Let me preface this by stating that I am not speaking from personal experience. I am happily retired after a long and rewarding working life. I do however have acquaintances amongst the long-term unemployed. Not because they want to be and not because they are scroungers. They remain unemployed because they are superabundant. If there were several million vacancies and nobody was filling them because of their attachment to daytime TV then the Tory campaign against the jobless would carry more weight. But clearly, George Osborne and Ian Duncan Smith do not have a clue.
I am told by those in the know that the Work Programme is not working. Tougher sanctions against the unemployed are not what is required. What is required is to make work a realistic prospect, which does not mean cleaning graffiti and cooking for the elderly.
Now, IDS has come up with the cockamamie idea under a Workfare scheme that jobseekers will have to report to the job-centre every day, some benefit claimants facing 35 hours a week so occupied. How will the unemployed in rural areas cope? Reporting to the job centre everyday and what that alone means in transport costs. And where will these people be put? There are millions of them all needing to use the toilet facilities....
I am not standing in defence of the work-shy. I am saying though, that treating the unemployed as social outcasts is a toxic form of political attack that has no place in my reasoning.
GO and IDS should try living in the real world....
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