The long-term unemployed

Above: I showed this picture to Terry and he started reminiscing about "Charlie Drake" a 1960s comedy set in an Employment Exchange.

In the Crossroads pub I met one of the long-term unemployed. He was aged about fifty and hadn't worked for about five years (and hadn't really had proper jobs before that). At fifty he didn't think he would work again.

I asked him what being unemployed was like. He gets about £55 a week in unemployment benefit (it's not actually called that, but I can't remember what the benefit is called). The Jobcentre periodically sends him on courses where he makes applications for jobs that never really come to anything (not having a car is a big problem for him).

Recently he has been sent on a new kind of course. This course is to last thirteen weeks. He has to go to a training centre where he sits in a large room with other long-term unemployed people.

They do nothing all day (sometimes they talk to each other, one person reads although reading is not allowed). The boredom of this experience is debilitating. Rather than experience this boredom week after week many people on the course go back to the Jobcentre and sign themselves off ("they sign themselves off and after three months they sign themselves back on again - even the ones who don't get hardship payments will do this in the end").

I was shocked when I heard this. It seems a cruel and immoral way to drive people off the unemployment lists. I say it is immoral because "we" pay taxes to fund the department of employment (or whatever expensive rebranding exercise they are going through at the moment) to HELP PEOPLE INTO WORK not to carry out vindictive campaigns against the very people they should be helping.

In the Victorian period the unemployed were required to carry out mindless "work" such as digging trenches and then filling them in again. This practice was condemned by subsequent generations. Until now, when we seem to have gone back to the policies of the workhouse.