unemployment actually cost each year? Government figures have not been published since 1982, so it 15 left to outside bodies to make informed estimates.
One has been produced by professor Adrian Sinfield and Neil Fraser with help from BBC North East.
This tots up the figures as follows:
• The direct cost of benefits paid out is £1.76 billion in unemployment benefit and £4.6 billion in supplementary and housing benefits. Adjusted to add men over 60. Northern Ireland, and redundancy payments the total comes to £7.4 billion.
• Working on the basis that 3.2 million registered unemployed must mean at least 3.6 million out of work (some of whom do not receive benefits or do not register). they calculate lost Income Tax revenue as £5.7 billion. lost National Insurance at £5.2 billion
THE single-minded ferocity with which Social Services Secretary Norman Fowler is hounding the roung unemployed who oard and lodgings benefit defies my logical explanation. under 26 who seek board and lodging benefit into permanent nomads, forcing them to move every two, four or eight weeks in order to remain eligible. proposais were ruled unlawful in the High Court after causing three months of chaos and heartbreak among claimants. But in a characteristic reprisal against a black couple who won a tribunal appeal for increased benefit following the High Court ruling, Fowler personally intervened to block the extra their eviction and the loss of their MSC training course places. proposals through the back door of the Commons and Lords statutory instruments Committee in October was rebuffed because of the High Court The costs of unemployment and lost indirect taxes from the reduced spending of the jobless at E2.1 billion.
• The totals come to a staggering £20.4 billion each year simply to sustain the army of unemployed. Even this leaves out the loss of possible production and services. and the Increased costs to local authorities.
Sinfield and Fraser also underline the ways in which the Tories have directly from the unemployed, by:
• Scrapping in 1982 the Earnings-
Related Supplement payable for the first six months of unemployment.
• Phasing out additional unemployment benefit payable for dependent children.
• Taxing unemployment benetit. the Tories had cut f500m from benefit
expenditure. and recouped a
staggering £625m in taxes trom the
unemployed - cutting 15% from
spending even while numbers on the
dole have increased by 140%l Socialist Viewpoint No. 9 December 1985 p3
Fowler's stab at unemployed youth claim November Fowlers's aim is to turn claimant: and TUC • At the end of July these vicious leaders dole. cash, threatening purely • A second attempt to smuggle the by pensioners. tried to recoup some of this lost money But the summer of 1985. therefore.
ruling. Fowler has not yet put the plans to a vote in Parliament.
• After a third failure, Fowler resolved to table the regulations for debate in the Commons later in
after which they will come immediately into force.
These and other brutal attacks on the unemployed are forging ahead with little response from the labour movement. The abysmally publicised
poorly-organised October 27 demonstration against the Fowler plans to savage pensions and the social security system symptomised the lack of interest of most union
with the problems of claimants and the jobless, and a failure to organise more than a tiny percentage of the millions on the
A feeble turnout - marked by an almost complete absence of union contingents from London itself, and a
token presence from the TGWU and NUPE in particular -was relieved only by the substantial columns mobilised by the unlikely trio of USDAW, the Tailors and Garment Workers, and the GMBU, and
large numbers of militant
If the workers's movement does not address itself to the problems of the
On the march on Ocfober 27
Unholy alliance against Scargill
unemployed, recruit and organise unemployed youth and workers, the prospects of forging the necessary alliance against policies is constantly undermined
Every union branch, Labour Party and Trades Council can begin now to play a role in reversing this situation, by taking up the fight organisation of the unemployed.
• Demand rule changes necessary or implement existing rules to recruit unemployed workers THE poorest paid workers have suffered worst under Tory rule. Latest figures show that since 1979 the average earnings of the bottom 10% in the pay league have fallen 5% behind the 74.6% increase in prices. These figures are pre-tax, and ignore the fact that rising prices hit the low paid proportionately far harder than those at the top of the scale.
The top 10% on the other hand
By ALAN THORNETT ARTHUR Scargill has been dragaed back into the courts and torc"contempt of co the
Cof court because they refused to accept a High Court The politics of the