Unemployment in Scotland

Debate between Gemma Doyle and Anas Sarwar

Wednesday 5th December 2012 Westminster Hall

[Gemma Doyle]

I think that the hon. Gentleman will find that we are discussing unemployment in Scotland. I am setting out very clearly what the Scottish Government whom he supports are failing to do. We need to get the economy back on track. There is no black-and-white answer, but the Scottish Government are failing desperately the people of Scotland. If more of the hon. Gentleman’s colleagues were interested, perhaps they would have turned up this morning.

The hon. Gentleman does not have to listen just to me. The Scottish Chambers of Commerce is also very concerned and has called on the Scottish Government to use the levers at their disposal to stimulate business growth, because they clearly are not doing so at the moment.

[Anas Sarwar (Glasgow Central) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing the debate. She is making a very positive and passionate case. On the point made by the hon. Member for Na h-Eileanan an Iar (Mr MacNeil) about the unemployment statistics in Scotland, my hon. Friend is right to say that unemployment has fallen across the UK but risen by 7,000 in the last quarter in Scotland. One reason for that is the number of people who are leaving school and not going into employment or to university or college as a direct result of the thousands of college places cut by the SNP Government.

[Gemma Doyle]

My hon. Friend is spot-on. I have met 17-year-olds in my constituency who were due to start a college course and thought that they had their future mapped out, but whose course was cut at a day’s notice because of cuts to Clydebank college. My hon. Friend is absolutely right.

My constituents have been particularly badly let down by the Scottish Government. Despite having one of the most challenging job markets in the whole UK, the Scottish Government have chosen to ignore us. In the initial plans to set up enterprise zones in Scotland, West Dunbartonshire did not even merit inclusion in the initial considerations. After snubbing our area, the Finance Secretary refused to meet me and local representatives to discuss his decision. In March this year, when West Dunbartonshire had the highest youth unemployment in Scotland, we were excluded from any support from the Scottish Government’s youth unemployment strategy fund.

There is no logic, no help, no jobs—only politics. The Scottish Government talk only of the limitations of the current constitutional settlement. Let us imagine the position if there were another devolved nation in the UK, one that could lead the way and would grab and use every power that it had to help its young people and wring every drop of help out of the levers of power that it had. It just so happens that, in Wales, Labour’s Welsh Government are doing exactly that through Jobs Growth Wales. That scheme is providing jobs—not work experience or training—for unemployed 16 to 24-year-olds, paying them the national minimum wage for a minimum of 25 hours a week and getting 4,000 young people a year back to work. I am told that most of those jobs are in the private sector. The scheme requires the positions to be new, not replacements—helping Welsh businesses to grow even in this tough economic climate.

If that is good enough for young people in Wales, it should be good enough for young people in Scotland. However, the Scottish Government have one priority, which they are pursuing relentlessly. I wish that it were job creation, and I hope that they will look very carefully at the Welsh scheme. At the moment, however, they are pushing everything else aside to pursue separation, in the hope that the people of Scotland will take a risk and cross their fingers that the grass will be greener on the other side.

Only last week, someone from Scottish civic society told me that their fear is that the Scottish Government are standing back deliberately, letting things get worse and worse, all to boost the fading chances that people will back their flawed plans for separation come 2014. At the heart of the SNP is a mistruth, the often repeated mantra that separating from the rest of the UK will mean that all of Scotland’s problems will be solved.

I want to roll back the years slightly to 1968, when Mick McGahey, the National Union of Mineworkers Scotland Area president, argued at the Scottish Trades Union Congress for a Scottish Parliament but against separation. He said that his members had more in common with the London dockers, the Durham miners and the Sheffield engineers than they had ever had with the “barons and landlord traitors”, as he called them, of Scotland. That is still true today, because someone unemployed in West Dunbartonshire has more in common with someone unemployed in the west midlands than with the speculators who caused the economic collapse, even the Scottish ones.

The workers movement has always been an international one. Constitutional wrangling will do nothing for the 218,000 Scots who want a job. In fact, it may harm business confidence. Last month, Rupert Soames, chief executive officer of Aggreko, which is one of Scotland’s six FTSE 100 companies, the largest temporary power generator company in the world and based in Dumbarton, said that the disadvantages of separation were

“large, serious and…likely to arise”

and would create

“a great deal of business disruption”.

Most worryingly, he said that business leaders were unwilling to speak out because

“over the past couple of years, anyone who has dared open their mouths on the subject with views that are contrary to those of the SNP have brought down on themselves rains of bile and ire, which is really very unpleasant.”

He said that a lot of the language was very intimidatory. What a damning indictment of Scotland’s Government. I am sure that the bile and ire will be raining down on me on Twitter later. In fact, I saw the hon. Member for Na h-Eileanan an Iar (Mr MacNeil) on his phone, so perhaps he has already been at it. We need the voice of business in this debate. We need them to be the job and wealth creators. We need a frank discussion, for the 218,000 families dealing with unemployment and for every person in Scotland.

I am told that during a recent conference, the Deputy First Minister, who walked away from Scotland’s health service to lead the nationalists’ referendum strategy, was asked about plans for welfare provision in a separate Scotland. He reportedly said that it would take four or five years to work out the details. Scots do not button up the back; we are not going to vote for a blank sheet of paper. No answers on welfare, no attempt to drive down unemployment and no real dialogue with business—only an obsession with separation. We should not be in a situation where almost a quarter of a million people are out of work without any proper provision to help them back into jobs. It just is not good enough.

I want us to debate employment, not unemployment, and celebrate our world-leading sectors of energy, food and drink—particularly whisky—tourism, life sciences, electronics, defence and aerospace, and manufacturing. Right now, Scots are caught in a toxic storm of the Tory-led Government’s cuts and the Scottish Government’s refusal to help. It is time for them both to step up to the plate, put aside their obsessions and ideologies, and help the people of Scotland back into work.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Gemma Doyle and Anas Sarwar

Thursday 6th September 2012 Commons Chamber

[Anas Sarwar (Glasgow Central) (Lab)]

4. What assessment he has made of the likely effect of proposed changes to employment law on low-paid and vulnerable workers.

[Gemma Doyle (West Dunbartonshire) (Lab/Co-op)]

22. What assessment he has made of the likely effect of proposed changes to employment law on low-paid and vulnerable workers.