Why is unemployment not an election issue?

On Wednesday I was sitting staring into space, wondering what I was going to write about this week. The press were preoccupied with mounting debt, and the creeps at Strathclyde Passenger Transport circumnavigating the globe at our expense.  Then my phone rang.  It was a BBC producer wondering if I would come and talk about why unemployment was no longer an issue. Now, that’s a very interesting question.

  Hardly anyone seems to think that unemployment, currently running at 2.5 million in Britain, is going to be a key issue for the general election.   An issue, yes, but hardly a dominant one.  Yet back in 1979, the last time a refreshed Tory opposition challenged  an incumbent Labour government after an economic crisis, unemployment was THE number one issue.  “Labour Isn’t Working” said that Saatchi and Saaatchi Tory ad, possibly the most  infamous election poster of all time.  Unemployment then was only 1.4 million.  

    True, the unemployment figures were calculated rather differently in 1979, but that doesn’t alter the point.  The return of mass unemployment has not been the burning issue it was in the past.   In 1979, 53% of voters believed unemployment to be most serious issue facing the country against only 30% today, according to Ipsos Mori.   Yet unemployment really is back in a big way.  The slight decline in the UK figures last week ( they continued to rise in Scotland of course) by no means indicates that joblessness has peaked.  There has been a huge increase in underemployment, with over 7.6 million on part time working.  Economic “inactivity” is also up - the numbers who have given up looking for a job, like students, long term sick etc. has risen to 8.8 million.   Hundreds of thousands of workers have accepted big reductions in pay in order to hang onto their jobs.  One in five young people is unemployed.  And the Chartered Institute of Personnel  and Development warns that a new shakeout of employment is almost inevitable later this year because of the sluggish economic recovery. 

   So, why is unemployment not an issue?  Make no mistake,  a lot of people are really suffering. Ask yourself: could you live on £64 a week jobseekers allowance?  Britain has some of the lowest benefit rates in Europe. In Ireland, unemployment benefit is nearly three times what it is here.  Many British workers have exhausted their savings and are hitting rock bottom, as the dramatic rise in the claimant count indicates.   The pain is partly mitigated by he various government schemes which have frozen mortgage payments and credit card debt.  But these subsidies can’t last indefinitely, and when they unwind, we could be facing a huge social problem. 

  But where’s the public outrage?   Where were the ministers squirming on Newsnight?   In 1991 when the Tory Chancellor, Norman Lamont said that unemployment was “a price worth paying” for economic recovery he was rounded on by the media.  Now no one bothers to compute the price of joblessness. It’s as if we don’t think that governments have any responsibility any more - even though Gordon Brown said, some years ago, that “full employment” was the government’s goal.  

    In the 1970s and 80s, joblessness was regarded as THE great social evil.  The prospect of just one million unemployed was enough to make Ted Heath, the Tory PM, radically change his economic policy in 1971.  The Labour PM, James Callaghan, came to grief over it in 79.   Under Margaret Thatcher’s monetarist policies in the 1980s, unemployment soared and so did social unrest, culminating in the miners strike in 1984/5. Now it’s back, and we all seem to be just accepting it as inevitable.  Even the response to the Corus ending steel-making in Redcar after 150 years has been muted, though a ballot on industrial action has been called. 

   So, what’s changed? Well, for one thing the nature of employment has.  Instead of being in large workforces in manufacturing industry, workers today are largely employed in small companies of under 50 often in poorly organised service occupations.  The great strikes and factory occupations in the 70’s and 80’s, like Upper Clyde Shipbuilders and the British Leyland Bathgate, were mobilised like military campaigns.  The foot soldiers were workers who all knew each other, lived in the same streets, had similar status and a great sense of class solidarity.  Now they are dispersed across all manner of occupations, as security guards, supermarket shelf-stacker, or in call centres.  They also have mortgages, which most didn’t in the 1970s, and big debts which put a dampener on industrial militancy.  And whisper it, but the influx of several million poorly unionised immigrant workers, willing to accept poor conditions and low pay, has sapped the strength of British  labour  Instead of union militancy, we have apathy and incapacity benefit.  As a result, trades unions are not the political force they were in the 70s and 80s. The last attempted strike action was the farcical BA non-event at Christmas.  Before that, it was power station workers downing tools in favour of “British jobs for British workers”. 

