Saturday 29th August

Is that it isn’t about making sure that there are no unemployed people, but is mainly concerned with counting the unemployed.  Or not even that, but in fact trying to find ways of not counting the unemployed.  Any excuse is used to declare somebody who has no job or income as not ‘unemployed’.  If they were sacked they are deemed to have made themselves unemployed, or else they would be suing their employer for wrongful dismissal even though the Government has made this prohibitively expensive.  If they are too ill to work they are ‘assessed’ by a private company and declared fit for work and many of their benefits are stopped.  The number of those dying after being declared ‘fit for work’ is truly astonishing; by some reckoning it is 300 a week.  If an unemployed person is ten minutes late for a meeting at the Jobcentre, even when that meeting may have been changed on the same day by Jobcentre staff they will be automatically sanctioned and their benefits stopped, and Hey Presto, they are no longer officially unemployed.

You see it is very important for the credibility of the Government to have constantly falling numbers of unemployed people, so that everyone, including mostly their friends in the Media, can see that their economic policies are really working for the benefit of all.  There is no actual job creation, there is no re-training; there is no real help for the unemployed except to shove them on a scheme for a few weeks so that they no longer show up in the unemployment figures.  After all, it really is their own fault if they cannot find a job, they really should have tried harder, worked harder at school, been a better worker, not questioned their employers and worst of all not gotten themselves ill.  After all there is a perfectly good NHS out there, why on earth are they claiming they are too ill to work.  Ever since Blair, Government has all been about presentation and News management, not solving the actual problems – just being seen to be having a solution and talking up, or in this case down, the unemployed.  Simple really – cretins can do it – they usually do.