IT'S OFFICIAL: inescapable evidence has now been produced to show that Britain's crime wave is linked to the rise in unemployment. And real unemployment — much of it concealed by the massaging of official statistics, is now around 5 million.
Statistics from the Association of Chief Officers of Probation show that a massive 70% of last year's convicted offenders were unemployed. These figures are based on a 28,000 sample, but exclude most metropolitan areas, where unemployment levels are even higher.
They were revealed in the same week as an internal Home Office briefing document, leaked to the Independent, admitted the link between crime and 'relative deprivation' created by Tory economic policies.
Far from easing deprivation, Tory Chancellor Clarke is actually intending to rub salt in existing wounds by cutting dole payments to young workers by 20% from 1996 as he leads the attack on the welfare state.
The civil service document concludes that improving prospects of employment would be the biggest single contribution the government could make to reducing the risk of unemployed youngsters sliding into crime.
Wooden headed
This news will come as a shock onl to the Tories, who have wooden-headedly ignored all the obvious evidence that their cynical and divisive policies of feathering the nests of the rich by ripping off the poor have created a mounting social crisis.
A whole generation of working class youth, growing up on neglected council estates or inner-city wastelands, with no prospect of a stable job, a decent wage. a house or enough money to match the ORY FAZE the of the ay media stereotypes of 'success', have been alienated, ignored, and occasionally subject to police repression when their revolt has boiled over into riots or larger scale disturbances.
U'nable to afford trappings of 'success' such as smart cars. videos, or designer clothes. some have taken the individualism promated by logical. anti-social conclusion, stealing to raise money to buy what they need — or stealing just for fun. to relieve boredom and frustration. as with much of the "joyriding of fast cars.
None of this is a secret: the crime wave has reached such epidemic proportions that insurance companies will no longer provide anti-theft cover for houses in some inner city areas. Car crime is rampant. and. like most petty crime, is largely ignored by police.
For the Back to Basics Tories, the answer is simple: Home Secretary Michael Howard is demanding more police powSURCHARGE 'YSTE Jail for jobless youth: but not for Tories in Westminster's £21m vote-rig scandal lege. Tory ideology to its source. are the key.
Labour. ers, longer sentences, bigger prisons and locking up more young people. If the Tories get their way it could reach the point where a greater proportion of Thatcher's lost generation will have spent time inside a prison than in a colThe civil servants of course were right: the problem. the key to tackling crime is to cut it off at More jobs, better pay, better education Alienated Fewer idle, alienated youth walled off from society would offer fewer recruits to the army of petty crime; the more young people become able to afford their restored. own cars and homes, the less they will want to steal from other people.
But Tory policies, reflecting the needs of the capitalist market economy, head in the opposite direction: fewer full-time jobs, lower pay, more casualisation, fewer prospects, fewer houses, and a growing gap between rich and poor.
Labour politicians, keen to score opportunist points from the crime wave, have called for the publication of the Home Office brief. But the issue, like that of taxation, is a double-edged sword for The harder they argue the link between unemployment and crime, the clearer it becomes that anything short of the most radical and hard-hitting socialist programme for economic expansion and reconstruction will fail to make any impression on the problem.
Capitalism has failed a generation of youth, and offers no escape.
John Smith's timid opposition, which Labour front-bencher Jack Straw now ludicrously argues is stronger for not having any specific policies, falls far short of the answers that are needed.
Even Bryan Gould and union leaders like GMB chief John Edmonds have recognised the need for a radical re-think to make full employment a central plank of Labour's electoral platform.
Gould and others argue for a Keynesian policy based on extensive government borrowing. This is bolder than Smith, but still fails to grasp the scale of Labour must promise a job-creation package centred on a crash programme of public works, financed in part by a steeply progressive taxation of the rich who have pocketed billions under the Tories and in part through the nationalisation of key banks and finance houses.
Social security and unemployment benefits must be uprated, with Tory cuts It is by tackling these roots of the social crisis, rather than fuelling the reactionary Tory 'law and order' crusade, whose main victims, as ever, are black communities and working class youth, that socialists can answer crime.
Miners from colliery found time to support the IWA convoy with a £500 donation and a memorial plate
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