Why let facts get in the way of a good campaign, Paul?

Over on my local MP's Twitter feed, you can see him boasting about the frankly astonishing uplift in employment in the constituency.

I think we can all agree that roughly 800 people a year either getting jobs or falling off the unemployment register (which is what really matters to politicians) is an amazing result. And I'm sure some of them won't be doing part-time, zero-hours or self-employed work for tiny sums at all. No, it's a stupendous figure. Statues should be erected to Mr Uppal for his sterling work in saving these people's lives.

But what's this? There are naysayers abroad, people who doubt Paul's claims about the economic revival! Just look at them!

What's wrong with these people? Can't they see the economic miracle? The greatest resurrection since the big one? What on earth could have prompted this mean-spirited attack on Mr Uppal's efforts?

Ah. I think I get it. When Paul proclaims the Employment Miracle, it's because he's hoping we thank the Conservative government. When his own local Conservative Party attacks the Unemployment Disaster, it's because there's a Labour council which should get the blame. So let's be clear: there's a Conservative Employment Success Story and a Labour Jobs Fail…using the same statistics. 

Isn't politics wonderful?

Let Us Be Too Proud

For Christmas, my mother gave me a recent and rather magnificent copy of JB Priestley's English Journey (rarely, for an Englishman, he actually just means England too). Originally published in 1934, it's a fair rival to Orwell's The Road To Wigan Pier. Most famous for his play An Inspector Calls, Priestley's friendly, socialist, sometimes slightly tetchy style, his love of ordinary people and his fury at the lives to which they are consigned by industrial capitalism makes for very enjoyable reading. I spent quite a lot of the Christmas break tweeting his pithy aperçus about the Black Country, Stoke, the Irish, hunting and so on.

Here are some of my favourite bits. On the Black Country and its inhabitants:

a beauty you could appreciate chiefly because you were not condemned to live there

Nobody can blame them if they grow up to smash everything that can be smashed.

While they still exist in their present foul shape, it is idle to congratulate ourselves about anything 

A typical visit is his trip to Stoke. It's foul and barbaric, but he thinks the people are wonderful, and they have been betrayed by the state and the ruling classes.

a grim region for the casual visitor…I have seen few regions from which Nature has been banished more ruthlessly…Civilised man…has not arrived here yet

He doesn't think much of hunting either, particularly those who claim it's an agricultural duty or whatever:

men and women who…spare no pains to turn themselves into twelfth-century oafs, are past my comprehension'

Though he says he'd have a bit more respect for 

the man who … declares…"It may be…cruel and anti-social, but I don't give a damn".

Rather wonderfully and topically, Priestley proclaims his love of state healthcare, immigrants (his home town of Bradford declined after the German Jewish population was victimised after WW1, he says) and the poor, no matter what fat politicians say about them. He hates talk of rationalisation:

You may do a good stroke of work by declaring the Stockton shipyards "redundant", but you cannot pretend that all the men who used to work in those yards are merely "redundant" too… Their labour, wages, full nutrition, self-respect, have been declared redundant. All their prospects on this earth have been carefully rationalised away. They have been left in the lurch. We have done the dirty on them. We can plan quite neatly to close the doors of their workshops on them, but cannot plan to open anything. 

Priestley's particularly incensed by the plight of the miners. He declines the offer of a trip down a pit because he was buried for a while in the trenches and clearly suffered considerably. He knows what a foul, dangerous life mining is, and is infuriated by bourgeois accusations and the complaints of 'red-faced gentlemen lounging before club fires' that miners are lazy Communist subversives.

Every man or boy who goes underground knows only too well that he risks one of several peculiarly horrible deaths, from being roasted to being imprisoned in the rock and slowly suffocated.

He's not a 'dignity of labour' type in general, but he has some curious blind spots: though he sees the miners' wives as cleverer and more determined than their sons and husbands (they have 'gumption'), he thinks that women are more suited to repetitive factory work because they find it easier to escape into a fantasy world, and he also thinks the Irish are troglodytic peasants beyond redemption. However, he has a cunning solution to the divide between the productive classes and the parasites:

Suppose we had a government that began announcing: "Coal is a national necessity…We will now have conscription again, this time for the coal-mines, where every able-bodied man shall take his turn, at the usual rates of pay. All men in the Mayfair, Belgravia, Bayswater and Kensington areas…will report themselves…for colliery duty" What a glorious shindy there would be then! And if you could buy yourself out by subsidising a professional miner, how the wages in East Durham would rise. 

