Latest from Coffee House

On Monday, we published a post on George Osborne’s “jobless recovery” — the point being that 90 per cent of the recent rise in employment can be accounted for by foreign nationals. Here’s a counterpunch to it from the IPPR’s Matt Cavanagh, who should already be familiar to CoffeeHousers from his previous posts and articles for us on matters military. We’re hoping that this will be the first of a new series of “Right to reply” posts, giving outside writers the opportunity to take on your loyal baristas in mortal combat. Here goes: One of the most frequently recycled statistics of recent years is the percentage of “new jobs going

“More than 400,000 people have been out of work for more than two years, according to analysis of the latest Government data by think tank IPPR.” So runs its press release today, trailed in the Sunday press and the wires. I hope the IPPR didn’t spend too much of their donors’ money on this research, as the figure is updated quarterly and freely available from the DWP website (click here). Add up only three categories: lone parents, jobseekers allowance and incapacity benefit the figure stands at 2.4 million, certainly “more than 400,000”. Worse, at the peak of the boom (Feb07), this figure was even higher at 2.5 million. And yes, it’s

Iain Duncan Smith has made two notable media appearances today and his comments will reveal how the government’s plan to fight gangs and lawlessness will unfold. He has just told Sky News that cuts to local youth programmes should be revisited. If the government reverses some of these decisions, it might satisfy the need for a positive policy angle, as described by James earlier. On the other hand, some Tories voice private concerns about reversing spending decisions, fearing that it would play into the Harmanite school of thought that cuts are to blame in part. Youth schemes and work are IDS’ inclusive carrot, but he also wields a coercive stick. He has

Theodore Dalrymple has an article in this week’s issue of magazine (non-subscribers can buy the Spectator from just £1 an issue), on the nihilism of the young. Roy Kerridge came to very similar conclusions during the Brixton riots of 1981. Here’s what he made of them: A day in Brixton, Roy Kerridge, The Spectator, 18 April 1981 Some years ago I noticed that all was not well with some of the teenage children of my West Indian friends. After reluctantly being pushed out of their schools – where they really did spend the happiest days of their lives, going on treats almost every week – they simply went home and

Before everyone gets too excited, Iain Duncan Smith is not saying in his speech today that immigration is a bad thing in itself. But he is saying that it has consequences, some of which impinge on native Brits. Many of these consequences are, as it happens, writ in the official statistics. As IDS highlights – and as Coffee House has detailed before – a good number of the jobs that sprang up during the New Labour years were accounted for by immigration; and there are signs that the process is continuing still. This is one of the reasons why the number of jobs in the economy can increase, while the

I live three miles away from where the rioting was happening in East Belfast last night, and heard the helicopters whirring overhead. It was the kind of sound that anyone living in the city hoped never to hear again. As a child, I’d lie in bed and hear bombs and sirens and helicopters — and we had all hoped that dark chapter had been closed. A tipping point of violence has now been reached. A press photographer has been shot, another given a fractured skull after a second night of riots. And in the aftermath, the blame game cacophony begins: Who started it? It was them. No it was them

Forget Balls, today brings one of the most significant moments in the life of the coalition so far: the launch of its Work Programme. The name may be commonplace but, as Fraser suggested earlier, the policy is revolutionary. Over the next year, around one million unemployed people will be enrolled on work schemes run by private companies and charities. Those companies will then be paid between £4,000 and £13,700 for every person they return to proper, long-term work. It is, evidence suggests, an effective and cost-effective way of getting benefit claimants back into the labour market — and it reaches those claimants that the state-run JobCentres can scarcely be bothered

To disguise the radical nature of reform, one need only make it boring. And here Chris Grayling has succeeded spectacularly. Today he has announced further details on the ‘Work Programme’ and the ‘Benefit Migration’, which sound like the type of well-intentioned but doomed reforms that ministers tried over the Labour years. The welfare state has incubated the very ‘giant evils’ it was designed to eradicate. There are, scandalously, 2.6 million on incapacity benefit right now – a category which ensures they don’t count in unemployment figures. Brown didn’t care much, but Grayling is taking this head-on. In tests on 1,700 IB claimants in Burnley and Aberdeen, it was found that

