Of all the statistics paraded for our approval by this Labour government, none is more misleading than the official unemployment rate. We know it is a lie, but we are still asked to believe it.
The official unemployment rate shows that just under 80,000 Scots are claiming the dole; a healthy looking 3.5% of working-age population. We shall therefore hear a lot during the forthcoming general election campaign about Labour’s achievement in delivering economic success resulting in the lowest unemployment figures for 30 years or more. This is one matter on which even Tony Blair and Gordon Brown will be in agreement.
It is, of course, nonsense. Forget for the moment the 80,000, many of whom will be genuinely between jobs or energetically in search of a job. Consider instead the 266,000 Scots now classified as “sick or disabled”, and in receipt of either incapacity benefit or disability allowance. More than a quarter of a million people. That’s more than the population of Aberdeen.
There are, in addition, as many again who are deemed to be “economically inactive”. Most of them come in a respectably different category. They are either studying or caring for relatives. Or they may be mothers looking after their young children, instead of hiring others to do that and themselves bustling back into a workforce, which is what Brown would like them to be doing.
A fair percentage of the sick and disabled are genuinely incapable of working. Some of these will never be fit to work; others will return to work some day. But a good many drawing incapacity benefit or disability allowance are, frankly, malingerers. They are the idle poor, content or resigned to being supported by the taxes of their industrious fellow countrymen and women. Nobody knows what proportion come in this category, but Jane Kennedy, the minister for work (England and Wales), said earlier this month that two-thirds of those claiming disability allowance are fit enough to work. Of the 2.7m people in the UK who claim incapacity benefit, only 300,000 are completely incapacitated. Makes you wonder.
The annual Scottish Labour Force Survey for the years 2003-2004 presents an interesting picture of regional variation. In Glasgow, 11.4% of the workforce was economically inactive on account of sickness or disability; in Shetland only 5%. The worst areas are all around Glasgow: Inverclyde 10.0%, North Ayrshire 10.1%, North Lanarkshire 10.1%, West Dunbartonshire 9.6%.
In other words, if we are to believe these figures, every 10th person of working age in the Glasgow conurbation is a crock. Put it another way: every 10th person there is a burden on the shoulders of working Scots. So the next time you find yourself short of cash at the end of the month, take comfort in the thought that you have been helping to keep that 10th Glaswegian in idleness.
Now the opposition parties will, reasonably enough, use these figures to show that Labour’s boast of “the longest period of sustained economic growth for 200 years” doesn’t apply to Scotland. Indeed, Alex Salmond has been characteristically quick with a soundbite. “What these figures show is that, compared to the Labour party, Margaret Thatcher was an amateur when it came to disguising real unemployment figures for Scotland.”
Fair enough; that is how politicians behave, and we are fools if we expect better of them, look for more true seriousness in their words. They will be at the old game of points-scoring till hell freezes over.
But these sick-list figures invite a more serious, cultural question: what has happened to the old Scottish work ethic? Some might prefer to speak of the “Protestant work ethic”, not without reason for it was in Presbyterian Scotland that the Gospel of Work was most fervently preached.
Does that 10th Glaswegian seek work? If he does and cannot find it, then he deserves our sympathy, for, as Thomas Carlyle wrote: “A man willing to work, and unable to find work, is perhaps the saddest sight that Fortune’s inequality exhibits under the sun.” But what if he is content to be idle, resigned to being supported by others?
Though Scotland has always been a place that set a high value on mutual support, on what we call a sense of the community, it was also one of the first countries in Europe to teach that the individual was responsible for his own wellbeing, responsible for what he might make of himself. This was a logical consequence of Calvinism: that form of the Christian religion which set Man face-to-face with his Maker, with no need of priestly intermediary. From this developed in the 19th century the idea, expressed by Samuel Smiles, that “the spirit of self-help is the root of all genuine growth in the individual”.
That message took root. It was taught in the schools. It was preached in the home. It was your duty to get on in the world, and the means by which you did so was work: work, which Carlyle, again, called “the grandest cure of all the maladies and miseries that ever beset mankind”. That was what he told the students of Edinburgh University in his inaugural address as their rector.
Respect for work was written into the Scottish character. Nowhere was St Paul’s message to the Thessalonians — “if any would not work, neither should he eat” — quoted more often and with more complete approval than in Scotland.
Idleness was frowned on, or roundly condemned. Look up that invaluable book, Scots Thesaurus, and you will find four or five pages given over to words denoting idleness and laziness, all contemptuous. It would have been inconceivable to earlier generations of Scotland that anyone should be content to live on the charity of others.
Indeed in Aberdeenshire when I was young, self-reliance was the rule. To be supported by the state was cause for shame, to be accepted only in dire necessity.
Things have changed, partly of course because the incidence of taxation both direct and indirect is now such that it is possible to believe that receiving money from the state is a right, something you have paid for already. Accordingly, many now in receipt of incapacity benefit are doubtless serene in the conviction that they have in the past done enough to merit being supported without working, even if they are able. Since people can convince themselves of anything that is to their benefit or is in their interest, this is not surprising. What is more surprising is that hard-working people so often shrug their shoulders and accept that the work-shy are entitled to what they can get off the state.
This is marvellously tolerant, and would have amazed our ancestors. Perhaps the truth is that we have all been demoralised as a result of the all-pervasive influence of the state. Complacently, with only the occasional grumble, we surrender our earnings to support that 10th Glaswegian — even if he regards work as something to be done by other people.
