Earn £££££££s with Purnell
There’s a smell of the 1970s about the Work and Pensions Secretary James Purnell. It’s the sideburns and the ties. It’s the barely suppressed contempt for the idle, the scroungers, the dossers.
You could drape a camel coat around his shoulders and bingo! he’s the coldly brutal boss of a struggling First Division football team telling them to get out there and commit atrocities. Or he’s a softly spoken crime boss telling his heavies which fingers to break – think of a better looking John Osborne in Get Carter.
As David Hepworth says, it won’t be Purnell getting his hands dirty when it comes to enacting his plan to supplement the servile class with the long term unemployed and disabled:
“Forcing” people to work means somebody’s got to do the forcing. Most of us would do anything rather than that.
And what of the people being forced? How are they supposed to look for proper work while they’re toiling in a New Labour camp? There’s a casual demonisation at play here, that pandering to the myth that the jobless are shiftless.
Why else is ‘community service’ being mentioned? You automatically lump the jobless in with petty criminals. How’s that for cementing the image of the unemployed as parasites? As inherently dodgy? People who say being unemployed is a cushy number would seem to never have experienced it first hand.
I just hope that the details of this are all set down clearly. At least more clear than Purnell was on Radio 4 this morning. He was either being evasive or is ignorant of his own policy, both of which are worrying.
Are there going to be plenty of Job Centre staff to help the jobless? When I was looking for work a few years back, the level of sickness at Hove job centre was incredible. Some weeks you couldn’t even sign on because of the staff shortages. I’d go in week after week looking for desperately needed advice but would be turned away because there was nobody who could speak to me.
When I eventually fell into the clutches of Working Links, the private sector company piloting the New Deal in Brighton, thing didn’t get better. I’ve written about this before. The bloke looking after my case couldn’t advise me on Tax Credits because even though he’s been on the training course ‘it was boring’ and ‘he couldn’t remeber anything about it’.
I hope private sector management of people’s lives has improved in the few years since it tried to screw mine. I hope there is no longer just an emphasis on getting clients (for that’s what the jobless are called) into any job at any cost so the company can get its mitts on the cash.
When I expressed an interest in being a journalist (that is, a career rather than a job) and needing the training they looked at me like I had just taken a dump on their desks. The benefit payments couldn’t be transferred to my partner while I took the training because I was the sole client. Eventually we scraped out of the situation with no help from Working Links whatsoever. They still got to keep the money though. Money for nothing, the lucky bastards.
I wouldn’t expect any of this to have improved in the five years since it happened to me. The unemployed in this country rank just above refugees. They’re not people to be helped, they’re scum permitted to scrape by, to be coerced, and made to feel grateful.
Unemployment benefit, you would think, isn’t a meagre safety net open to everybody, it’s a feather-bedded paradise. It would be wrong of us to hope that some of the mutton-headed rubber johnnies who think like this might get a taste of it in the upcoming recession. We’re not like them.
Posted on July 21st, 2008 at 1:28pm under Eye Catching Initiatives, New Labour
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• 14 Comments |
If I may, I have experience in the field of youth unemployment and much the same rules apply.
Unemployment is low but, reducing it further is still seen, foolishly, as a vote winner so new schemes are thought up. In any number of jobseekers there is alway a hardcore of people taking the piss but government never gives the agencies the tools to deal with them and this new legislation is a case in point. It only effects long term unemployed, who, if they’ve any sense, will take on a small bit of work after seeking for 8 months to send the community service clock back to zero.
From real experience, you know if a seeker needs a rocket within a month, most good unemployment workers will make it clear benefits will be stopped if anymore piss take goes on and as JSA is a gateway benefit, that does the trick. Trouble is not enough workers play tough.
As for the scheme for dealing with Incapacity Benefit, I love it, because this is the greatest area for fraud, esp with people claiming it for mental health issues that have long since passed.
