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Saturday 22 November 2008

WEB EXCLUSIVE:  Meet the minister for selling the unsellable - uncut

An extended version of Fraser Nelson's interview with Jim Murphy

It is like lighting a tinderbox – he was quite calm when talking about Europe but question Labour’s record on social justice and he’s off. 'That’s not true,' he says, about the immigrants. Yes it is, I reply. 'We’ve created 2.7 million new jobs' But that’s if you include pensioners returning to work, which is a bit of a cheat I say. We go too and fro like this for a while and he calls a truce. 'A big question is underpinning this exchange of figures we’re having: why is it someone can get a bus from Warsaw and walk straight into a job?' Agreed, I say, especially as there five million Brits on benefits.

'Look at Glasgow for example. It has a higher level of unemployment and a higher level of vacancies than the UK average and yet some people – I have to be careful here – they don’t connect the vacancies with the people who are unemployed.' It is, perhaps, a polite way of saying that immigrants are taking or creating all the new jobs while 26% of the second city of the empire are on various types of out-of-work benefits.

'So what should we do?  One is continue to look new ways to help those deemed hardest to help.  My family challenge was poverty, it wasn’t disability, it wasn’t illness, it wasn’t all the other things, it was one dimensional, it was grinding poverty, one dimensional deep and grinding poverty.' And poverty which his father escaped by going to South Africa and working as a plumber there (aged 60, his Irish-born father still works on a building site). Mr Murphy portrays this was a simple choice, against today’s more complex poverty.

'With the growth of drug dependency, lone parent families an awful lot of people have very complicated needs. So the welfare system has got to be better at coping with all those complicated needs.  But also the welfare system has got to be less tolerant of people who just refuse to work.'

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