Orders of the Day — Unemployment

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

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Photo of Mr Ivan Lawrence Mr Ivan Lawrence , Burton 12:00, 24 July 1978

I am sorry that the Minister of State, Department of Employment could not stay, because I wanted to compliment him on the professionalism of his speech and to express my admiration of its sheer, brazen effrontery.

If I were a Minister responsible for employment in this Government I should have jumped off a cliff a long time ago or at least resigned; but not that redoubtable performer the Minister of State. Like the burlesque performer of old, the show had to go on; the world was falling about his ears; everything he had lived his political life for was in pieces, and there he was hamming it up at the Dispatch Box.

A visitor from Mars hearing the Minister of State might have thought that the Government had actually put Britain "Back to work with Labour", instead of doubling the number of unemployed. He might well have thought that all the other comparable nations in the world had done far worse than we had instead of having done almost invariably better and put us nearly bottom of the league. Such a visitor might have thought that we had all the elements against us, instead of having the bonanza of North Sea oil and gas.

Listening to that Archie Rice character the Martian might have thought that all the Government's forecasts of the past had been right instead of all wrong; that Labour had been good to small businesses; that the Employment Protection Act had actually created jobs; that the Government had fought for the cuts in public expenditure rather than having had them forced upon them by the IMF; and that the result of all that will be that a grate- ful nation will return Labour to office at the next election.

That speech might have amused a Martian, but it will not have amused the nation, still less will it have amused the 1,585,800 people most of whom have this Labour Government to thank for being out of work. This Government's record on unemployment has been a humiliation even for their own supporters.

In Burton-on-Trent today there are 1,871 people out of work compared, with only 672 when we left office—and that latter number included students, who do not figure in today's total. What a record to be proud of! The Labour Government have brought about a threefold increase in the number of jobless when they promised a decrease in the numbers out of work. That must be an utter disgrace.

When we consider whether there is any prospect of an improvement if this Government stay in power, what is the situation? My right hon. Friend the Member for Crosby (Mr. Page) pointed to the horrifying future facing Liverpool and Merseyside which the Select Committee of which I am a member visited. Unemployment there stands at 11 per cent. now, I think, and will probably rise to 14 per cent. in the next few months. The same sort of thing applies in Wales, where the level of unemployment is between 11 per cent. and 12 per cent., and it applies in the southwest and in other regions all over the country.

Yet we have Labour Members advancing Socialist solutions—more nationalisation, as though nationalisation had ever created more jobs; a reduction in the working week, which would be likely to increase unit costs and price us out of world markets; protectionism, which would stop other countries from buying from us; and more cuts in defence, which have already cost about 200,000 jobs that people would have had but for Socialism.

What else Labour Members would do has not been made very clear, since most of the speeches today have been taken up with an attack upon Conservative policies, an attack which is always made when the Labour case is a bad one, and an attack which is as ill-founded as it is misleading. What is certainly clear—nobody can argue against this point—is that the policy of the Labour Government has so far been a total failure. If they are going to break away from that policy they are leaving it a little late to tell us about it, as it is just about 11 weeks away from the next election.

The Labour Government's remarkable performance over the unemployment forecasts does not help to convey confidence. As my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Hexham (Mr. Rippon) showed, every optimistic forecast of reduced unemployment has been wrong. One can understand why the Chancellor would not let the Select Committee and the Manpower Services Commission have his mid-term forecast for the next 12 months, because if it has been wrong when the mid-term forecast has been promising what on earth can we expect when the forecast is bad? Bad it must be. And to pretend that the 1·7 million was not a forecast is to play with words—and for what other purpose than to mislead everybody?

It may be that there can be no reliability about such forecasts, but it is absurd to pretend that there is some important difference between an informed assumption about future unemployment trends and a forecast of future unemployment trends. Further, it is sheer idiocy and grossly misleading to pretend to optimism that unemployment will fall when the Government and Trades Union Congress both agree that it would require a growth rate of about 3½ per cent. a year merely to keep unemployment at the present level and when our growth rate is now under 2 per cent. So let us have no more of it. Let the Government come clean for a change. Let us have some truthful open government, as they promised us.

What about Conservative policy on unemployment? I cannot stand here and catalogue it. That has been done almost ad taedium. Although hon. Members on the Government Benches never stop baying. "What is your policy?" because they cannot think of anything else to say, the truth is that anyone who has attended our debates or read Hansard will know that it has been detailed often, loud and clear, from the Conservative Benches.

The silliness of the criticism that we do not have a policy has, I believe, filtered through to the hon. Member for Liver- pool, Walton (Mr. Heffer), whose criticism was not that we did not have a policy but that our policy was wrong. He is aware that we have a policy. But there has come from the hon. Gentleman the persistent myth—