Training and the Unemployed

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 7:28 pm on 5 June 1991.

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Photo of Tony Blair Tony Blair , Sedgefield 7:28, 5 June 1991

I support that policy absolutely. The hon. Gentleman has been badly briefed by his researchers. The Fabian pamphlet that Ministers cite against a minimum wage was actually written in support of it. The job estimates are absolute nonsense. We know, as does the rest of the country, that Conservative Members are raising the issue only because they dare not talk about the unemployment that they are creating, day in and day out.

The other day, in an interview on "Frost on Sunday" on TV-am, the Chancellor of the Exchequer gave the Government's response to the recession: These are just vague stirrings at the moment, but the signs arc there … I know that when one talks to business men —I talk to business men all the time, and listen very carefully to what they're saying—lots of them say, 'We can't see it', but of course, they can't sec round the corner. That is what the economist has to do, what the Treasury has to do, and what we have seen David Frost then asked the Chancellor: But the vague stirring? You're saying you've seen vague stirring? The Chancellor replied: Faint stirrings, yes. Given three years of high interest rates and the number of small businesses going bankrupt—bankruptcy rates went up by 97 per cent. in the south this year, by 115 per cent. in the midlands, by 159 per cent. in Wales and by 261 per cent. in East Anglia—"faint stirrings" are a pretty poor record for any Government after 12 years.

Ministers told us that there would be no recession when there was a recession; they told us that it would be shallow when it was deep. Now, when the evidence of their own incompetence is piled deep around them, and when we have the worst recession in the western world, they still try to pretend that the problem does not exist, because they do not have a clue how to solve it.

Does the Chancellor of the Exchequer not understand that, as he and his colleagues looked round the corner—as he puts it—two years ago and told people that there was an economic miracle, and as people and businesses planned, borrowed and organised on that basis, those people and businesses are now entitled to experience feelings of betrayal, because, instead of a miracle, they have got a recession? Does the Secretary of State for Employment not understand the feelings of the unemployed, and their anger, not only about the fact of unemployment but about the fact that, at a time of fast rising unemployment—we have the fastest rising unemployment anywhere in the western world—the Government are cutting the budget for training the unemployed?

When unemployment was last at 2 million, in December 1988, the budget for special employment measures was £1–5billion in real terms. Today it is £800 million. Then, unemployment was falling; now, it is rising. Are not the training and enterprise councils, which have been landed with the responsibility for training the unemployed without the power or funds to do it properly, entitled to experience a sense of betrayal as well?