Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 12:00 am on 24 July 1978.
I cannot give that during a debate in which I have been asked to keep my speech short.
I was talking about the relationship between the figures for unemployment and crime. They produce, in some extreme political minds, a cry for bringing back conscription. Those who would like to see conscription reintroduced in order to reduce unemployment say that we should thereby take the young people off the dole, and teach them discipline and a trade. They say that it would prevent many people from being idle for so long that they lose the will to work, eventually lose the capacity to work and, after two or three years of idleness, become unemployable.
I appreciate that that is what the Secretary of State hopes to tackle with his various job schemes. But the schemes are failing in an important respect. There are not enough worthwhile jobs to which the schemes are applied. The jobs involved are not permanent. More important, the jobs do not involve the teaching of skilled trades. If all those jobs involved apprenticeships, if all the young people for whom job opportunities were found were learning a trade, and if about three times the number of jobs were available, we would be getting somewhere now and for the future—somewhere towards building up productive capacity for industry and commerce.
About £530 million is spent each year on job schemes. If in addition, some of the £1,500 million which is to be raised by increasing the payroll tax were also spent on such schemes I am sure that we could afford to subsidise a large number of apprenticeships. In that way the system could be made compulsory, both upon the employer to take apprentices and upon the employee to become an apprentice.
I know that that sounds a little like direction of labour and I know that many trade unions would object because it would increase the number of apprentices in a trade. But there can be nothing outrageous about compulsion to employ and train, or in compulsion to be employed and trained.
There is the mandatory number of disabled people an employer has to employ. There is the compulsory industrial levy. There is the cessation of dole for a person who refuses to take a suitable job. The school leaver would have time to choose a career or trade, if one made apprenticeships compulsory.
Something drastic must be done to close the floodgates of unemployment. Why can we not introduce a system of conscription for apprenticeship as some solution to our rising unemployment problem?