   The other big difference is that the public sector unions have not yet been mobilised in this economic crisis.  The recession has hit in the main the private sector.  Employment by the state has actually risen by around 100,000 since 2008, during the deepest recession in eighty years, and wages in the public sector have continued to rise, even as non-state workers are taking pay cuts.    In the past, public sector workers - nurses, teachers, fire-fighters - had a deep sense of grievance at their poor pay and were leaders in industrial unrest.  Nowadays they are a relatively privileged class earning higher wages and with better pensions than their private sector equivalents. 

   However, this might all be about to change.  If and when the next government tries to tackle Britain’s unsustainable public deficit, sacking hundreds of thousands of public sector jobs, then unemployment and industrial militancy are likely to stage a dramatic comeback.  There have already been threats of strikes from public sector unions at the mere suggestion of a pay freeze - but much more than that will be required to balance the government books.  This may explain why Labour, which tends to do rather badly in times of industrial distress, has held off cutting public spending until after the election is safe and gone.

    So politicians may be fooling themselves if they think unemployment is no longer an issue. There is a lag in social awareness.  It has taken some time for people to remember what it actually means in terms of ruined lives and social dislocation.  If we think society is broken now, just wait until next year and the year after that.  When people lose hope they become desperate - and the clock is ticking.  

  

Are the Blairites trying to lose?

  “Out of the night that covers me; Black as the Pit from pole to pole; I thank whatever gods may be; For my unconquereble soul”.  Those who’ve been speculating about the Prime Minister’s state of mind had further material yesterday in those lines from “Invictus” by the High Victorian poet William E Henley, which Gordon Brown says consoled him during his recent trials.  The poem also gave moral sustainance to Nelson Mandela when he was incarcertated in Robben Island. 

  Make of that what you will.  Certainly, there is a darkness surrounding Gordon Brown’s personality.  But there is also defiance, dogged determination.  He is, in lines from the same poem, “bloody, but unbowed”,  a fighter not a quitter. Which makes it all the more bizarre that the leaders of the Midwinter Mutiny last week bothered with their comic-opera coup.   Over the weekend, commentators struggled to explain why two senior Labour politicians, Geof Hoon and Patricia Hewitt - not noted for their rebelliousness in the past -  should  have launched their  revolt when they hadn’t even secured the backing of any cabinet ministers, let alone significant back bench support.  Surely they realised that this prime minister would need a whole army of grey suits to prise his bitten finger nails from the door of Number Ten. 

   It didn’t make sense, and it still doesn’t.  Why did Hoowitt choose to strike in the very week when Labour appeared to be recovering in the opinion polls and Gordon Brown had his best outing at Prime Minister’s Question Time in months?  Why, indeed, launch an attack on the Labour leadership at the very moment when the Tory leader, David Cameron, had stumbled into his worst policy error since he became leader over tax reliefs for married couples? Do they want Labour to lose the election?  A BBC/Daily Politics poll on Thursday showed that 60% now believe Labour is the most divided party -  and as we know a house divided is a house defeated. 

   Well maybe they do want Labour to lose.  It may seem unbelievable that Labour politicians who have devoted their lives to the Labour Party would actually want  to lose the general election.  We haven’t had that kind of active disloyalty since the days of the far Left Militant Tendency that tried to wreck the Labour government of  Jim Callaghan in the 1970s.  But I’m having great difficulty coming up with any other explanation.  It’s not the first time either.  Think back to the ‘Night of the Stilletos’ in June when three women cabinet ministers resigned along with the work and pensions secretary, James Purnell. That was on the eve of the European elections, which Labour went on to lose so badly that it came third behind UKIP.   Even then Brown stayed put.

