The road to Purnell.
Over on the bustling Open Left blog, James Purnell has had a look at the Tories' welfare proposals and rather than arguing with the merits of their policies has instead decided to pick holes in them. If anything, Purnell is critical of the fact that they could be less tough on claimants:
Even if Purnell is right, the Tory proposal is much more preferable. Just what jobs exactly are these lucky people going to have to take up or lose their benefit? Ones you would imagine that are dead-end and which no one who had a choice would want. Training on the other hand is a different realm of possibilities, although the funding and planning required would be far larger than simply plonking someone into what could be a completely unsuitable job. The other lesson of course from US welfare programmes is that they simply give up on those who exhaust their entitlement to benefits, leaving the charity sector to pick up the pieces, which is only slightly more draconian than what is being proposed here.
The real point though is that the Labour and Conservatives plans are almost identical, and that although I was highly critical of the Tories' policies yesterday, Purnell may well have set me straight on which will be the most destructive. It's worth quoting the comments left by both myself and Lee Griffin:
The other big mistake the Tories are making is giving up on the Job Guarantee. In fact, this seems to me to be the bit no one has picked up on – looks to me like they are abolishing the Future Jobs Fund which is creating jobs with public and charitable organisations so we can offer everyone a job to every JSA claimant aged 18 to 24.
I think this would increase the number of claimants – training has limited value in helping people back to work. Instead, places like Denmark and the Netherlands guarantee people work but require them to take it up. That helps people such as the disabled who sometimes get overlooked in interviews. But it also forces people who are cheating the system to stop claiming. This is also the lesson from the US welfare programmes – what works is work. The Tories seem to be moving away from it (and indeed this seems to contradict the headline in the Sunday Times “Tories would force jobless to work”).
Even if Purnell is right, the Tory proposal is much more preferable. Just what jobs exactly are these lucky people going to have to take up or lose their benefit? Ones you would imagine that are dead-end and which no one who had a choice would want. Training on the other hand is a different realm of possibilities, although the funding and planning required would be far larger than simply plonking someone into what could be a completely unsuitable job. The other lesson of course from US welfare programmes is that they simply give up on those who exhaust their entitlement to benefits, leaving the charity sector to pick up the pieces, which is only slightly more draconian than what is being proposed here.
The real point though is that the Labour and Conservatives plans are almost identical, and that although I was highly critical of the Tories' policies yesterday, Purnell may well have set me straight on which will be the most destructive. It's worth quoting the comments left by both myself and Lee Griffin:
Interesting fight going on isn't it. On the one hand you have a party demonising the poor and the out of work, threatening them with destitution and a life of crime if they don't follow the government's prescribed course of "work-fare". And now you also have the Tories giving their own perspective on the same thing!
Is this really about picking (what are minor) holes in Tory policy, or outpourings of jealous petulance at them coming so close to Purnell's own frankly despicable policies?
I notice that nowhere in this does Purnell address the feasibility or likelihood of moving 500,000 individuals from IB onto JSA when there's the simple fact that there's no jobs for those people and that even if there were employers are loth to touch those who have been sick for years with a ten-foot barge pole. The real point here is that there is next to no difference between both the Tories' and Labour's policies: both are intent on further impoverishing the most vulnerable in society, not because it will save money, as it almost certainly won't, but because the focus groups and tabloids demand it.
Labels: conference season, Conservative party conference, David Cameron, George Osborne, James Purnell, policy, politics, spending, welfare reform
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