Gordon Brown must have been at his happiest in Opposition, delivering sermons about how Labour would deliver employment to cure the Tories’ wicked devil-take-the-hindmost approach. In launching the New Deal in Feb98, he had this to say: “Young people are our future. Yet unemployment among the under-25s is twice the national average”. It was true then. But the OECD data flagged up by David Willetts shows it is now a shameful four times the national average. Ten years ago, Brown called the unemployed young people “Major’s children.” Major, of course, had a recession to contend with – last year, after a decade of growth, youth unemployment rose above the level Brown inherited. So whose children are the NEETS? Success, as the saying goes, has many fathers.
I genuinely believe this Son of the Manse originally saw a moral aspect to tackling unemployment – hence his pious “Where There’s Greed” book and his appalling quoting of the Bible against the Tories in his conference speech last year. I’d love to know at what stage he decided to sell out. That instead of reducing joblessness for real, he would fiddle statistics to make it look as if he had. I suspect immigration took him by surprise, that he suddenly saw the opportunity to misrepresent this as his creating jobs – and decided to go for the Brownie instead of the mission. Remember, 2.6m of his ”3m new jobs” went to (or were created by) immigrants. Strip away pensioners returning to work and the public sector and you’d have no new jobs at all. Which, during ten years of economic expansion, takes quite some doing.
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