For ‘Education, education, education’, read ‘Employment, employment, employment’. Employment for all will be the primary means of bringing about social justice, bringing down the deficit and growing the economy under an Ed Miliband One Nation Labour government. The clue, as he says, is in the name.
His speech today on social security reform was not, as many had claimed and/or feared, all about slashing benefits and clamping down on the so-called ‘scroungers and shirkers’, and nor, as IPPR’s Nick Pearce explains, was it about abolishing the principle of universalism and bringing in means testing across all benefits and public services.
It was about work, jobs, employment, ‘labour’, making work pay.
For young people who have been out of work for 12 months, he pledged a Labour government would encourage firms to take them on and give them training by paying their wages for 25 hours a week, on at least the minimum wage. This will be funded by a tax on bankers’ bonuses, and for those young and out of work who refuse, they will lose their benefits.
For parents, he offered ‘a pathway back into work’ after the birth of a child. And for those made redundant later in life he promised extra support, ‘more generous to better reward contribution’, in addition to ‘extra help back into work’.
While on housing, building on much of what Ed Balls has said recently, he laid out Labour’s plans to tackle ‘one of the biggest drivers of the growth of social security spending in recent decades’ – housing benefit. He said there is ‘nothing to be celebrated’ about a system in which we ‘pay billions on ever-rising rents’ instead of ‘building homes to bring down the bill’. He pointed out that 30 years ago, ‘for every £100 we spent on housing, £80 was invested in bricks and mortar and £20 was spent on housing benefit’, while today ‘for every £100 we spend on housing, just £5 in invested in bricks and mortar and £95 goes on housing benefit’.
Cut the unemployment benefit bill by growing the work base; cut the housing benefit bill by increasing supply. Less paid out, more money in. More homes, lower private rents – seems obvious, doesn’t it; clear to all but those in government, determined to blame the poor and the unemployed for their plight, offering not a hand up but a slap in the face, and leaving a 1980s-style trail of desperation in their wake.
David Cameron, Miliband said, ‘will hit the low-paid in work… make the [housing benefit] problem worse by making people homeless and driving up the bill… hit people who work hard and do the right thing. He is a man who, together with his colleagues ‘seeks to use every opportunity to divide this country and set one group of people against another’.
This was very much a Labour speech, an Ed Miliband speech, setting out plans to tackle a social security budget in a way that helps those who are long-term unemployed and short-term unemployed, young and old. The fact that it contains tough language for those who refuse to comply and will bring down the deficit merely adds to its plus points.
The siren voices on the left need to realise that credibility does not equal betrayal.
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Shamik Das is a journalist and Labour party member.