The Bare Minimum

“Falling inflation” means only that prices are going up by less than the last time that anyone officially checked. They are not coming down.

All this, and 5.2 per cent unemployment, too. Tell us again how there cannot be both mass unemployment and galloping inflation. There can be, there is, and from the point of view of the people responsible, there is supposed to be. Almost all Labour and other MPs regard that as neither a failure nor an accident, but as something to be engineered and celebrated, as it has been and is being, since the fear of destitution is fundamental to their control of the rest of us. They are the Heirs to Blair, whom Margaret Thatcher identified as her greatest achievement.

Thus, while the unemployment rate of 14 per cent among those aged 18 to 24 has arisen without the equalisation of their minimum wage with everyone else’s, the solution is assumed to be the abandonment of the Labour manifesto commitment to that equalisation. 30 years ago, we used to wonder how, if the arguments used against a minimum wage were correct, then County Durham could manage to have both the country’s lowest wages and its highest unemployment. That point was unanswerable. But no one would make anything like it now.

Instead, all parties are far more likely to concur with Clean Up Britain that Universal Credit claimants, one third of whom were in work while another quarter had met the extremely arduous conditions to be found medically unfit for it, should be compelled to spend at least four hours per month picking litter. If there is litter picking to be done, and there is, then it should be someone’s properly paid job. It sometimes is. Are those workers to be sacked and put onto Universal Credit so as to do it for free? We did not work for free in prison. And why does anyone with a full-time job have to claim Universal Credit, as millions do?

Not that anyone is offering any change. Robert Jenrick texted a copy of yesterday’s speech to George Osborne, generous host of Peter Mandelson, with the message: “George, trust you’re well. Here’s a copy of a speech I gave today on the economy. It commits to the OBR and to fiscal responsibility, which I hope you will approve of.” On his podcast with Ed Balls, Osborne responded, “I say yes, I do.”