9.4 Million: Thinking Through the Number.

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Capitalism, Economic Inactivity, Immigration, Margaret Thatcher, Marxism, Opinion, Politics, Rishi Sunak, Sick-Note Culture, Unemployment, Welfare, Welfare Dependency, work, Worklessness Crisis

A number had jumped out at me from The New Statesman a couple of days ago and its screaming is still ringing in my ears. So 1.4 million people in the UK are unemployed. But on top of this another 9.4 million people are “economically inactive.” These are people who are aged between sixteen and sixty-four and who are not only unemployed but no longer looking for work.

Say you grew impatient with this term “economically inactive” and you thought it would be more straightforward to use “unemployed” instead. This would mean that over 10 million people in the UK were unemployed. By contrast, during the worst year of Margaret Thatcher’s deindustrialisation, unemployment had peaked at 3.2 million. Economists have been reassuring us recently that the UK is only in a “technical recession,” but if ten million people are not earning a wage, then it hardly matters what soothing words are used to describe what is obviously a fiasco.

Fortunately, it is possible to knock some of the drama out of that 10 million figure. For example, around 1.6 million of these people are carers, so they are in no real respect “unemployed.” Indeed, in paying out the pitiful £81.90 a week that is available to these people in “Carer’s Allowance,” the state is getting millions of hours of important work done for very little money.

A further 2.57 million of these people are full-time students. Given that their economic status is essentially synonymous with childhood, they should be not even included within the adult figures.

2.83 million of these people are unwell. The Tory government has expressed unhappiness about the scale of the UK’s “sick-note culture,” and more urgency, in fact, than it has ever shown towards bringing down NHS waiting lists themselves. The Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has proposed that work capability assessments of the long-term sick should become newly alert and sceptical. In reality, however, the state can do little to make sick, depressed, anxious and uncooperative people attractive to employers.

Another 1.1 million people have retired before the age of sixty-four. They are likely to have lost all interest in earning money, so good luck trying to drag them back into the workforce.

What remains is broadly similar to the Thatcher figure. As BBC Verify notes of the “economically inactive” category, “more of them say they want a job (1.7 million people) than are officially unemployed (1.4 million).” In any case, we have at least 3 million people who are potentially employable and fewer than a million job vacancies within the UK economy. At last, we have reached a clear understanding of how poorly capitalism in the UK is performing.

This rate of worklessness is not particularly removed from the historical norm. The numbers of the “economically inactive” have never actually fallen below 7.5 million since 1971. Presumably, such numbers of people were not in work during the seventies because they were housewives or because people were significantly less healthy back then. But it has been a characteristic of our lumbering economic system throughout the last fifty years that quite a lot of people have been riding up on the wagon rather than helping to push it along.

Moreover, the Tories are today struggling to articulate what they want from the labour market. Apparently, net migration of 745,000 people is a disaster for the economy, with the ruling party frantically signalling that it is going to bring this number down to the “tens of thousands.” Indeed, the level of migration is apparently such a disaster that the Tories are willing to spend more than half a billion pounds on an excruciatingly nonsensical plan to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda, to “deter” more arrivals. How confusing, therefore, when unleashing millions of the “economically inactive” onto the workforce is suddenly sprung on us as being highly desirable.                   

[Previously on Tychy: “The Future According to Councillor Scott Arthur.“]