Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 12:00 am on 24 July 1978.
The hon. Member for Glasgow, Maryhill (Mr. Craigen) has made some constructive points. I particularly want to return to some of the points that he made about training.
There have been constructive speeches by Opposition Members. Even the Minister of State acknowledged that my hon. Friend the Member for Brentford and Isleworth (Mr. Hayhoe) made half a constructive speech. I think that he made a wholly constructive speech, as did my right hon and learned Friend the Member for Hexham (Mr. Rippon).
I cannot pay the same compliment to the Minister of State. The speech that he read was not very constructive. However, I acknowledge at once that his right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Employment has endeavoured, perhaps desperately, to be constructive over the national problem of unemployment.
But the right hon. Gentleman finds himself in a dual political personality—a Jekyll and Hyde, as it were.
As Dr. Jekyll, he administers for unemployment a number of palliatives—temporary employment subsidies, small firms subsidies, job release schemes, job creation programmes, training and work preparation programmes, job opportunity schemes and the rest—all calculated to help the country to digest unemployment. As Mr. Hyde, the right hon. Gentleman is responsible for the operation of that misnamed measure, the Employment Protection Act, he supports the £1,500 million increase in the payroll tax, he concurs in the loss of contracts by the pay policy blacklisting, he approves the corset control of the banks in their lending to private sector industry. In short, he is a member of a Government who, in four years, have succeeded in doubling unemployment.
It must be so frustrating—indeed, even heartbreaking—for the Secretary of State that the more subsidies he pours into industry and the more bright ideas that he has about job creation schemes, the higher the unemployment figure has risen.
However, the Secretary of State can congratulate himself that his subsidies and bright ideas have kept more than 300,000 people in some kind of work. I shall want to come to that point later. He can also congratulate himself that, by means of his subsidies and bright ideas, he has kept down unemployment by a quarter of a million. But what consolation is that when, even relieved of that quarter of a million, the figure is still 1½ million?
Both the Secretary of State and the Minister of State know that there is no credibility in trotting out the Labour Party propaganda that unemployment is due to world recession, not enough nationalisation and all those excuses that we have heard lately. I think that ringing in the Government's ears must be the quotation made by my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Hexham of what the Chancellor of the Exchequer said at Preston in October 1974—that a party which contemplates unemployment on the scale of 1½ million out of work is not a party fit to govern and unite Britain.
When talking about these fantastically large figures—1½ million unemployed—it is difficult to realise the human tragedies that they create in any particular area or, indeed, in the 1½ million families affected. It brings a little more reality into the figures to think of them on an area basis.
On Merseyside, for example, where my constituency is located, the 95,107 unemployed means that one in eight of employable persons is out of work. That is what is meant by 12·6 per cent. unemployment on Merseyside. "Ah", say Government spokesmen, "but look at the trend: from 9·3 per cent. in 1975, a jump up of 2 per cent. to 11·5 per cent. in 1976 became a jump up of only 1 per cent. to 12·4 per cent. in 1977 and a jump up of only 0·2 per cent. to 12·6 per cent. this year." It is marvellous, is it not? If one states the figures quickly enough, they sound quite good. But those figures still mean that Merseyside now has one worker in eight out of work when three years ago it was one worker in 11.
And that one will be joined by many others within the next two or three months, when Merseyside will have 1,000 more school leavers and with many redundancies which are in the pipeline: English Electric 600; Courtaulds 300; Triumph 3,000; Plessey 600; Lucas 1,450 over two years; Birds Eye 450; Western Shiprepairers 625; Meccano 350; Otis 300. Those are firms on Merseyside with all those redundancies in the pipeline and heaven knows how many more from Tate and Lyle eventually. Merseyside will certainly have up to 100,000 unemployed within a couple of months.
There is an anomaly about all these figures which puzzles the public. That anomaly has been mentioned by more than one speaker in the debate. With 11 million unemployed, the profitable postal service cannot find enough postmen to make Sunday collections. Trains and buses are frequently taken off—notice being put on the stations that it is because of shortage of staff. Our hospitals have waiting lists of 600,000 because of lack of nursing and ancillary staff. No one appears to be available to deal with derelict land, boarded-up shops, vandalised warehouses, potholed pavements and to build the millions of homes that we need.
We could be almost self-sufficient in food if we had sufficient farm workers. We could bring the Armed Forces up to strength if we had sufficient recruits. We could stop the phenomenal increase in crimes of violence if police forces were brought up to establishment. With all that, we have 1½ million unemployed.