s not based on the 2.5 million people in this country chasing half a million jobs. The corrosive creep of modern welfare rhetoric increasingly sets the terms of reference for any debate about job seekers. It is a rhetoric that inflates the presence of the vanishingly small number of claimants who simply won’t work and ignores the economic reality most unemployed people face.

Our policy is full employment. We will be trying to implement this in a climate set by an out of touch Conservative-led government, who sell their policy by shifting responsibility onto those who can’t work because – through Cameron’s own design – there aren’t enough jobs for them. Labour has brought a policy of full employment back to the table. It is a policy for the millions who need, and want, to work. We should doggedly pursue that aim knowing that it is both economically and socially responsible. We should pursue it without giving in to an insidious received wisdom that could couch the right policy in dangerous terms.

I come to this issue unashamedly lugging my own baggage. It was the last Labour government that lifted me out of unemployment: the Future Jobs Fund gave me a minimum wage job, without which I would have remained under-experienced and unemployed. Labour recognised that in a bleak economic climate, there needs to be direct intervention to create jobs. They put a scheme in place to invest in the long-term unemployed when we needed it most. And what about this government? They scrapped the only scheme that’s really helped unemployed young people for years and then proceeded to blame us for having no work: told us simply, in the words of Cameron’s ministers, that we just lack grit.

Tell this to the young man I met in Penwortham. He was on an 8-hour-a-week contract, and got a text each day telling him whether or not to come to work. He took it because that’s all there was: a job in which he didn’t know day to day or week to week what work he would get. That uncertainty isn’t what he studied for, or what he hoped for. Because he couldn’t do better, did he lack grit? When I couldn’t afford the bus fare for six months and walked the hour and twenty minutes each way to my Future Jobs Fund placement, did I lack grit because I was relying on the government for help?

When there are not enough jobs and the welfare bill goes up accordingly, and when your policies explicitly mean that there will not be jobs for everyone, it becomes politically expedient to absolve yourself of responsibility. So an economic malady becomes a personal one, and an unemployment scrap heap is passed off as the character defect of an entire generation. Cameron’s Tory ministers tried to put it simply, and so will I: we don’t lack grit. We lack jobs. I wasn’t chased to my Future Jobs Fund placement with sanctions and warning letters being waved at my retreating back. I went because it was work. The evidence is that the vast, vast majority of job seekers are the same. They’ve been employed before; they’ve followed the rules and applied for jobs and attended their job centre appointments. So fine, blame people and sanction people who don’t take work when there are enough jobs for them. But there aren’t. So don’t.

By announcing a policy of guaranteed jobs and full employment, Labour puts itself squarely on the side of people who have fallen foul of a widening jobs gap. Our approach will reduce the welfare bill whilst creating jobs, training and stable employment. A policy of full employment, of guaranteed jobs, doesn’t need to be couched in that corrosive welfare rhetoric. We have the right policy, so leave the blame-shifting to a government that hasn’t. Leave it to a government that has to resort to tub-thumping speeches about sanctioning half a million people, most of whom are new claimants or who have a good employment record, while they convince the public that those same people are so lazy or feckless or both that they deserve it. Leave the blame-shifting to them. We don’t need it, and neither do the people we’re fighting for.

Veronica Bennett is the Labour PPC for South Ribble