To him, the state of the mining areas is the fault of

greedy, careless, cynical, barbaric industrialism

The Daily Mail style bigotry of the urban middle classes infuriate him. He loves to see the workers having fun, whether on a trip to the seaside, having sex or getting pissed in the pub:

Those persistent legends about miners who buy two pianos at once and insist upon drinking champagne… A man who has been working for seven hours at a coal face, crouching in a horribly cramped space about half a mile underground, has a right, if anyone has, to choose his own tipple; and I for one would be delighted if I knew that miners could afford to drink champagne and were drinking it.  

He's not keen on bankers either:

Until they are openly proved to be crooks, our own financial jugglers are regarded as distinguished…benevolent wizards…a sphere of action in which all depends on your being able to "get away with" certain things.

I know all this looks like he's the world's grumpiest man, but he's on a mission - to puncture the chocolate-box-Chipping Norton definition of England peddled by politicians and his fellow writers:

Most of my fellow-authors do not go blundering in like that; they never go near these uncomfortable places; they continue writing their charming stories about love affairs that begin in nice country houses and then flare up into purple passages in large hotels in Cannes… 

As it happens, 1930s 'proletarian' novels are my specialist subject: for an antidote to the Purple Prose of Cairo, I'd recommend Gwyn Thomas's Sorrow for thy Sons, Lewis Jones's Cwmardy and We Live, Hanley's Grey Children and Bert Coombes's These Poor Hands.

By the end, Priestley identifies three Englands: Old England of honeyed manor houses and meadows (the tourist and aristocrat version), which depends on the Nineteenth-Century England of 'sootier grim-like fortresses' like Birmingham and Stoke, where money (for some) and misery (for most) went hand-in-hand, and post-1918 England. Priestley isn't nostalgic: he knows the pretty countryside was a place in which peasants starved and died, or were glad to escape to the cities, but he's determined to end our illusions. Industrialism

found a green and pleasant land and had left a wilderness of dirty bricks. It had blackened fields, poisoned rivers, ravaged the earth, and sown filth and ugliness with a lavish hand…What you see looks like a debauchery of cynical greed… Wolverhampton and St. Helens and Bolton and Gateshead and Jarrow and Shotton. … I felt like calling back a few of these sturdy industrialists simply to rub their noses in the nasty mess hey had made. Who gave the leave to turn this island into their ashpit? … and the people who were choked by the reek of the sties did not get the bacon. The more I thought about it, the more this period of England's industrial supremacy began to look like a gigantic dirty trick. At one end of this commercial greatness were a lot of half-starved, bleary-eyed children crawling about among machinery and at the other end were the traders getting natives boozed up with bad gin. 

Not that post-industrial England holds much charm for Priestley either: a land of strip malls, escapist cinema, advertising and filling stations. Like the Frankfurt School, he fears that we're all being bought off by cheap tricks and shiny toys (from Woolworths, he reckons). It looks like being a classless society in which people admire sportsmen more than royalty, so not all bad, but

too much of it is simply a trumpery imitation of something not very good even in the original. There is about it a rather too depressing monotony…leisure is being handed over to standardisation too… I cannot help feeling that this new England is lacking in character, in zest, gusto, flavour, bite, drive, originality, and that this is a serious weakness. 

What he fears is that a complacent, lazy, satisfied England is ripe for authoritarian politics: to him, the contrary, pushy, touchy, loud, drunk, proud working classes are what keeps us safe from the dictators of either doctrine.

By the end, JB is a sad and angry man. He has met working and workless people all over the country. Some of them are depressed, some broken, some slovenly, some angry, some phlegmatic. None of them, he feels, deserves the 'dole' and the attitudes which come with it.

…the England of the dole did not seem to me to be a pleasant place. It is a poor, shuffling job, and one of our worst compromises… The young men, who have grown up in the shadow of the Labour Exchange, are not so much personal tragedies, I decided, as collectively a national tragedy.
It cannot be every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost. [my italics] 

Priestley remembers the drawn, grey faces of starving German POWs in 1918:

I did not expect to see that kind of face again for a long time; but I was wrong. I had seen a lot of those faces on this journey. They belonged to unemployed men. 

…this blackened North toiled and moiled so that England should be rich and the City of London be a great power in the world. But now this North is half derelict, and its people, living on in the queer ugly places, are shabby, bewildered and unhappy. And I told myself that I would prefer…to see the people in the City all shabby, bewildered and unhappy…because I like people who make things better than I like people who only deal in money…What had the City done for its old ally, the industrial North? It seems to have done what the black-moustached glossy gentleman in the old melodramas always did to the innocent village maiden. 

What's the inevitable consequence of a country in which the workers are raped by the rich?

