Ed Balls is right - it is "shocking that the number of young people stuck on the dole for more than a year has doubled under David Cameron."

But Labour's proposal to strip such people of benefits if they refuse to take the jobs offered under its Compulsory Jobs Guarantee is a dismal sop to Tory "scrounger" propaganda.

Whatever the disinformation peddled by Daily Mail columnists, Con-Dem Cabinet ministers and - appallingly - their Labour shadows, most jobless people do not choose not to work because they fancy "a life on benefits," a phrase Chancellor George Osborne bandies around at Tory conferences that was tellingly echoed yesterday by Mr Balls.

Long-term joblessness is rising under the coalition because it is an anti-jobs government. Hundreds of thousands of secure, skilled jobs have been axed - are still being axed - across the public sector.

A survey by trade union GMB found 631,000 public-sector roles had been given the chop by autumn last year, a figure the government's own projections suggest will exceed a million by the next election.

An administration that boasts of destroying a million jobs is no enemy of unemployment. But it is the enemy of unemployed people (as well as of people with jobs, as we've just seen).

From workfare - which effectively provides forced below-minimum-wage labour to private firms at taxpayers' cost - to ever increasing sanctions on jobseekers who can't jump through a constantly changing set of hoops, people who are out of work have been exploited, punished and demonised by the Department for Work and Pensions and its sanctimonious chief Iain Duncan Smith.

Indeed, last year the Chancellor decided to introduce a waiting period between losing your job and being eligible for jobseeker's allowance, presumably as an extra kick in the teeth for the 631,000 people his government has chucked on the scrapheap.

Labour should be highlighting the rank hypocrisy of a regime that sacks people en masse and then blames them for it. Instead it seems content to follow in its footsteps.

There is no shortage of serious options for tackling mass unemployment. Britain is crying out for a huge programme of council-house building.

The increasingly unpredictable weather resulting from climate change, which saw devastating floods hit the country last month, ought to prompt investment in flood defences in the short-term and in the new technologies needed to moderate and cope with global warming in the long-term.

Our NHS needs more midwives, more nurses and far more resources dedicated to treating mental health issues. We face a teacher recruitment crisis.

And rebalancing the British economy away from an overheated and reckless financial sector and towards a future based on quality manufacturing could create hundreds of thousands of skilled jobs.

Mr Balls should take a look at such options before rushing to jump on the blame bandwagon.

A generation has grown up with the impression that counting the unemployed in the millions is normal - a legacy of Thatcher, who created the mass unemployment we've lived with ever since.

But it doesn't have to be. Full employment has existed before and it can again.

If we want to see a Britain where everyone can be assured of decent, well-paid work - a Britain where everybody counts - we need to be shot of the neoliberal gang who have hijacked this country and start putting people before profit.