Welcome to my blog. I am a former local journalist who now works in PR and a Conservative and community activist in Woking and Horsell. This blog will keep updated on local issues as well as my interests and quirky news stories.
Norman Lamont famously, or infamously, declared in 1991 that unemployment was a “price worth paying” to get inflation down (so much so that the Mirror ran a scare story on this back in 2008). With cuts in public sector jobs inevitable and the knock-0n effects of government cuts likely to be seen in the services area of the private sector, will rising unemployment in 2011/12 be a “price worth paying” to bring the deficit down?
This is a question that must be weighing heavily on the minds of George Osborne and David Laws right now – and probably too on the PM and NC’s as well. Perhaps Vince has got a solution up his sleeve but one suspects not – what to do with all these people whose wages Labour’s wrecked Britain can’t afford to pay right now?
Sending them onto benefits makes no sense at all and is equally ruinous financially. While there are schemes for re-training and skills, there is only so much they can do and in any case, who needs an extra 30,000 people with IT qualifications? There are plenty of other, more manual, jobs around but for most people that’s not something they want to consider. Part-time work and sharing full-time equivalents between two or even three people means that what income is available is more equitably apportioned but again, that’s not going to be able to cope with the scale of what we might be talking about.
My feeling is that as many as 600,000 jobs could be affected both in the public and private sectors during the next five years and even if 100,000 of them have the nous and entrepreneurial spirit to set up their own businesses, that still leaves half a million more people out of work. I firmly believe that this is the fault of Labour, who expanded public sector employment in a shabby vote-fixing exercise to bring more and more people into public pay and into the clutches of Unite.
The truth was we couldn’t afford them and left to their own devices they would have found other ways to contribute to the economy. Now, they will be forced to do so in circumstances not of their own choosing and with an economy that is not conducive to their efforts.