It is almost a cliche to describe jobs figures as a “mixed picture” — and yet that’s exactly what today’s are. Beneath the headline finding that the number of unemployed people has risen above 2.5 million, are numbers that will fuel not only David Cameron’s happiest dreams, but also his most paranoid nightmares. Let’s start with the nicer stuff first. The graph above shows the cumulative change in employment levels since the recession started to take hold in 2008. What it shows is something that often goes ignored: that is was the private sector, not the public sector, that took the greatest hit from the crunch. At the depth of

Youth unemployment in the UK has hit another record. More 16 to 24-year olds are out of work than ever. The unemployment rate in this group is now a shocking 20.5 percent, which amounts to nearly a million young people out of work. Of those, 600,000 have never had a job since leaving school or college. All unemployment is bad news, but youth unemployment is particularly bad news. We want young people who leave education to get a job, learn the skills and disciplines of work and build up the experience that will help them be upwardly mobile. That benefits them, obviously, and it benefits the whole community too. But

Dressed with his effortless prose, Matthew Parris has a point (£) that proves why he is the leading commentator of the last two decades. Housing benefit reform is his subject and he urges his readers reject the legends that have accrued around the issue – not Boris, not Polly Toynbee, not shrill councils, not rapacious landlords and definitely not the government. No one, he says, has the numbers but there are several certainties: ‘The outcomes may not prove nearly as brutal as this week’s predictions. What (as I asked above) can we know? We know that comparisons with Paris are ludicrous. All of our big cities are speckled with very

This is the next of our posts with Reform looking ahead to the Spending Review. Earlier posts were on health, education, the first hundred days, welfare, the Civil Service, international experiences (New Zealand, Canada, Ireland), Hon Ruth Richardson’s recent speech, selling the case for cuts to the public and how to deliver retrenchment.  (And the next subject, defence expenditure, can be found here) The debate over spending cuts was taken out of Westminster to the ex-mining constituency of Cannock Chase, Staffordshire on Friday. For “Can Cannock Cope? Showcasing local champions and public sector reform in Cannock Chase”, Reform assembled heads of local public services and business leaders in front of

This is the fourth of our posts with Reform looking ahead to the Spending Review. The first three posts were on health, education, and the first hundred days. What is the budget? The welfare budget must be at the heart of the debate on how to restore the public finances. The Government spends more on welfare than anything else. In 2009 the bill for social protection was around £199 billion. This has almost doubled in real terms over the last 20 years from £104 billion in 1989. Social protection now represents 32.5 percent of all government expenditure or 14.2 per cent of GDP. Some welfare spending varies with economic conditions,

Sometimes hope lies in the details. Take this morning’s press release from the DWP, for instance. On the surface, it is a response to today’s encouraging employment figures. But what it really is is a new way of approaching the problem of worklessness in this country. And all because of its headline: “Figures reveal five million on out of work benefits as Grayling pledges to make work pay.” This is, as far as I can remember, the first time that the total out-of-work claimant count has reached the summit of an official release. The last government always knew what the figure was, of course, but never drew much attention to

David Cameron’s Big Society re-launch continues after his American interlude. Today, he will introduce the national citizens’ service for 16 year olds, which was famously backed by Michael Caine during the election campaign. There is no military element to this national service; the aim is to unite different communities, ages and classes. As a leader in the Times puts it: ‘The bold aim is to turn a summer of potential drift and disaffection into one of purpose for youths from different backgrounds, working together to help people worse off than themselves, under the wing of various charities and social enterprises; and thereby, perhaps, to lay the ground for a less

So much of the welfare debate is lost in jargon and the numbingly large and depressing numbers. John Bird, founder of The Big Issue, has just been on The Daily Politics and he condensed the specious waffle into plain but evocative sound bites. ‘You don’t have a broken society without a broken system. The usual suspects come in and advise Blair, Brown and now Cameron that what you need is money for the poor. The poor don’t need more money; the poor need more opportunity.’ Bird admitted that prison made him upwardly mobile. He left it being able to read, write and paint, and was given the confidence to pursue