Author: Robert HendersonRobert Henderson
Date: Jul 23, 2008 13:31
: The roots of the long-term unemployed army and the legion of
school-leavers classified as NEETS lies in the Thatcher era, which not
only destroyed the natural employments of the workingclass and created
structural unemployment. To cover this disaster, the Tories attempted
to disguise the massive employment by allowing sickness benefit to
balloon
Thatcher set the stage for Major, Blair and Brown to follow suit and
expand on the disastrous policies she had initiated such as
privatisation of strategic industries, the export of jobs and the
adoption of an open door immigration policy. Much of this disastrous set
of policies was made possible by her embrace of the Single European Act.
Attempts to portray any of our present economic and social woes as the
consequence of socialism is a nonsense. We had more or less full
employment from 1945 until 1975, by which time the oil price shock had
filtered through to the economy in general. Even then, by 1979 there
were only a few more than 1 million unemployed and that was an honest
figure because all the ways of hiding unemployment such as long term
sickness benefit, training schemes and extended education had not been
used.
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