Britain now endures the highest unemployment figures since 1935. The increase of 545,000 a year is the steepest since the great depression. Our jobless are growing over twice as fast as those in any other EEC country; and yet we are still only at the start of a long road. The consensus forecast is for a further increase in the number of adults without work of between 300,000 and 400,000 by the end of next year. Unemployment is being used as a tool of economic management to an extent that no government since the war has dared contemplate.
Behind the figures is a catalogue of demoralisation and some despair. Nearly half of the 2,001,208 are under the age of 24. On Merseyside, the unemployment total has reached 102,894, of which 17,000 are this year╒s school leavers. They are chasing just 1,928 jobs. These school leavers are offered wages as low as ú25 a week. They cannot afford to move away in search of work: they cannot even pay public transport over any distance.
Another snapshot behind the figures: more than 343,000 people have been without a job for over the year. No longer on earnings-related benefit, or even flat-rate unemployment benefit, they make do on supplementary assistance. Rent-paid, it comes to ú29.70 for a man and wife. For each 10-year-old child, the couple receives ú6.25 a week, and more for older children. That inevitably means cutting down on food, drink, the little pleasures. No treats for the children in these dog days of summer. Wait for the winter, and the heating bills.
We are increasingly two nations, riven between employed and unemployed, north and south. Nearly one in 10 of the workforce is idle in the North, the North-west, in Wales, in Scotland and, the worst affected region of all, in Northern Ireland. But the malaise creeps south. There are another 24,000 on the South-eastern dole queues this month, leaving aside the school leavers. There are 14,000 more adults unemployed in the West Midlands. As the northerners traipse south, unemployment will spread inexorably to the Tory heartlands.
Nobody knows what effect this nightmare may have. The learned journals predict higher crime rates, worse infant mortality. From America, a study at Johns Hopkins University suggests that each
increase in the United States unemployment rate by just one point causes 37,000 deaths over the succeeding six years. Stress and poor diet take their victims. Studies here, comparing Liverpool and Nottingham, claim that the mortality rate increases by 2 per cent for each 1 per cent increase in unemployment.
Our steep rise in unemployment is not the inevitable result of world recession, as Mr James Prior, the Employment Secretary, claimed it to be yesterday. The major depressive effects of that recession have yet to be felt here. According to today╒s OECD study of the United States ╤ the only other major economy to begin an early downturn at the same time as ourselves ╤ the American balance of trade will only swing into surplus in the second half of this year. Our own exports abroad have been remarkably stable, though they are now beginning to fall. The truth is that our industries are laying off workers because domestic demand for their products has fallen, and their share of that home market has been eroded by imports. That is directly attributable to government policy.
The economic ministers more honestly argue that unemployment is the necessary cost of reducing inflation, but that the cost is temporary. But when whole plants and companies close down, and their workforces are dispersed, how is there to be any swift regeneration? Only constant industrial change can guarantee secure jobs. Only investment in new industries can make us competitive. But which businessmen will embark on large new investments in our worst slump since the war?
