Oh no, not 'on yer bike' again - Morning Star Comment

Oh no, not 'on yer bike' again - Morning Star Comment.

It's back to Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith today, because the man quite simply can't keep himself from stirring it up mindlessly.

Last time we mentioned him, it was because he wanted to keep elderly people at work until they dropped.

This time, he's turned his creative little mind to those working-class people who don't have jobs.

They, he says, need jobs. Perceptive of him.

Not so perceptive is the idea that they should up sticks and away to where the jobs are, and this government can help by sticking council tenants at the top of the housing list in areas where jobs abound.

It's an attractive idea for Tories and their Lib-Dem apostles, but like most ideas that attract them, it's so full of holes that you could sieve peas with it.

Mr Duncan Smith doesn't seem to have much of a handle on reality any more, if he did in the first place.

At least he has admitted that fact that all governments have shirked from admitting for decades, that the unemployment figures are the result of a stitch-up by successive administrations and the claim of around 2.5 million unemployed really represents over "five and a half million people of working age who simply don't do a job."

But him being forced into admitting that is the case is a small and bitter victory.

More of a triumph would have been him admitting something that we've been batting on about for years, but doesn't seem to penetrate the thick skulls of whichever party is in power, namely that there aren't the jobs for these people to go to.

And that half a million vacancies don't go far with 5.5 million unemployed, that this figure will inevitably worsen as the elderly are forced to continue working, that the VAT rise will suck demand out of the economy and that, as the public sector is butchered, it wil force tens and, maybe, hundreds of thousands more onto the dole.

There isn't much knowledge of working-class life in Mr Duncan Smith's head either. "We have over the years, not us personally but successive governments, created one of the most static workforces in the western world," he said, and he's right. But there are many reasons, for that.

Working-class families, to a large extent, rely on inter-generational support mechanisms to supply child care, schools pick-up and collection and all the other conflicting tasks that hit young working families.

Break up the communities by chasing jobs around the country and you demolish that support network at a time when public provision of services is increasingly under attack.

And what's the use of being at the top of a council housing list when councils and their housing association collaborators are producing little housing to meet an already overstretched and urgent need?

What is it about Chingford MPs, anyway? Mr Duncan Smith's predecessor in the constituency made the same ass of himself many years ago with his call for working people to "get on their bikes," to find work.

At least the Work and Pensions Secretary, unlike Norman Tebbit, omitted to include the bikes.

But, other than that, it's the same old reactionary Tory drivel that they've always pumped out.

Stable working-class communities should be turned into hordes of itinerant labourers trekking round the country to follow non-existent jobs.

Sometimes it feels as if the Tories are not just trying to turn the clock back to before the welfare state, they are trying to revisit the early 19th century.

That would suit them just fine, with workers' rights restricted, with social services provided by a mixture of charities and Lady Bountifuls and with unions totally hamstrung with an itinerant labour force.

Well, it might suit them, but it certainly won't suit us. And the real question is: "Why should workers wreck their lives to follow the work, when their government is wrecking the regional development structure which could use workers' taxes to encourage the work to follow the workforce?"

Link: Morning Star