There is nothing prudent about letting unemployment spiral
According to the Latest figures unemployment is currently hovering at just below 2.5 million. By now the national, and party political, debate about how we deal with the recession has taken a certain shape. It is, many would have us believe, a choice between pain relief and prudence. While both major parties compete to promise cuts the Tories in particular have rammed home the question of the budget deficit. It is a fact that increasing government spending has the potential to create jobs at a moment when jobs are scarce. Yet according to Cameron et. al. attempts to relieve hardship must, must, be tempered by an ovveriding cmmitment to assure the future financial position of government.
Yet if the history of economic crises teaches us anything it is that there is nothing prudent about allowing unemployment to spiral. We know well that the decade of mass unemployment in the 1980s created a cohort of people who – having experienced long, long term unemployment – were simply unable to work again. The unemployed of the 1980s were of course, at the time, compared to the ‘virtuous’ unemployed of the 1930 who in the words of Norman “Neanderthal” Tebbit, simply ‘got on their bikes and looked for a job’. Yet it is actually the case that unemployment in the 1930s doggedly persisted in the case of quite substantial recovery, and that historical evidence suggests this was in part because of the inability of those who had been crushed bythe experience of long term unemployment to find the work.
The significance of this is that it problematises what it means for government to be prudent right now. Allowing unemployment to spiral – as undoubtedly the Tories will – has the potential to create a mass of people who, while not lazy, simply find it far harder to partake in regular employment in the future. Put in terms that even a Tory could understand, it will create a mass of dependents and erode the tax base of the future. And through no great progressive virtue on the part of Gordon Brown, we DO actually have an important choice to make at the coming election.
Reader Comments
There are no choices, they seek to do the same who ever wins, round and round in circles we go! All the Major parties agree on one thing keeping the profit system propped up!
Labour may play the class card against the Tories, but in doing so they lie through their teeth, and how many times have we heard the Tories say that Labour have stolen their polices or that they agree with Labour and will support this or that vote in parliament.
They agree on many things including war!
So your against the rise in National Insurance then – which is a taxon jobs? Or would you use the money it raises to pay for public sector workers whom we cannot afford? You seem to be suggesting that Tories ‘like’ unemployment, or at the very least prefer it to having to cut down on the quality of their sherry.
I have actually lived through the ‘disastrous, awful Thatcher years’, 19 years old, unemployed for the best part of two years, unplanned pregnancy, a baby son, partner and living on Income Support (£64/wk for a family of three) on a very rough council estate (hence the immediate housing availability). Yet I am a Tory, and look to the Labour government of the ’70s with disgust? I don’t have the perfect answer to this recession, but those who conjure up the image of “Nasty Tories” and attack their policies are identifying the wrong enemy here.
I think both the government and the opposition are being rather economical with the truth (no pun intended).
It seems rather like we’ve a tight rope to walk, and the two parties are arguing about which side we should be worried about falling off.
To the right: – If we let the debt get out of control, and interest rates on it rise, we’re in the shit as we’ll have to divert even more resources into paying off the debt and compound interest.
To the left – If we fail to sustain a recovery, and we get an unemployment-deflation spiral, we’re in the shit as we’ll have ever decreasing revenues and spending, and will need to re-inflate the economy with even more government borrowing and quantitative easing.
But whoever is leading our country over the tight rope after the next election, if we start falling one way, you can bet they’ll try to correct to the other direction, regardless of which way they reckoned we were falling before. This seems to me to be mostly posturing by the government and opposition to try to win points and appeal to their core voters before an election.
Call me a cynic if you will