Is it nearly over yet?

Are the party conferences nearly over yet? I live in hope.

Negative feelings are bad for you but I think I hate the Tories in the present government. When they’re not bribing married people or the rich or pensioners with tax breaks to get them to vote for them, they’re giving the poor, disabled and unemployed a hard time and encouraging the rest of us to blame them for the state we’re in. It’s called divide and conquer and the Tories are good at it. Just listen to how people now talk about ‘immigrants’: they’re all scroungers, this island is overcrowded, etc. Even the vans touring London and the signs up at asylum/immigration centres telling people to ‘go home’ don’t bother us.

Now Osborne is after the ‘long term unemployed’, people out of work for more than three years. How he’s picked that number, I don’t know.  His own civil servants in the Office of National Statistics don’t seem to keep figures for anyone unemployed for more than two years.

Between May and July 2013, according to ONS (last figures available), there were 2,487,000 people unemployed in the UK. 462,000 of them have been unemployed for 24 months or over. I’m sure there are some ‘skivers’ among them but equally sure there are plenty of unemployed people who worked for a long time before losing their jobs, paid tax and national insurance all that time and would love to be back at work.

By the way, it’s interesting that having them sweep the streets is what Tories think would be a humiliating job for the unemployed. Plenty of us would love to see people sweeping our streets. If only the councils could afford to employ them.

The idea of having the long term unemployed clock in at the job centre every day is just laughable. How does that get them a job? And, given how the staffing of job centres is being cut, will there be anybody there to clock them in?

Wouldn't it be better to focus on getting everybody back to work? That way, we could have more tax revenues coming in and so cut our borrowing. And given that we have one of the poorest rates of social security (I refuse to call it by the Americanism ‘welfare’) in the whole of the EU, we might even be able to give people living a decent amount to live on.

Of course, that’s a bit harder to do than picking on the unemployed.