Melanie Phillips Knows Even Less About Unemployment than the MMR Vaccine.

The Mail is in its element with the Tory plans to send the long term unemployed onto "community work". That'll teach the scrounging bastards, stop them spending zillions of pounds on cider and plasma telly's, and watching Jeremy Kyle all day, and so on. Christ, they even began one article with the adjective "feckless unemployed". Now I'm not naive - I know not everything is ticketyboo with welfare payments, and it is a difficult balance to achieve. But what really gets on my steaming wick about the rhetoric around this story is the implication that everyone who is unemployed is A) better off that way, and too lazy to look for work and B) chose to unemployed. I cannot stress how unfair these assumptions are. I've had a tough year employment wise, and I can assure you that in my experience A and B are completely opposite to what I have experienced, and I doubt I am alone in that regard. I got so fucking wound up about this labeling of those who were out of work as a bunch of idle layabouts, by people who had been fortunate enough never to have experienced the cold winds of unemployment -that I actually was moved to write a letter to the local paper in response to some prat who had written in mouthing off about something he knew nothing about. (I made headline letter too) Such is the fog of ignorance around this much maligned group. So with trepidation I have been keeping up with the commentary on the issue, and lo and behold Melenie Phillips was only too willing to spout complete bollocks to the target audience, and; my God it's a masterpiece.... of shite.

"There is a rough rule of thumb that if the wrong kind of people are ­opposed to what you are doing, then you must be on the right track."

No Mel, that's just blinkered thinking.

"So what is he doing to provoke such fury? Why, making the outrageous ­proposal that instead of ­sitting at home on benefits doing nothing, people who are out of work should actually give something back to society in return."

What? Are all people doing that? Is looking for jobs, filling in application forms etc.. doing nothing. What about people who worked and paid N.I, but were made redundant, and will pay it when they get a new job. That is sort of "giving something back". Not everyone unemployed and on benefits is automatically a lazy scrounger, why can't people fucking see that?

"According to advance reports, IDS will be requiring the unemployed to ­undertake community service projects such as gardening, clearing litter and other menial tasks."

Couldn't this threaten some of the people who already do this for a paid living? Why pay someone a good wage, if you can pay people peanuts to do it for them. It could actually put more people out of work. At least they could give gardening advice to their new "co-workers".

"Following the example of U.S.-style ‘workfare’, they will do such jobs for 30 hours per week for four weeks at a rate of £1 per hour, under the threat of being stripped of their Jobseekers’ Allowance for three months if they fall short."

The plan for this scheme is that Job Centre advisers will "assign" long term jobseekers to these placements on their own discretion if they feel it would "benefit" them. A worry I have about this scheme is that the job seeker is under compulsory obligation to attend a specific location and time, no ifs and no buts. What if they can't fit childminding around them? What if their kid is ill one day? What if it is driving distance and they have no car, or can't afford the fuel for the journey, or the bus fare? Are they to lose three months of JSA for even a minor transgression? Let me repeat that, there may be people who have no access to a source of allowance for 90 days!

"Shock horror! Such is the outrage on the Left, you’d think IDS was proposing to send little children up the chimneys."

Oh boo hoo, some people think differently to Mel on a controversial plan. The monsters

So far so bad. But this being a Mad Mel article, the stupidity and mindfuck swiftly gets turned up to eleven. Check this utter brain melt out:

"They [the leftys] whine, for example, that the unemployed can’t be expected to find work, as there are no jobs to be found. At the very same time, they splutter that having to do such community work will give the ­unemployed no time to look for work.

They don't literally mean there are NO jobs at all! Anywhere! There are few jobs to go round relative to the levels of unemployed, that's why people are struggling to find something. As for her second point, if the work corresponds with the opening hours of the job centre, anyone without access to their own computer (which means a lot of unemployed people who tend to be skinter than the whole) will find it difficult to look for something.

"Well, which is it? If there aren’t any jobs, what’s the point of looking for them?"

You know Mel, credit where credits due. I thought you were just a slightly barmy right winger, but I now realise you are in fact the worlds greatest satirical genius. I mean no one could intentionally be this moronic and not just secretly taking the piss, undermining the values you claim to espouse.

