Rhetoric isn’t working

Labour isn’t working. So went the Conservative slogan in 1979, ushering in a change of government and a new wave of politics, in which the misfortunes of ordinary people boosted the political fortunes of a group who had little experience of unemployment and even less interest in the damage it does to society.

It didn’t take long for people to recognise that concern for the jobless was the last thing on the government’s agenda, as Britain staggered through the recession of the early 1980s and unemployment rocketed. Oddly enough, though, the voters didn’t seem that bothered.

Today unemployment is once again a stick to beat the government with. The figures are appalling, whatever your political perspective: 1.9m children in a home where nobody has a job, an increase of 170,000 over the last year. There’s every reason to be shocked that three million people haven’t had a job since 1996.

Theresa May, the shadow work and pensions secretary, is making a speech today castigating the government’s record and pointing to the £340bn spent on state benefits to the jobless since Labour came to power. But what’s the agenda here?

Governments – Tory and Labour – have had two overriding imperatives in the last 30 years: to curb welfare spending and to get the claimant count down. Labour trumpeted the New Deal as a way of moving the jobless into work, with apparent success in the early years; but this was aided by sustained economic growth and failed to address entrenched and long-term worklessness. Hence the rather less cuddly approach to benefits reform, which has become increasingly coercive.

Theresa May might rail at the levels of welfare spending and the numbers of jobless, but how concerned is she to improve their lives? At a macro level, would she and her colleagues stipulate a level of worklessness they consider acceptable, and resign if they fail to achieve it? Or will we see a repeat of the 1980s, where the pre-election outrage turns into post-election disregard?

Take a look at today’s Daily Mail and you’ll find the dominant attitude rather more clearly expressed. The unemployed aren’t people who’ve fallen on hard times or who struggle with chaotic lives: they’re ‘the “Shameless” generation of benefit addicts’. Perhaps the poor are always with us because we live in a society that despises them.

We should understand by now that unemployment and benefit dependency is the result of a complex of interlocking problems that no government has successfully addressed, and no pontificating can possibly help to solve. To untangle the lifestyle factors, circumstances, chances and choices that leave the long-term unemployed where they are demands personal relationships, mentoring, and patience. There are many successful examples of it – Groundwork’s projects spring to mind – but they are almost always small scale and their funding is fragile. Instead of supporting them as they should, governments (including the current one) prefer to package up large contracts for commercial organisations like A4E in the vain hope of getting better value for money.

But then our approach to poverty has always been driven more by the quest for value for money than by the hope of creating value in people’s lives. A history of Sheffield’s workhouses quotes Alderman Richard Searle, chairman of the Sheffield Guardians, at the opening of the Sheffield Union Workhouse (now the Northern General Hospital) in 1881:

‘They had spent a lot of money and the people of Sheffield would have to pay it. (Laughter) He could assure the ratepayers the guardians had been exceedingly careful how they had spent the money. They had not spent it recklessly, but had tried to get value for their money. They had spent the money well, and had got something durable. The buildings would not tumble down in a year or two, they were commodious and substantial , and second to none he had seen in the kingdom. (Applause). Concluding, he hoped that, with the spread of education, pauperism would decrease, and that the people would be more careful, thoughtful, and thrifty, so that the time might arrive when the workhouse would not be required (Applause).’

Well, the Daily Mail would say people aren’t more careful, thoughtful and thrifty, and it’s all Gordon Brown’s fault. Theresa May should think carefully about the poisoned chalice she’ll inherit if she gets the job of work and pensions secretary, because she’s offering nothing to suggest any change in the way we approach those whose lives are most difficult in society, and for society.