People are beginning to believe that government is a mysterious process with which they have no real concern. This is the soil in which autocracies flourish and liberty dies. Alongside that apathetic majority there will soon be a minority that is tired of seeing nothing vital happen and that will adopt any cause that promises decisive action.  

And yet Priestley sees hope. Underneath the swaggering

'red-faced, staring, loud-voiced fellows, wanting to boss everybody about all over the world and being surprised and pained…if some blighters refused to fag for them'

he detects an England of natural beauty, technical genius, literary glory and generosity:

Let us be too proud, my mind shouted, to refuse shelter to exiled foreigners, too proud to do dirty little tricks because other people can stoop to them, too proud to lose an inch of our freedom, too proud, even if it beggars us, to tolerate social injustice here, too proud to suffer anywhere in this country an ugly mean way of living… We headed the procession when it took what we see now to be the wrong turning, down into the dark bog of greedy industrialism, where money and machines are of more importance than men and women. It is for us to find the way out again. 

Now, I know I've gone on far too long, and you probably feel that I've typed out the whole of English Journey, but there's a good reason. We're governed once more by a group of Southern English multimillionaires with no real experience of work, hunger or want. They inherited their cash or made it on the money markets. They're experienced tax-evaders and system players. They move between Notting Hill and the Cotswolds. They encourage us to blame the poor, the weak and the foreign rather than their friends in the City, and tell us that the solution to our ills is to close the borders, sell the Mail and the NHS, and to hate the workless.

Like Priestley, we have a population eager to work but no government is interested in finding anything for them to do. What should happen to them? They won't just dwindle away. They can't all be 'sleeping off a life on benefits' as the Chancellor put it, and they can't all serve us coffee on the minimum wage. Priestley's minority is UKIP and the Tory voters encouraged by their leaders and their friends on the Mail and the Express to see every foreigner as a terrorist benefits thief, every welfare claimant as a fraudulent scrounger rather than as a fellow citizen. This is the country in which a millionaire investment banker made Minister for Welfare Reform can stand up in the House of Lords and claim – on behalf of the government of this country – that food banks are busy because everybody wants a free lunch.

Have we heard any politician come anywhere close to the pride, or despair, of Joseph Priestley? I could imagine Atlee nodding along in his quiet way, perhaps Wilson even. But this shower: they see us as so many millstones round their moneyed, tanned necks. When they venture North of their hunting grounds, they sneak from limo to photo-op without a care. My own MP made his millions in property speculation: he hasn't a word to say about his constituency's decline from being the workshop of the world to a grey, sullen sinkhole of ambition.

Happy New Year. 

Uppal: a lesson in evasion

Those of you with nothing better to do might recall that I rather suspected Paul Uppal of telling porkies in Parliament, given that he always manages to find constituents to quote who completely agree with him, and speak in fully-fledged parliamentary language.

The latest excrescence was his claim that young constituents feel completely trapped by state subsidies.

My constituency has a rich industrial heritage, but many young constituents come to me and say that at so many points in the history of the constituency they have been dependent on the public purse and whatever quango or mechanism. I think people are looking forward to some aspect of private sector entrepreneurship to provide a route out of the poverty that exists in so many of these industrial constituencies.

I was intrigued. Who are these kids? What do they mean? How many of them are there? Are they referring to the scrapped Educational Maintenance Allowance, which helped people stay in school or college? The one the Tories scrapped? I think we can all imagine what 'private sector entrepreneurship' routes out of poverty means: it means more children up more chimneys. Let's not forget, of course, that the Conservative Party opposed the National Minimum Wage and some of its MPs want it abolished.

So I wrote to Mr Uppal on this subject, and also took the opportunity to ask him to release the constituency's unemployment figures since he took office. All the other MPs in the city do this: it's collected and sent to them by a government agency.

I also asked him, given that he'd mentioned the new Jaguar Land Rover engine plant in the city, whether it was an example of private sector entrepreneurship, or heavily-subsidised by the local taxpayers through the area's councils.

Here's the letter I sent him:

Dear Mr Uppal,
I note your recent speech in parliament expressing the desire of 'many young consituents' to escape dependency on the public purse and quangos. Could you please enumerate to me how many young constituents have expressed this desire and how they experienced this 'at so many points in the history of the constituency' given that they are 'young'. To what organisations and mechanisms do you think they are referring? 

Secondly, could you please make public the unemployment statistics for the constituency since your election in 2010? I gather that constituency break-downs are provided for each Member of Parliament and that other MPs in the city make them public. 

