Women are window dressing in the Brown government, as this picture of Peter Mandelson in weekend attire clearly shows

After 13 months of manufacturing decline and with unemployment heading towards 3 million,  the unelected British PM has promoted the equally unelected Business Secretary, ‘Lord’ Peter Mandelson, to First Secretary of State in a clear signal that his ‘democratic renewal’ measures mean exactly the opposite. Mandelson, who is really calling the shots at the fag end of this ruptured government, wanted the job of Foreign Secretary but David Miliband, who led a failed coup against Brown last autumn, refused to move. Meanwhile, fingers-in-the till Chancellor, Alastair Darling remains in his post because Brown’s choice of replacement, smeary Ed Balls, would have catalysed a full scale revolt. Blairites James Purnell and ‘Europe’ Minister Caroline Flint resigned in high dudgeon, the latter claiming that women were seen as ‘window dressing’ in the Brown cabinet. Ms Flint had posed as a vamp in a red dress in the (left-leaning) Observer Magazine fashion magazine the previous month. Both she and Purnell have serious questions to answer about the creative use of their members’ allowances.

As for women as window dressing – Jacqui Smith, Home Secretary also ‘resigned’ on Thursday. We first highlighted her part in the arrest of Conservative MP Damian Green (Thus passim) as a cover-up for her own abuse of second home allowances several months ago (Thus passim). In the hail of muck and bullets, the passing of Tony McNulty, Employment and Welfare minister, went almost unnoticed. The surveillance society and anti-transparency cheerleader McNulty, who allegedly gouged over £60,000 by claiming mortgage interest relief on his dad’s house (Thus passim) also played a leading role in the diversionary firestorm which saw disgraced Speaker of the House Michael Martin authorise the attack on Damian Green (for uncovering widespread manipulation of immigration statistics) all those months ago.

Back to window dressing. We’ve got an economy to fix. Who better to do it than Brown’s close personal friend ‘You’re fired’ Alan Sugar? He can break the news to the millions who will lose their jobs, perhaps even to Gordon himself. Promoting him to the House of Lords and parachuting him into the job of helping Mandelson sell what’s left of the business sector into the hands of Billy Big Time ‘oligarchs’ who turn out to be short of readies when the bill arrives displays perfect synergy. Both are preening fantasists. Sugar’s manufacturing legacy is terrible: Amstrad PCs, clock radios, rebadged video recorders and plastic phones that didn’t work, mostly manufactured in Asian sweatshops and assembled by monkeys in Neasden. Amstrad shares recorded a record loss in the 1987 stock market crash, when people suddenly woke up to the fact that they were unlikely to make money on products which would represent poor value if you found them in a Christmas cracker. Sugar’s resurgence came as a result of hosting a ‘reality’ TV gameshow, ‘The Apprentice’ where he breaks every rule of employment law and encourages barrow boy antics as a way of doing business. It is difficult to project the true horror of this man, so for the benefit of non-UK readers, here is an insight to his management strategy and business ethics, presented in cruel and unusual fashion by CassetteBoy. This is New Labour’s role model of a business leader. There is nothing more to add.

Except that Gordon got one thing right. Sugar is five times as popular as he is. CassetteBoy vs the Bloody Apprentice has so far had 550,000 YouTube viewers. The equally compelling Gordon Brown has only attracted 116,000 viewers. Joking aside, the country needs a General Election, not because Brown is a monster (he is) but because New Labour and its infighting, self-aggrandising, authoritarian second-raters have impaired democracy beyond recognition. It won’t get one without a fight for precisely that reason.

no malingering in back-to-work Britain

In yet another demonstration of the sort of lateral thinking that has made Gordon Brown not only saviour of the banks but saviour of the world, Work and Pensions Minister James Purnell announced a government pledge to force long term sickness benefits claimants and some single mothers back to work. The Welfare Reform White Paper has also been welcomed by the Conservative Opposition, largely because it steals their thunder by arguing that unearned benefits undermine society and destroy the work ethic.

a spot of hard work never hurt anybody

The sand in the vaseline of this get-in-your-invalid-car-and-find-work initiative is that the UK has just registered the highest unemployment figures for 11 years. For example, Plaid Cymru (Wales) MP Hywel Davies observed that there were 320,000 unemployed people in his constituency but only 20,000 jobs advertised. Scottish MPs are also skeptical, as well they might be. Nobody (dares) to gainsay ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ in our Through the Looking Glass mother of Parliaments, but it would help if the UK had any Arbeit on offer to its able-bodied citizens, never mind the vulnerable, disadvantaged or unskilled. Genuine skivers will always find a way to avoid job opportunities and cheat benefits, but they are a tiny minority. 