"IDS is, indeed, the one person against whom that particular smear of ‘heartlessness’ cannot be made to stick. The patent decency of the man is plain for all to see. He is motivated by the ­highest possible concerns to rescue the poor"

That's her opinion I suppose. IDS' "compassion" always strikes me a bit like the heavy handed patrician attitude to the poor in Victorian times, a compassion that can disappear if you don't accept it on their terms. Not helpful.

Mel now starts changing tack, pulling out straw men to show how it's the left who actually hate poor people.

"under the guise of ­‘compassion’, the Left traps people in ­permanent poverty through treating them as less than human."

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"For what drives ‘progressives’ absolutely wild is the moral concern at the heart of the IDS project — to encourage the poor to take some responsibility for themselves and for others. But it is an article of faith on the Left that the poor are helpless tools of circumstance; and so it is outrageous to expect them to behave as anything other than victims, who accordingly can only ever take rather than give."

This kind of sentiment is what worries me so much about this kind of stuff. Mel and IDS don't seem to grasp the fact that - let me spell it out for those at the back -

"PEOPLE DON'T ALWAYS CHOOSE TO BE UNEMPLOYED AS A LIFESTYLE CHOICE"

They don't seem to tumble to the possibility that people can be poor and unemployed because of arbitrary factors like pure bad luck. Their attitude seems to be "anyone who is unemployed is too lazy and idle to get a job." Mel is guilty of the things she accuses her opponents of. She can't see them as victims in any circumstances! She can't see them ever giving, only taking! If this punitive philosophy is espoused by the guy tasked with sorting unemployment. Yeah people are going to worry!

"This is tantamount to saying that the poor are a breed apart — incapable of ­displaying the same human dignity as the rest of society."

said someone who said this:

"to encourage the poor to take some responsibility for themselves and for others."

Call me cynical but doesn't this imply that the poor generally don't do these things willingly? Thus implying that they don't have the same sense of dignity as other members of society?

She then blames the entire left for creating a poverty layer as part of a plan to keep themselves in work. No, really.

"Their resulting entrapment in permanent poverty then gives the Left their own meal ticket for life through the enormous industry they run to manage the lives of the poor."

With that in mind it is heartwarming to see Mel's own solution to welfare recipients.

"But there was one important element of the U.S. scheme from which the Coalition is flinching. It set a cut-off point for benefit payments if the claimant hadn’t found work by the end of a set period."

"But it seems that the IDS proposals will not contain that crucial ­welfare cut-off point. So one might say that, far from being unprecedentedly harsh and cruel, these proposals don’t go far enough."

Setting a specific time limit for finding a job and then cutting their benefits after that time is up is seven shades of stupid. Finding a job is dependent on so many external factors. Availability, the whim of an employer, the economy, the time of year and so on. You cannot put a time limit on something that owes so much to pure chance. Yeah you can cut the benefits of those who obviously aren't looking for work (that's why you have to sign on in the first place), but to put a set limit for everyone regardless of circumstances is brainless and actually downright evil.

This kind of sentiment to the unemployed and those on benefits is what worries me so much, especially now that those in power share them. We never hear of the problems of the collapse of traditional manufacturing base jobs, outsourcing, the service sector orientated jobs market (that is why many young men with poor communication skills find job hunting difficult), the reliance on agencies that deflate wages and allow employers to lay off agency workers at a moments notice when things are slack. That job security is wretchedly low these days. As for people who are better off on benefits (and I admit it can happen.), is it always out of laziness, or down to low wages that don't reflect the cost of living? Or due to the large numbers of part time entry level jobs? Is it moral to cut child benefits to children who had no say in their parents circumstances?

But all this would be both hard to convey and would require a lot of reflection and self analysis, which isn't really the turf of Melanie Phillips. I mean why do you have to bother with all that shit, when unemployment is all down to people being to lazy to get a job. You don't have to tackle the root causes, because there aren't any. People choose that life, and we'll punish them for it. It's all their own fault and not down to say something like bad luck or the butt end of a very free market orientated jobs sector. We don't have to change anything because they brought it all on themselves. That kind of attitude is growing, and if we judge a society on how it views those on the lower rungs, that isn't something to be proud of.