Finally, I note that the biggest investment in the city for some years (Jaguar Land Rover) was achieved through the incentives provided by Wolverhampton City Council, South Staffordshire Council, Staffordshire County Council and Advantage West Midlands. Given your professed opposition to quangos and state subvention for the private sector, will you be lobbying for an end to this taxpayer support?

So: I asked him for details on these youngsters' claims; the constituency's unemployment profile; and some recognition of the state's role in landing the area's only big investment.

Can you imagine what the reply was? Honest and straightforward?

Don't be silly.

On the question of what exactly these youthful idealists had to say about being 'trapped' in dependency:

I have met with [oh dear: only Americans and illiterates add the preposition] many young constituents during my weekly surgeries and my frequent visits to schools… the future of the city is often discussed… The views of many young people in the constituency are reinforced by the City Council's 'City Strategy'. Their assessments highlight the city's over-reliance on public sector employment, the lack of private sector jobs, and the gap between skills and those required by the emerging knowledge-based economy'. 

So that's bollocks. Uppal's surgeries are by appointment only, and held during the week: I can't see many kids skipping school to earnestly express their Ayn Randian opposition to child benefit and the EMA. I note he can't say how many have expressed these views to him, though I rather wonder if his sample runs to the two slightly creepy Young Tory interns he uses as muscle on his rare public appearances.

I can't think why the city is over-reliant on public sector jobs. Oh hold on, I can. Is it because successive governments – not solely but mostly Tory – completely abandoned the industrial areas while pursuing a policy of making Britain a land fit for Hedge Fund Traders? Might it be because the Tory industrial complex shifted all the jobs overseas where they can pollute and exploit out of sight? Could it, even, be connected to the fact that the Tories have utterly wrecked this country's economy? Could be, you know. Could be.

OK, question 2: what's happened to unemployment since Paul Uppal became the MP? Simple question. He just has to photocopy the quarterly briefing sent to him.

Oh no.

The employment rate for Wolverhampton fell significantly since early 2006, at least a year before the first impacts of the recession were felt in other areas. During the three years between 2007 and 2010, nearly 4000 jobs were lost. The unemployment rate in Wolverhampton South West is currently 9.1%. 

Just a couple of points here. Firstly, he shifts neatly from 'Wolverhampton' to Wolverhampton South West: neatly avoiding the specific constituency's profile: it's far from clear that unemployment was rising in the constituency between 2006-2010. Then there's the abrupt shift from trends to a single figure. It's awful that unemployment is 9.1%. But Uppal's carefully evaded my question. I wanted to know what the rates were in the period since he was elected. Instead, he's carefully claimed that the place was doomed by the previous government, without letting on that unemployment has been steadily rising since he took office. He has personally made the situation worse for the people in his care, employed and unemployed, while getting richer and richer himself.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is what we call disingenuous.

As for my question about state subsidies for business: he didn't weasel his way out of that one. He simply ignored it. Silence. Not a word.

He's got to go.

Paul Uppal: Citation Needed?

In a welcome return to Parliamentary debate, my secretive millionaire MP is stoutly defending tax breaks for the seriously rich (i.e. him) in the midst of the worst depression since the 1930s. Most of it, as you'd expect, the usual vacuous attack lines generated by Tory HQ. And of course he can't find room for the employment statistics for the constituency, which would show a drop in employment in every quarter since he was elected, if it's anything like the neighbouring constituencies. 

But as usual, little Paul over-reaches himself. Yet again, he's discovered some constituents who utterly agree with him and – despite being young and not members of Parliament – display a firm grasp of Parliamentary language:

My constituency has a rich industrial heritage, but many young constituents come to me and say that at so many points in the history of the constituency they have been dependent on the public purse and whatever quango or mechanism. I think people are looking forward to some aspect of private sector entrepreneurship to provide a route out of the poverty that exists in so many of these industrial constituencies.

So these young people make an appointment with Mr Uppal (you can't drop into his surgeries unannounced) to discuss political history? I'm not quite sure how 'young people' can have suffered this Oppressive State Nightmare at 'many points in the history of the constituency', nor do I believe that any young people see themselves as trapped in a cycle of dependence - especially as Mr Uppal's government removed the only support available, namely the Educational Maintenance Allowance. Unless he's suggesting that the young unemployed people of this city believe that they'd be free to save the economy if only the state wasn't forcing them to accept unemployment and housing benefit. 'Let Us Starve' they chant as they parade through the city. 'Homelessness Makes Us Strive' is another of their favourites.

