Unemployment is no accident

The current total of 2.7 million is a horrific figure but it masks the reality of a far larger number of people denied the essential human right to work.

Not only would many of the 1.4 million part-time workers prefer to have full-time jobs but hundreds of thousands more have been erased from the jobless rolls by bureaucratic gerrymandering that puts them on dead-end work experience schemes or invalidity benefits.

Work experience could have an important role in bridging the gap between schooling and employment for young people, as happens in Germany and elsewhere.

However, most schemes operating in Britain are either a thinly veiled subsidy to private firms or a sponge to soak up jobless youngsters and massage unemployment figures.

Young people are quick to see through governmental deceit and to appreciate that the political elite is largely indifferent to the prospect of growing numbers of a new generation condemned to the scrap heap.

Cynicism flourishes when the victims of unemployment see themselves vilified by politicians and the bourgeois media as if they are on benefits by choice rather than because of the failure of the capitalist system to provide sufficient jobs.

This applies equally to youngsters shuffled from one scheme back to the dole and on to another scheme and to former industrial workers - miners, dockers, steelworkers etc - on incapacity benefit in employment deserts and berated as welfare spongers.

The huge job cull in the public sector - championed, let's not forget, by the leadership of all three of the main parties - has introduced a new category of casualty, women.

Given female preponderance within the public services, coalition government funding cuts are falling disproportionately on women, with the Fawcett Society calculating that women made up 80 per cent of job losses in the past quarter.

This represents a massive blow against gender equality since women are not only the majority of the workforce in the public sector but depend most upon its services.

Women are also the sole wage-earner in most single-parent households.

Coalition government ministers may make cooing noises and put on their concerned faces when they talk about unemployment, but what is happening is not an aberration.

It is part of their economic plan, shared by the other capitalist governments throughout the European Union.

Their intention is to take advantage of the financial crisis sparked by the banks' unsustainable speculation to force through changes to entrench capitalist advantage over the working class.

Trimming the state, particularly public services, the NHS and state pensions and benefits, is part of a strategy to hand over these areas to the private sector for profitable exploitation.

The role of mass unemployment is to neuter the trade unions and to reduce workers to ciphers, employed, if at all, at low pay rates, poor conditions and few employment rights.

Waiting patiently for a possible change of government in 2015 is futile, since a five-year onslaught by the Cameron-Clegg coalition will create a qualitatively different situation.

The March 31 Morning Star conference in London's Bishopsgate Institute, For a People's Britain not a Bankers' Britain, offers a prime opportunity for trade unionists to debate the issues and plan the fightback that is so necessary to employed and unemployed workers.