Jobs and the Unemployed

Sheila Gilmore Excerpts

Wednesday 7th July 2010 Commons Chamber

[Sheila Gilmore (Edinburgh East) (Lab)]

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker, for calling me to speak in this debate.

In the few weeks that I have been here, it feels a little as though I have walked into an Alice in Wonderland world where everything has been turned on its head. A lot of myth-making has been going on. If one says something often enough, even if it is not true, people will come to believe it. I have to say, as somebody who studied history, that we need to ask what sort of regimes are particularly good at doing that. I trust, and I am sure, that my constituents will not fall for these myths.

So what are the myths? Myth No. 1, which concerns a terribly important issue, is that Labour causes unemployment. Let us take 1997, and let us take 2010, after a major recession, and then allege that during the course of the Labour Government we have had high unemployment. If my constituents were asked which were the recent periods of long unemployment, they would not say the period from 1997 to 2008 but the periods of the 1980s and the 1990s—they know that full well. By the mid-part of this decade, we had reached a position in Edinburgh whereby unemployment had been virtually reduced to a hard-core minimum. We had a very healthy economy for all that time, so it is simply not true to suggest that we have had a period of Labour Government with high unemployment.

Neither is it true that we have the highest unemployment figures in Europe—I do not know where that that comes from. A year ago, my cousin from Spain came to visit and told me that he was very worried because Spain’s unemployment stood at 19% or 20%. That myth about our unemployment figures is another one that we must destroy.

Public support and funding makes a lot of the economic development in the Edinburgh area possible, but the Tory view is that public spending is a drag on, rather than an encouragement to, the economy. For example, the public spending and support we put into a wave power project in Leith docks—£4 million of public spending in past year—will create lots of employment, but nothing would have happened without that degree of public support. The offshore wind projects in the River Forth would not have happened without public support.

During the election campaign, a construction engineer in my constituency told me that he was seriously worried about school building projects drying up, because his firm had been associated with those nationally and in Scotland for all the years of the previous Labour Government. However, in 2007, the Scottish Government came under the control of the Scottish National party. They chose—they were not forced—not to use public-private partnership, which was Labour’s funding mechanism. As a result, they have been unable to start a single new school in my area, because they have not come up with another form of funding, meaning that my constituents’ employment prospects are much diminished. That was before public funding was cut further. If that construction engineer—he has always worked in the private sector—were asked whether he could manage without the public sector, he would say no.

Another big myth that is being perpetrated is that increased funding for welfare spending—I do not particularly like that term—means that it is all being spent on people who sit at home doing nothing. That is not true. One of the big triumphs of the Labour Government was to create a situation in which single parents, for example, can work. Single parents have been enabled to work, but only a very low proportion of them used to work, even compared with other countries, because the benefits system made it very difficult for them to do so. Tax credits, which come under the big heading of welfare spending, are designed specifically to let people work. That is what they are about. They are not about people sitting at home doing nothing. That is another myth.

I was interested to hear another hon. Member praise an academy project. We have set up similar projects in Edinburgh. I hear people talking about having a single, unitary, simplified form of training; the point is that it must be relevant to particular areas. Our training was in health care, because we had brand-new hospitals, but one size will not fit all.

Let us give up on the myths and talk about the reality. I hope that our prediction that things will not go well in the next few years does not come true, but my constituents are very afraid.