The idea that individuals and the economy are being held back by the minimal state support for individuals is simply an ideological talking point. The only bright spot in this city is the foundation of a Jaguar-Land Rover engine plant. Paul finds room to mention it:

 Jaguar Land Rover is bringing private sector investment into my constituency for the first time

Firstly, I strongly doubt that this is the 'first' private sector investment in the constituency. Ever? This is just nonsense. The place has lots of companies, many of them international corporations. There is no possible way that this could be true. Anyway, turning to Jaguar Land-Rover: it's not actually in his constituency for a start. Is this project the product of entrepreneurial, private sector energy? Not if you read the newspapers it isn't:

The regeneration project is a joint venture between Advantage West Midlands, Wolverhampton City Council, Staffordshire County Council and South Staffordshire Council.

The lesson of this benighted city is that the private sector has failed. It used to be an industrial powerhouse, but failure to innovate and to invest, couple with a determination to reduce wages and export jobs, has left the city destitute. The idea that the state has squeezed out the private sector is utterly ridiculous: the Dark Place has lost jobs and hope throughout the past 30 years: precisely the decades of Thatcherite free market economics (practised by both main parties) and the deluded discourse of entrepreneurialism. Who brought Jaguar-Land Rover here? It wasn't JLR on its own: it was the taxpayers of this area through their local councils and the taxpayers of this country through Advantage West Midlands: JLR was essentially bribed to come here.

Paul Uppal has been free from the constraints of the state: family money enabled his very successful business career in property speculation - precisely the kind of activity which has bankrupted this country without employing a single person or creating any wealth beyond his own enrichment.

Uppal is, I think, either a liar or fantasist. I just don't believe that these 'young constituents' exist beyond meetings of the local Conservative Party. And his economics go no further than the concerns of his political career. It's time for another letter:

Dear Mr Uppal,
I note your recent speech in parliament expressing the desire of 'many young consituents' to escape dependency on the public purse and quangos. Could you please enumerate to me how many young constituents have expressed this desire and how they experienced this 'at so many points in the history of the constituency' given that they are 'young'. To what organisations and mechanisms do you think they are referring

Secondly, could you please make public the unemployment statistics for the constituency since your election in 2010? I gather that constituency break-downs are provided for each Member of Parliament and that other MPs in the city make them public. 

Finally, I note that the biggest investment in the city for some years (Jaguar Land Rover) was achieved through the incentives provided by Wolverhampton City Council, South Staffordshire Council, Staffordshire County Council and Advantage West Midlands. Given your professed opposition to quangos and state subvention for the private sector, will you be lobbying for an end to this taxpayer support? 

Yours,
Plashing Vole

Lies by omission and distortion

Great news for The Dark Place, according to Paul Uppal MP, the secretive millionaire:

As the Minister may be aware, the number of private sector jobs in the west midlands decreased under the last Labour Government. Will he welcome the news, as I do, that Jaguar Land Rover is increasing investment in the engine plant in Wolverhampton by £150 million, creating an additional 700 high-skilled jobs?

Once we strip away the tired old rhetoric of 'the last Labour Government', we appear to have some facts about JLR's expansion plans. 

But not so fast, Paul.  

For a start, the plant is the product of heavy subsidies from taxpayers' funds, council and central government – and all under the auspices of the 'last Labour government', which essentially bribed Tata Motors to come to the city. Interventionism in action: not the kind of think Paul approves of, unless it's tax cuts for commercial landlords. 

But aside from this, there's one whopping lie by omission here. Dodgy Paul rather misdirects us with his talk of 'private sector jobs' under the 'last Labour government'. Apart from the fact that a subsidised factory rather blurs the line between private and public sector employment, Paul rather naughtily avoids the current government's record. What's this?

Unemployment rises in West Midlands despite UK-wide fall

The West Midlands was the only English region to see unemployment rise in the last quarter as more than 5,000 people were added to the jobless list.The total number of people out of work in the region stood at 233,000 during the three months from June to August, which represents a rate of 8.6 per cent.
Unemployment fell or remained the same in every other English region – but increased in Scotland and Northern Ireland – as UK-wide joblessness fell by 50,000 in the same period to 2.53 million, the lowest since the spring, giving a rate of 7.9 per cent.

So the policies Paul has loyally voted through have actually made things worse in his own back yard, whereas the policies of the 'last Labour government' have actually helped! But never mind the wider West Midlands: what about Paul's own city? Surely the 'tough choices' he's voted for have helped here? Let's ask the local, rabidly Conservative newspaper.

Wolverhampton bucks national trend as city's unemployment rises 

Jobless queues in Wolverhampton are getting longer, new figures revealed today – bucking the national trend of unemployment falling for the first time in almost a year.

But we shouldn't take the word of the Express and Swastika on this. Let's turn to Paul's neighbouring constituency, Wolverhampton South-East. Its MP Pat McFadden asked the UK Statistics Authority for the figures for May 2010 (the end of the 'last Labour Government' and January 2013.

