Labour pledge "job guarantees for under-25's"

[Ken Burch]

Source(Yahoo! UK)
(snip)

Young people out of work for a long time should be guaranteed a job but stripped of their benefits if they reject the chance, Ed Miliband has said.

The Labour leader said he would introduce the idea if he became Prime Minister.

He pledged that all under-25s who are jobless for more than a year will be given paid work for six months, with the plan funded by a tax on bank bonuses.

Under his policy, the Government would pay businesses enough money to cover 25 hours of work a week at minimum wage - approximately £4,000 per person. In return, the employers must offer 10 hours training a week.

(end snip)

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/labour-pledge-job-guarantee-under-25s-102637569.html

[Ken Burch]

1. My take on this:

Offering job guarantees is one thing...the coercive aspect is troubling(essentially, the proposal is.."you'll do whatever shit work we MAKE you do, or we'll leave you to starve&quot


Why don't they use this as an opportunity to create not just work, but work with real skill training and, if possible, some genuine senes of purpose and accomplishment?

I'm all for getting people who can work into work...especially those who really WANT to work but have been kept from working by the harshness of the Thatcherite economic reaarrangements since 1979...but there's something about this that is way too much in the tradition of punitive Victorian paternalism.

It essentially acts as if it was some sort of crime for young people to be unemployed and on benefit...rather than recognizing that they were innocent victims of the machinations of their elders.

Does Labour's inner circle STILL buy into the Blairite myth that "Middle England" is obsessed with reminding "the lower orders"? of their "place"?

[dipsydoodle]

2. It may not be so much what the work is

but where it is.

[Ken Burch]

3. So it's about punishing the young for not "getting on (their)bike(s)"

To repurpose a particular ugly quote from a particularly loathesomeThatcherite politician(the sort "Next Labour" is STILL obsessed with emulating, even though nobody is insisting that they do) of a few decades ago.

The idea, then, is that the unemployed must leave their neighborhoods, their friends, all that they know, and become permanent economic migrants...and if possible, keep moving often enough that they can neither resist exploitation nor stay in one place long enough to be eligible to vote for any alternative. That if your town has been left to die, you must help encourage its process of decay by abandoning it.

Because, of course, if the wealthy have decided that a particular town(or a particular region or set of regions, such as the North and Midlands of England, or particular whole subjugated counties such as Scotland, and Wales, for example)is to be left to die, no one, anywhere, especially the government, must ever dare to challenge the Writ of Economic Execution.

Not that there's anything at all to be outraged about any of this...of course...just the Invisible Hand at work...nothing to see here...move along, everyone...

[T_i_B]

4. It is a well known fact

That the Tories have an ideological hate for the North of England, Scotland and a big chunk of Wales and their policies are accordingly spiteful towards those areas.

As to Ed Miliband's policy proposal, it sounds like an expension of the current "workfare" scheme where long term unemployed are given the choice of working for their benefits or having their benefits stopped. It's still welfare, but welfare for big business rather then the poor and the needy.

Pretty dreadful, but I think workfare was one of those policies that was in the Labour manifesto as well as being enthusiastically adopted by the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats.

[Ken Burch]

5. I'm well aware of the Tories' hatred of the North and the "Celtic Fringe".

You'd think, though, that Labour would embrace the North in response, given that it tends to win massively in the areas the Tories left to rot for eighteen years under Matron and Major.

Perhaps, in the way that much of Wilson and Healey's generation of Labour politicians had been by the defeats of the Fifties, The post-Blair Labourites are still traumatized by 1979, 1983, 1987 and 1992-and have internalized, as people like Wilson and Healey did to some degree, that Labour really has no right to win an election and can't actually fight for its core supporters and core values when it DOES end up in power.