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Tuesday 7 October 2008

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

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

We’re soon into the 40th of my allocated 30 minutes, and he has batted away two civil servants who say his next visitor has arrived. He is no longer welfare reform minister (his last job under Blair), but is almost evangelistic about settling my doubts about Labour’s record on poverty. 'The Labour party was founded on the right to work, the creation of the welfare state and all the great reforms of the past were about the right to work, full employment and the right to work.' I ask if he would say (as James Purnell, the new Work & Pensions Secretary, did) that Britain has 'full employment' now. 'Statistically,' he says. 'But the problem is they are economically inactive.'

An honest answer. In 1944, when William Beveridge defined 'full employment' as unemployment of less than 3%, he would hardly have imagined that three times this figure would be on other out-of-work benefits. But Murphy does not belong to the type of Labour politician who claims to have conquered it by dint of reclassification and statistical fiddle. Indeed, he sees this as a betrayal of his party’s values. 'The Labour Party and the trade union movement was never based on the right not to work for those who are able and capable of doing so,' he says.

He points to a new, attitudinal problem. 'There was a period where it was a matter of working class pride that you didn’t rely on benefits,' he says. The period that his father grew up in, I ask? 'That’s right. There was a pride and dignity in work.  Deindustrialisation where whole streets have no one in work, I think, changed the culture in some communities about attitudes to work.' This is the crux of the issue: joblessness has lost its stigma. I say that ten years of Labour is long enough for him to stop blaming 'deindustrialisation' – ie, Thatcher. He says no matter what you blame it on, the corner has been turned. 

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