Orders of the Day — Unemployment

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 12:00 am on 24 July 1978.

Alert me about debates like this

Photo of Mr Harold Walker Mr Harold Walker , Doncaster 12:00, 24 July 1978

I reject wholly and entirely the charge flung at us by the hon. Member for Brentford and Isleworth (Mr. Hayhoe), using the words of a newspaper columnist. This Government have not used and never will use unemployment as an instrument of economic policy. If I say that with a little feeling, it is perhaps because, in common with many of my hon. Friends but unlike many Opposition Members, I have experienced the hardships and miseries of unemployment at first hand. I can therefore establish my credentials to speak with some conviction in this debate.

I do not charge the hon. Member with insincerity. However, I charge him and his party—including the hon. Member for Glasgow, Cathcart (Mr. Taylor), who is more concerned with making his speech from a sedentary position—with the fact that, overriding any concern they might have for unemployment, they desire to use the unemployed as a political instrument with which to beat the Government over the head.

It is ironic that the hon. Member keeps harping on productivity as an element of Government policy when it was his party which deliberately filleted out the productivity responsibilities of the Department of Employment and Productivity, as it then was, and divested it of those responsibilities which had been built up to improve productivity.

Despite what the hon. Member said, I had not intended to raise this next subject. It is he who dragged in the question who was changing the presentation of statistics. The Department of Employment Gazette for March 1972 shows that the total register of unemployed on 14th February 1972 was 1,574,500. I readily accept that that included those who were temporarily stopped and that, of course, it was certainly a sensible move at that time—