  Could it be that Blairite diehards are now afraid Brown might remain in charge even after a general election defeat?  Are they now trying to ensure that Labour goes down so badly that there is no question of Brown remaining as leader?  I’m beginning to think that this is the only plausible explanation.  Certainly, the destabilisation campaign is continuing.  Yesterday, Geof Hoon released highly damaging correspondence to the Sunday Times suggesting that the Prime Minister vetoed the purchase of vital military helicopters for British troops fighting in Afghanistan. This is tantamount to saying that Gordon Brown endangered the lives of British soldiers.  Serious stuff - especially since Hoon, the former defence secreatary, is due to appear before the Chilcott Inquiry into the Iraq War.  Moreover, the current defence secretary, Bob Ainsworth a close friend of Hoon, is thought to be on the point of resignation over the situation in Afghanistan. 

  In another move clearly designed to destabilise the Prime Minister, the former general secretary of the Labour Party, Peter Watt, has said that Gordon Brown is not fit to be in Number Ten.   In a book serialised in the Mail on Sunday he gives further evidence of the PM’s unpopularity in his own government. He quotes one of Brown’s longest and closest political allies, the development secretary, Douglas Alexander, as saying:  “We’ve spent 10 years working with Gordon and we don;t like him.  The more the public get to know him he less they will like him too.” Watt also reveals bungling and treachery over the abortive 2007 election-that-never-was and over the “donorgate” affair when businessman David Abrahams was allowed to disguise his cash payments to Labour by registering them under false names. The former general secretary claims he was lied to and set up by Brown. 

   The Watt revelations are clearly motivated by personal grievance , and some of the charges - such as that Gordon Brown sulked at a dinner party with US politicians - are faintly ridiculous.  Nevertheless, scheduling this embarrassing account of domestic life in the Brown cabinet on the eve of a crucial general election campaign remains highly damaging, and calculating.  Watt’s actions should surely be condemned by every member of the Labour Party.  Indeed, you wonder how the party can expect its footsoldiers to start canvassing the icy doorsteps this winter when the leadership seems to have acquired a death wish. But once again, this could be exactly what the Blairites want:  to so weaken Labour morale as to guarantee a Tory landslide.   

    If this is indeed all part of a ‘scorched earth’ campaign by the New Labour old guard - and I’m not the only person who’s thinking this - then the sections of the party that are not determined to lose the election need to consider how they respond. It’s one thing to believe privately that Brown isn’t up to it; quite another to side with the Tories.  Retaliation is necessary,  but it is hard to fight back without making he party look even more divided.   

    Brown’s last line of defence is the Scottish MPs who have in the past acted as defenders of Labour’s core values and as his Praetorian Guard.   Perhaps they need to make a move now to isolate the Right and ensure that Labour, under Brown, fights a principled campaign based on social democratic policies.  Following the financial crisis, and given the behaviour of the banks, this should be Labour’s moment.  The public are waiting for a lead against the plutocrats and banksters. It isn’t too late. Time for all good men, and women, to come to the aid of the Labour Party.

Why is Labour only Labour when it's losing?

    Following the Queen’s Speech last week, I have informed my bank manager that I have passed a private members bill to abolish my overdraft within four years.  Having entered into this solemn and binding commitment with myself, I feel sure that he will grant my request for unlimited additional borrowing in the mean time. 

  Yes, a lot of what was in the Queen’s Speech was,  like the Fiscal Responsibility Bill, complete nonsense.  Passing a law to make the government to do what it is supposed to be doing anyway is to treat the electorate with intellectual contempt. However, there was also a good deal of  interesting material in the Queen’s Speech that was largely ignored by the media, on the grounds that, since Labour is on the way to the funny farm, nothing it says is worth listening to.

   But listen up nevertheless, for this last Queen’s Speech of the Labour era tells us a lot about what has gone wrong over the last 13 years.   Whenever Labour seems to be on the rocks -  unpopular, losing votes, on the way to the electoral dustbin - it suddenly rediscovers its social conscience; dare I say it: its heart.  The Queen’s Speech was filled with measures which can only be described as, well, Labour policies.  Like abolishing child poverty, giving job security to agency workers, introducing free care for the elderly in England , promising to extend Scottish home rule. Why didn’t it do these things when it had the chance?