Number of people(1) claiming jobseeker's allowance in Wolverhampton South East constituency
	All people	Aged 18 to 24
May 2010	4,285	1,230
January 2013	4,775	1,380

Ouch. So much for 'tough choices' starting to work – and I doubt Uppal's constituency is any better. 

So in fact what Paul's trying to avoid saying is that the only bright spot in this benighted city's future is a Labour policy decision continued by a Labour city council, while the Conservative policy he voted for has actually made the city's inhabitants poorer. 

And if you think this is all historical, have a look at today's manufacturing figures. Here are the adjectives being used to describe it: 'awful', 'appalling', 'dreadful', 'poor', 'miserable'…

Slow hand-clap for Mr Uppal, both for his politics and his dishonesty.  

Just in from the department of You Couldn't Make It Uppal

It is becoming increasingly apparent that we on the Government Benches are on the side of those who strive and work hard in society. In that vein, how can my constituents inWolverhampton South West who are saving for the future have access to enrolment to high-quality pension funds?

Says who?

Says Paul Uppal, MP.

2 minor quibbles, apart from the usual wave of tedium that crosses my cranium every time he assays one of those pointless little political jibes.

1. Paul is hardly qualified to speak for those who 'strive and work hard'. He acquired funding from somewhere mysterious (family?) to run a property speculation business. So he's never made anything, never built anything, never contributed to the economic and social life of a community. He's simply collected rents like a 19th-century absentee landlord. He's even successfully lobbied for tax breaks for himself, in the form of rebates for the holders of empty properties, insulating him from capitalism's vicissitudes at our expense. He is a tiny, local version of Goldman Sachs, memorably described as a 'a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity': parasitic, amoral and socially useless.

2. 'Those who strive and work hard' have had their benefits cut in real terms. They pay taxes and national insurance, but thanks to Paul, his party and his ideological allies across the political class, they aren't paid enough to survive without state benefits. In effect, we're subsidising Paul's corporate friends. Let's be clear: the vast majority of people in receipt of benefits are in work.

And of course despite George Osborne's disgusting sneering about people 'sleeping late on a life of benefits', most of the unemployed want desperately to work. There are 2,500,000 people unemployed. They aren't all lazy bastards. They're workers thrown out on their ears by a government which doesn't care about them and can't formulate an economic model which can get our stricken economy going. But this doesn't fit the ideological framework of Conservatism. It depends on an individualistic model of society in which structural and social conditions simply don't exist (except when you need to blame 'the European economy' to explain away bad figures). You're unemployed because you're lazy or greedy. Or you're rich because you're hard-working and thrifty. 'There is no such thing as society, there are only individual men and women, and families' said Margaret Thatcher, and she meant it.

I have so many recent graduates bursting with talent who can't find jobs, or are stuck in low-wage, low-hours jobs wasting their abilities. Take Bruno, for instance - a skilled writer, a keen intelligence, a man who takes every course available yet can't find work. Then there's Shaun, who has a first class degree and works behind the bar of my favourite pub. Many others are either unemployed or under-employed, yet to listen to the Tories, these wasted talents are the result of individual fecklessness.

One of the best things The Hegemon has done recently is start a programme of graduate employment: we've taken on recent graduates across the university in a range of roles from outreach to analysis. They may not be paid much and the contracts aren't permanent, but it gives them the experience unavailable elsewhere. My students don't have the social contacts or the family money to get unpaid internship experience of the kind open to other classes. I wish they weren't here, because I'd like them to have careers - but with people like Paul Uppal and George Osborne bad-mouthing them, they need all the help they can get.

Paul Uppal has a majority of 691. If we can just get some of his economic victims to vote, we can send him to join the ranks of the unemployed in 2015.

Graduating to the dole queue

Today's youth unemployment figures are out. The UK now has 1.016 million young people unable to find work. I look at the bright eager (sometimes) faces in my classes and wonder what's going to happen to them. Some are optimistic - and some watch the news.

It's so utterly depressing, and yet the political discourse seems so hostile. I watched Newsnight's discussion of this last night. A Tory minister sat there and told them all about temporary schemes, while the CEO of a profit-making 'training company' lectured them about polishing up CVs and making themselves employable.

She would, of course, suggest that the problem is something she's got rich fixing, but it's a lie. My students are employable. They're bright, thoughtful and desperate. The failing isn't some internal quality: it's structural. We've built an economy on low wages for jobs which tax-evading corporations can shift abroad at the drop of a subsidy. With 2.5m people unemployed, what chance will an inexperiences 21-year old have? The stories the studio guests told were so familiar from my own desultory attempts to find a job in the mid-90s. No experience, no job - but nobody is willing to give you experience. These kids were used to never receiving even an acknowledgement that an application has been received: news to the politicians, not to anybody else.