One thing is that long term benefit recepients are loath to come off it, because it’s a gateway to housing and losing benefit and going into work would mean a complete collapse of the life they’ve built but that doesn’t mean government shouldn’t do something about it.
I had a nasty shock when I saw Purnell on Sky News this morning. What a disgusting, chinless, pasty-faced excuse for a man he is. “Milquetoast” incarnate.
What I noticed while claiming dole was just how little attention is paid to the labour market.
There’s very little information given on the kind of jobs that come up regularly in a certain area or on major employers in the locale. Big employers such as councils and the NHS hardly ever advertise at Job Centres.
For all the talk of ’skills’ and ‘training’ they never show any enthusiasm for helping people find and fund courses that might be useful to a career or vocation. The only saving grace for me was that I knew I wasn’t going to be forced into doing something I really detested or some kind of slave labour project. Looks like that is going to change…
The thing that I don’t understand in all this is that if (a) there is work that needs doing (as there presumably must be for these “community service” schemes), and (b) there is money to pay both dole and for the administration of whatever crack-brained scheme they’re going to come up with, plus a healthy dose of profit for whatever private sector slave-traders get involved – wouldn’t it be simpler and more efficient just to drop the whole “work for dole” bollocks and call it a job?
Maybe I’m being obtuse, but to my mind working for money is normally known as “having a job”. Is this all really just a not-very-clever may of getting round the whole minimum wage thing?
Bloke across the road hobbles slowly down the road with a stick every so often, to renew his incapacity claim. Before lying under his van, tinkering with the engine.
Bloke two doors up, total waste of space, alcoholic, never done a day’s work in his life, but he has stuff I, working, can’t afford to buy.
Bloke moaning that the council owe him this and that and should fix his gate, while a TV and hi fi I could never dream of owning sit in his rent-paid living room.
I have one child, because I couldn’t afford the childcare costs for two, while the woman over the road breeds asbo brats and piles the pavement with black bags of rubbish every week.
Meet enough of the idle and the scroungers and you almost want to start buying the Daily Express.
What jobs they are supposed to get when all the ‘factory fodder’ jobs have long since been ‘outsourced’ overseas and no employer would want to touch them with a bargepole and we’re entering a recession is, however, something I’ve not seen the politicians answer.
while the woman over the road breeds asbo brats
Luvly jubbly
> wouldn’t it be simpler and more efficient just to drop the whole “work for dole” bollocks and call it a job?
Totally agree – I’m all for the (fit to work) unemployed being made to work for their money, provided they’re paid at least minimum wage, and given holidays. sick pay, etc. Work as a human right and all that.
If you pointed out to Purnell that state job-creation schemes are a bit un-free-market, he’d probably cry.
May I add that the level of ability in those that work with the unemployed is quite poor, so that signposting to training and services and offering careers support is juts not present, which is the real problem and a damn shame.
Daniel Hoffmann-Gill’s latest blog post… On Torture…
Unfortunately the situation has not improved since your experiences, and I suspect it is only set to worsen. There are no actual links with employers via New Deal or Pathways programmes, and advisors are there to try and force claimants into whatever job they happen to have adverts for at the time, so lots of support or care worker jobs, which are incredibly physically demanding and unsuitable for the vast majority of disabled claimants.
I’ve blogged about these issues many times, as has Wat Tyler from the financial perspective,
Bendy Girl
Bendy Girl’s latest blog post… Nothing Ever Happens
What jobs they are supposed to get when all the ‘factory fodder’ jobs have long since been ‘outsourced’ overseas and no employer would want to touch them with a bargepole and we’re entering a recession is, however, something I’ve not seen the politicians answer.
Where do you think the jobs the eastern European immigrants are doing have come from? Right now at least there is no shortage of employment.
This was an issue in the Glasgow East by election yesterday and various party activists from all sides were asked for views on the policy. The only one who made the point you draw about community service was Jim Wallace for the Lib Dems who pointed out the criminal overtones of the expression and merely said – that tells us all we need to know about this really.
Scott’s latest blog post… Glasgow East by-election
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