ED MILIBAND’S plan to deprive tens of thousands of unemployed young people of benefits unless they achieve level 3 qualifications is despicable.

It marks a continuation of new Labour’s policy of competing with the Tories over which party can be most hard-hearted to capitalism’s victims.

The overwhelming majority of people want to earn their own livelihood.

Their inability to do so is based on the system’s failure to provide full employment not because young people have chosen unemployability by dint of inadequate educational and training levels.

Jobless youngsters are constantly shuffled through dead-end “training” schemes, providing easy profits for so-called employment agencies as their “trainees” are shunted off the unemployment rolls for a period.

The initial keenness that many feel in response to being told that they are being trained to help them get a job changes to scepticism, descending into cynicism.

Despite government rhetoric about an economic recovery, those trapped on jobless lists know that the jobs aren’t out there.

They also understand very quickly that comfortably off, unscrupulous politicians believe that there are votes to be had through scapegoating benefits claimants.

For all the chat about being “tough,” the Labour leader’s approach is essentially cowardly, picking on those without power or wealth for a good kicking rather than those who enriched themselves as they inflated an unsustainable economic bubble and who pay no price for their actions.

As ever, Labour’s latest poor-bashing ploy is justified by an opinion poll finding that 78 per cent of people believe that the welfare system rewards claimants for doing nothing.

Well how surprising, given that this is the message pumped out day in, day out by the leaders of the main political parties and the corporate media.

That same media, together with anonymous senior Labour Party members who have not reconciled themselves to Miliband’s election as leader, continues to jangle on about the need to replace him with his brother across the sea or some other more enthusiastic new Labourite.

Miliband’s tragedy is that he seems frustrated at being undermined in this way even as he spouts similar policies to those he defeated in 2010.

He is not a stupid man. He must understand that to label persecution of young people on benefits as “progressive not punitive” is nonsense.

It is copying Tory policy but it is not a vote-winner because people whose electoral decision will be based on how brutally the unemployed are treated will back David Cameron’s crew.

The Tories are past masters at it. They’ve had centuries of practice.

Mimicking them, either in specifics such as cutting benefits for the young employed or in general by accepting the bankers-approved austerity agenda, is a self-defeating approach.

It confirms government propaganda that there is no alternative to its policies and it demoralises current or potential Labour supporters.

Miliband’s child-like devotion to the power of markets to create jobs, provide services and deliver social justice flies in the face of experience.

Jobs can be generated through a government-directed economic expansion, based on encouraging manufacturing, green energy innovation and a massive council house-building campaign.

Tens of billions of pounds lie idle in the coffers of big business and the rich.

These assets could be invested to provide real jobs, which would encourage unemployed young people to improve their qualifications and step forward to build their futures rather than face frustration and politicians’ abuse on the employment scrapheap.