David Cameron's first job was in the Conservative Party's research department, secured after a phone call from someone in Buckingham Palace. After that, it was off to the PR department of Carlton Communications, a very poor TV company with a reputation for hiring well-connected Tories. Nice life for some…

One of the most pernicious schemes promoted by government is internships: working for free for a period to gain experience. Sounds nice, doesn't it? But internships are acquired through contacts, which gives an advantage to well-connected middle-class people, and working-class kids can't afford to do them, because months of unpaid labour means parental support for travel, food, accommodation, clothes and all the other things paid work usually provides - it's a scam to maintain inequality.

The other rip-off is the apprenticeship scheme: minimal wages while you learn a trade. Again, it's a great idea, and one of the backbones of vanished industrial life. But look closely, and we discover that supermarkets are rebranding shelf-stacking as 'apprenticeships', as a way to reduce the wages of the very poorest, while failing to pass on any meaningful skills. That strikes me as the very worst sort of cynicism.

I wish I could sound more optimistic. Yes, some people are doing degrees that may not add to the sum of human knowledge. Some don't work very hard. Some are unrealistic. But from what I see, most of my students are more aware of the challenges facing them than I was when I graduated. We need to find meaningful, lucrative work for everybody - not just the graduates but the millions who don't - or can't - go to university. Capitalism, based on the transfer of wealth from the poorest to the richest, just won't do it.

Before we go: Uppal News

Sad to say, the problem with an astonishingly lazy and secretive MP is that as often as not I'm reporting his lack of activity more often than anything he does. I presume that Paul Uppal MP spends most of his time with a copy of the tax code, a lawyer and a razor, looking for loopholes or - now he's an MP - clauses he can persuade the other millionaires you voted in to abolish.

Has he done much this week? Well, he's asked if the government has assessed the impact of withdrawing lots of student visas, as well he might, given that The Hegemon's VC signed a letter to the press about it a few days ago. Doesn't he look dynamic? (The answer is that the government held one of their secret consultations and we can all sod off).

But to be fair to Mr. Uppal, he's upped his workrate to a magnificent 2 questions this week. It will not surprise his fans to learn that this property speculator millionaire is fully in favour of all the savage and reactionary attacks on welfare proposed by nasty young men in thinktanks and presented by the Minister as intelligent ideas, rather than binning them as the youthful excesses of spoilt and inexperienced toffs.

Being Uppal, the point of the speech is to treat his colleagues to the sound of his dulcet tones and polish the myth, hence pointless nonsense like this:

I would not expect anything else from a fellow Wolverhampton Wanderers fan; that is the least I would expect from him.

Er yes, I always assess a person's intelligence from their choice of football team. That's really important in an elected representative, and not a smarmy attempt to appear 'down' with the oiks at all.

 Wolverhampton South West is a no-nonsense constituency, full of decent, hard-working folk who say it as it is and always wear their heart on their sleeve. The sentiment that has been repeatedly expressed to me is that the Bill has been a long time coming. Its central ethos is that work always pays. I shall sum it up by recalling my personal experience of my father.

What this means, of course, is that he's spoken to some local Tories who hate the poor. In the middle of a massive depression caused by the tricky financial shenanigans of Paul and his colleagues, they're still going to blame the unemployed for losing their jobs. And then we move to the real heart of the speech: Paul himself.

My father came to this country with less than £5 in his pocket and no idea where he would sleep that night. He took that risk not only because he wanted to live in a country that had choice, freedom and opportunity, but because he wanted to work. Within 48 hours of his arrival, someone tapped him on the shoulder and said, "Do you know you can actually claim benefits?" That was anathema to him; it was not even in his mind. He came with the ethos of working, and working is what he has always done. That story has been replicated by those of scores of my relatives, who came over to work and had the ethos of working hard at their core.

Now, I'd never dream of calling Paul Uppal a liar or an embroiderer, but it seems rather too convenient. Just like David Cameron's black friend:

"I was in Plymouth recently and a 40-year-old black man ... said, 'I came here when I was six, I've served in the Royal Navy for 30 years, I'm incredibly proud of my country. But I'm so ashamed that we've had this out-of-control system with people abusing it so badly'."

The immigrant who joined the navy at the age of 4.

