I read today that
David Cameron today announced he would impose a £25-a-week benefit cut on as many as 500,000 incapacity benefit claimants to fund a £600m back-to-work programme.
[…]
The “tough and tender” approach was being signalled by the Tories to show the party was willing to address the victims of the recession by offering extra apprenticeships and training and by modernising welfare.
The Conservatives claimed that medical assessments designed to test whether incapacity benefit claimants are fit to work will lead, on the basis of government research, to at least 500,000 current claimants being shown to be capable of working.
Labour say that they’re doing some of this already, and that there just aren’t the doctors etc. to fast-track all of this (and never mind that incapacity benefit has traditionally been used to park problem people so the dole figures look better). But that’s not what concerns me most.
The economy is currently in the shitter; nobody’s buying or selling much, house prices that were previously over-inflated are now coming back down to something approaching reality, companies are sitting tight and hoping that they’ll make it through without having to sack too many of their work force.
And David Cameron thinks the solution to all of this is to create more and cheaper labour for the employment market?
The policy appears to be two-pronged: 1) force people who could afford to live on incapacity, but not on jobseeker’s, into the employment market; and 2) try and train up existing long-term unemployed.
#2 will probably do as well as any such policies tend to do, which is to say somewhat, but not in a way that would startle the horses. (Assuming it only targets the long-term unemployed; there are plenty of people who have been laid off for no fault of their own, and will almost certainly be hired again once the economy takes off, and making them jump through hoops going to rubbish training courses is hateful and counter-productive.)
But #1 is either an act of class-based vindictiveness or a phenomenally bad understanding of the economy that asserts that, in a time of general bad times, what we really need is more competition at the bottom of the jobs market.
Actually, knowing the Tories, it could easily be both.
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