A doleful tale from which no one benefits-Comment-Columnists-Libby Purves-TimesOnline

A doleful tale from which no one benefits-Comment-Columnists-Libby Purves-TimesOnline

A doleful tale from which no one benefits
The pessimism of unemployment
Libby Purves

Launching the Freud report, the Work and Pensions Secretary, John Hutton, got strict about welfare reform. “The status quo is not defensible,” he said severely, seeming not to notice how odd that statement sounds from a Government that has had ten years of comfortable majority in which to change that status quo.

He said much the same thing in December — pledging to end the “can work, won’t work culture” and “hardcore” benefit claimants who won’t compete with East European migrants. Indeed, you could conclude that it is only the sight of foreigners finding jobs in two days that has made the Government notice our own shortcomings. Now the finger is pointed accusingly at the long-term unemployed, the 100,000 able-bodied and unencumbered who have spent six of the past seven years on benefits, and at the boom in incapacity benefit (currently three million claimants). We are promised “initiatives”, involving firms and charities being paid bounties to persuade people into work, combined with benefit cuts, unlovely bullying of single mothers and American wheezes like free haircuts and tattoo removal.

Well, Mr Hutton didn’t confirm the tattoo removal, not being a fool, but we get the idea. And — leaving aside the complex matter of single parents — we should all feel sympathy with the general aspiration. Long-term unemployment is a curse: it not only bankrupts the state but leaches self-respect, health and hope from the individual. Often enough it leads straight on to claiming incapacity for depression and stress (such claims have risen by a third since 1997). The bald fact is that anybody able-bodied, with no serious domestic caring to do, should earn their keep. Daytime TV is no life, nor is the well-documented route whereby the young untrained unemployed — “Neets” — are 50 per cent more likely to drink heavily, take drugs and fall ill.

There are always exceptions, but it cannot be denied that thousands are not trying very hard. In times and places with a general expectation that every herring hangs by its own tail, the most surprisingly encumbered or disabled individuals manage to earn. Just glance back in time at a prewelfare Britain, or across the world, at African women running microcredit businesses while supporting half-a-dozen Aids orphans.
Background

* Anger over benefit reform plans

* Benefits rules will hit single parents

* Free haircuts to help jobless

We all know that, really. But crunching through statistics and economic papers I found myself musing on less solid things: attitudes, feelings. One figure that sprang from the thicket was that whereas in the 1960s and 70s the average duration of UK unemployment was under one month, in the next two decades it rose to nearly seven. Doesn’t sound much, but that is an average: it hides the fact that through the Eighties and Nineties it became commonplace in many areas to be without a job or much hope of one.

It also hides creeping incapacity benefit: as mines and factories closed, doctors in depressed areas began signing sick notes for social reasons. “There’s no work here for a man pushing 50,” said one GP when the Corby steelworks closed. “So I sign him off sick. He does better that way.” He probably feels better too, officially labelled as Not A Well Man.

In 1973, I was sent to interview 17-year-olds who — shock horror! — had left school a whole year ago and never worked. “Jobless youth” was much discussed as a novelty. I remember those kids well: they were pitifully ashamed, and vainly applied to shops and hairdressers and British Leyland. A couple of years later the Today programme sent me north to interview another new species: a man in his forties, a former shipyard worker who had been looking for work for two whole years! More shock. He described his life without self-pity — the boredom, the embarrassment, too much time to worry about aches and pains, the sense of rejection when the Jobcentre could not offer even menial work. His wife, who had a cleaning job, sat quiet beside him and once said gently: “It’s not your fault, pet, everyone knows that.”

If you are under 30 and incredulous, let me reiterate that these were news stories: they surprised people. Today they would be unremarkable. And because of that — because of what happened to working people in the faltering 1970s and then the brusquely callous 1980s, when tens of thousands were thrown out of the steel, coal and manufacturing industries — the stigma of unemployment faded. It had to. Mere humanity demanded it. For a couple of decades we had in our midst a vast number of people excluded from work by circumstances beyond their control.

Thus evolved a sense that living on benefits, even without young children or a verifiable illness, is OK. Not perfect, not luxurious, but no disgrace. The euphemism “unwaged” handily put carers under the same umbrella. But a nihilistic sense of benefits as a permissible way of life got passed to the next generation. At the same time a poverty trap developed whereby a low wage brought in less than benefits. Gordon Brown’s working families tax credits (although sometimes chaotic) have helped, but the trap still exists: if a single unemployed parent gets even a tentative job, the free school meals, transport, dentistry and prescriptions abruptly stop. Meanwhile, fussy and prescriptive workplace law makes employers ever less willing to take a chance on any but the star candidates. The long-term unemployed rarely look starry.

John Hutton is right: the status quo is unacceptable both in economic and in humane terms. But those who brandish carrots and sticks and hair-clippers must understand that often their enemy is a fatalistic state of mind which, though unhelpful, is explicable. That, not simple idleness, is the difference between a second-generation British refusenik and an ambitious Pole who still believes, owing to his very different national history, that life’s natural path leads upwards.