 It also reminds me of this:



If the scant details about Uppal's background are to be believed, his parents arrived as part of the flight of Asians from Kenya after Idi Amin turned on them (the British Empire had shifted them from India). Would you begrudge a family with £5 some benefits? I wouldn't, but it appears that if people like his parents turned up now, he'd lock them up and deport them.

Then we're into classic Norman Tebbit dreamland, in which the only bar to work is individual weakness (and not the fact that 2.5 million people are after 0.5 million jobs). And look, more really convincing examples from Tory Propaganda Central Casting. If you're one of Paul Uppal's school friends, do write in.

I went to a state school. My friends divided into two camps: those who had the ambition to move on, and those who, even then, in the late '70s and early '80s, would tell me to my face that they envisaged that the rest of their life would be on benefits, and that they were quite happy to live that way. The Bill, through its ethos of making work pay, tackles that problem head-on.

I do wonder where Uppal raised the money for property speculation. It wouldn't have been family support would it? Surely not the kind of financial help that the poor can't generally access? No, Paul wouldn't be that duplicitious… would he? This is the kind of detail that Uppal can't provide: he's a fixed-ideology man, not a 'respond to situations thoughtfully' type of guy. He's decided that everyone without a job is a workshy scumbag. The end.

To her eternal credit, the member who spoke next was kind enough to pass over Uppal's contribution in silence rather than embarrass him with a detailed fisking. I'm not that kind.

Hello, Dole Scum

On Radio 4's Today programme this morning, a reporter shadowed Iain Duncan Smith, the Employment Minister, as he visited a Job Centre trying to help the long-term unemployed. He talked to several very highly-skilled and articulate unemployed people.

IDS: 'if you've grown up and become conditioned - say in a workless household - to people not being in work, the whole concept of work becomes alien…'

Right, it's their fault they don't have jobs. Just as a reminder, here are some statistics for the minister:

Job vacancies: 500,000 (as IDS acknowledges)
Unemployed: 2,500,000

At the Job Centre he visited, there are 6000 unemployed people and 250 vacancies, so he can't pretend this disparity exists.

But according to Duncan-Smith, unemployment is a state of mind. This is exactly what's wrong with Tory politics: even in the face of solid evidence, they'd rather tell the voters that there's a massive pool of workshy loafers out there, sucking away your taxes. Certainly there are a few, and there's a group of unemployable people out there - but the idea that anyone out of work is simply lazy or 'conditioned' to sit on the dole is laughable - but it fits an ideological agenda.

Lying Tory Scum

When Gideon Osborne stood up for the budget a few days ago, he said that the private sector needed nurturing, and that more jobs were the key to saving the economy.

In private, he was saying something else.

George Osborne's austerity budget will result in the loss of up to 1.3m jobs across the economy over the next five years according to a private Treasury assessment of the planned spending cuts, the Guardian has learned.

Unpublished estimates of the impact of the biggest squeeze on public spending since the second world war show that the government is expecting between 500,000 and 600,000 jobs to go in the public sector and between 600,000 and 700,000 to disappear in the private sector by 2015.

 he would have had access to the forecasts traditionally prepared for ministers and senior civil servants 

So it looks like this utterly evil budget is designed to help the low-employment, tax avoiding financial services sector (big Tory donors) while abandoning everybody else. So much for 'we're all in this together'.

For Daniel

He's in Liverpool today, at a job interview. So in his honour, here's one of the finest moments from that seminal work of the 1980s, Boys from the Blackstuff, a searing attack on the way the Conservatives abandoned Liverpool and the working class in general. Those days are coming back…

Gissa job. Go on, gissa job.

Sweet - my new phone's here, and my Dublin sister has jacked in her unfulfilling job, a week after my brother quit his for a new life as (cough) a lawyer, once he's done his conversion course. Add my newly unemployed New Zealand lawyer sister to the list and half my siblings are now scrounging dole scum, in the words of The League of Gentlemen. I, of course, am loving this. Having suffered the slings and arrows of these career-minded chaps and chapesses while I did an English degree, an MA in Welsh writing and then a PhD (Masculinity in four 1930s political Welsh novels), now I'm the one with a career(ish)! The worm's turned, the world's turned upside down etc. etc. etc. The family are going to hear about this for a long time to come.

Having laboured over Mark's collection of journals for hours (Sewanee Review 1966-1977 anyone), I've been rewarded with some fine books: The Trial of Lady Chatterley, Doctorow's Ragtime and Ballard's The Day of Creation. Good job I'm not being thrown out of my office.

In my absence the cricket has turned from the habitual England mediocrity into a brave stand by Collingwood and Pietersen. At least Pietersen went in his standard way - trying to be too clever. My least favourite player.

(Post title is from The Boys from the Blackstuff)