   The 2009 Queen’s Speech has been dismissed as an exercise in political gamesmanship, but if so, Brown is playing a very curious game.  The speech, drafted of course by the government,  included a bill to prohibit those iniquitous cluster bombs which cause terrible injuries to innocent people in war zones;  a bribery bill to clean up corrupt business practices at home and abroad and end scandals like the Al Yamamah arms contract;  and an energy bill to will help poor consumers and give financial incentives for energy firm to develop carbon capture and storage projects.  

   And there’s more.  I won’t bore you with all the details, which you can read for yourselves, but there is a law to limit banker’s bonuses and curb City risk-taking, a legislative commitment to outlaw age and gender discrimination,  and a law committing Britain to spend  0.7% of national income on helping poor countries, which has been hugely praised by Bob Geldoff and Bono. Now, it’s easy to say that this is all hogwash, and Labour is only promising to do these worthy things because it knows that it will not actually be in government to deliver them. It’s a bit like a ‘living will’ - a series of commitments designed to put the Tories on the spot.

    But hang on a minute. If the aim is to damage David Cameron by getting him to disown these policies, doesn’t that rather suggest that the're rather popular?   Gordon Brown - who lives and breathes focus groups - would surely not have put all these measures in the Queen’s Speech if he thought they were vote losers.  This is his last ditch, his final throw of the dice - mix any metaphor you like.  These bills are intended to boost Labour and give voters a clear idea of where Labour stands before polling day in May.

  So the obvious question is, again: why the hell hasn’t Labour introduced these measures before?  It spent nearly a decade dissing the Scottish Parliament for introducing free personal care for the elderly.  Too expensive!  A subsidy for the middle classes! Why shouldn’t old people sell their homes?  Well, for one very important reason: giving older people support to remain in their own homes is not only humane, it  delays the moment when they become a costly burden on the NHS.  Now suddenly, when the government is facing oblivion, Brown discovers that free personal care has been a cost-effective vote winner all along.  

   Why the delay on cracking down on banker’s bonuses and cleaning up the financial system?  One of the abiding mysteries of the Labour years is why successive Labour leaders hitched their fate to the spivs and speculators of the City of London.  It all goes back to the days of Neil Kinnock, and Labour’ desperation to show that it wasn’t anti-capitalist and cloth cap.  But that is ancient history.  Bankers are now the most loathed members of society after paedophiles, and even the Tories have been disowning their behaviour since the crash.  

   The entire financial “community” has been deeply unpopular with the voters for at least a decade.  Successive scandals like endowment mortgages, personal pensions,  with profit bonds have rotted any faith that the people ever held in the probity of bankers.  It’s why so few people save money in pensions - they can see very well that they are going to get ripped off.  Labour had a golden opportunity to remodel social democracy for the new century by cleaning up the city, ending the bonus culture, creating new mutuals and building societies, and introducing a fair deal on housing.  Instead, it cynically created a housing shortage in order to bid up asset prices and put an entire generation of young families into colossal debt to the banks. 

    Being good is popular. So why has Labour in office so often opted for unpopular vote losers?  In last weeks Queen’s Speech there was - thankfully -  not a single mention of the War on Terror, the recurrent theme in New Labour legislation since 9/11.  This government squandered support among middle Britain through its determination to diminish our freedoms and launch unpopular wars to combat a fictitious threat.  4 million CCTV cameras, identity cards, detention without trial, connivance in torture through rendition - these were never popular, which is why the Tories have disowned them. 

   Well, better a sinner repenteth, I suppose.  As it breathes its dying breath, Labour has suddenly rediscovered its soul.  You can see it on the streets of Glasgow North East, where the party is learning to be Labour again.   You can almost hear the thumbscrews being loosened on Labour dissidents.   Gordon Brown is promising a Tobin Tax on financial transactions, for heaven’s sake!  Why has this been left until the very last moment, when Labour is about to enter the long sleep of opposition?  Stuffed if I know. I’m off to the bank.