But enough of this cup-half-empty rhetoric. Despite the fact that my White Paper to reskill unemployed lap dancers as school zebra crossing attendants and bankers as traffic calming bumps in the road met with studied silence from the government (Thus passim), our policy wonkers have been hard at work solving this latest conundrum. It’s so simple it hurts:

Latest UK Government health advisor

Send the sick and the lame on a ‘Crusade to Health’ to Lourdes. Allow those that are cured back into the country and put them to work immediately building a Brit Art installation out of their crutches, eye patches and walking sticks. Those that stubbornly refuse to be cured should be branded a threat to national security or similar by no-nonsense Northerner, Immigration Minister Phil Woolas who can knock together a failsafe points-based entry system at least as good as the one which kept out the million or so illegal immigrants we apparently boast. And there’s more. Since RyanAir are the main carriers to Lourdes, there is a fair chance that they won’t be they won’t be able to run fast enough to catch the plane back in any case so they’ll have to live in a French concentration camp – Calais has a good one, I hear. 

Behold the miracle: the lame leap from their Beemers and into the pub each match day

In the event that nobody will lend the UK Government enough cash to buy the RyanAir tickets, even during one of their miraculous ‘million seats for £1.00′ bonanzas, there is another solution. I have noticed that whenever my local team, Arsenal, play at home, miraculous numbers of people with disabled badges leap from their cars and rush to the ground, more agile and fleet of foot, in many cases, than the footballers themselves. If the government wants revenge and tabloid headlines, my advice is to start by investigating those displaying disabled badges in 4×4 jeeps, Beemers and pimpmobiles on Match Day restricted parking zones. There is more than a fair chance that they are also benefit cheats, especially if they can afford the gouging season ticket prices charged by our foreign-owned Mercenary Utd. soccer clubs.

Or we could move towards creating real jobs which people, disabled or otherwise, will enjoy doing. If that fails, make a Novena to St. Jude, patron of Lost Causes.

Young women on government back to work scheme (1905)

By Julia Margo, Demos

One of the themes to emerge from debates last week about the Karen Matthews/Baby P/shocking state of social services scandals was the ongoing saga of Britain’s teenage birth rate, or more precisely the so-called benefit claiming class of teenage single mothers who suck up state resources and services, do not work, but procreate freely and supposedly by active choice: Britain has the highest teenage pregnancy rate in Europe. Only ten per cent of teenage mothers stay with the father of their child. Abuse and neglect are more likely to happen in households headed by a young single mother, children are more likely to be depressed, anxious and to do less well at school. But it is the propensity of their mothers to be reliant on state benefits that has captured the imagination of the political class this week. James Purnell has suggested that the government will move to end the benefit culture surrounding single mothers and more or less compel them to work or undertake training.

Single-parent teenagers are not the wily benefit cheats they are portrayed to be but more often ill-informed teens who have nothing better to do with their lives and realistically can aspire to little more. I welcome the idea that the government will offer teenage mothers opportunities thus far denied to most of them (education and training), but not if it is framed in terms of getting them off their lazy bottoms. Teen parenthood is commonly associated with a poor educational background, lack of opportunities or experiences such as travel – not only foreign travel but even moving much beyond the confines of a deprived and uninspiring local area – neglect and other aspects of poor parenting. However woolly and lefty this may sound, it is supported by hard econometric analysis: politicians who choose to ignore the evidence because it does not fit a popular argument or appears patronising are making a gross error.

You'll feel a little prick then as many as you like

Essentially we are talking about a group of girls who often lack the capacity to get good jobs, missing not just the physical requirements of qualifications, skills and accessible local labour markets, but the less tangible essentials of self-confidence, supportive parents and wider social networks (things which also help people to be good parents). Is a more interventionist Job Centre Plus and benefit conditionality really going to plug this capability gap? Teen pregnancy is one of the few policy areas in which genuine silver bullets exist. We could for instance ‘offer’ the contraceptive injection, (AKA the jab or ‘jag’ every three months, to all 16 year old girls in the country: wham, bang! we would have abolished teen pregnancy (if they remember to turn up). But this does not mean these girls can or will study or work instead. We could compel them to work, as Purnell suggests: simply make it impossible to claim benefits without evidence of job-seeking, stipulate time limits for claiming and cut off support for those in breach of this rule. Quite clearly it is their children who will suffer.

I do not mean to paint these girls as hopeless cases. But are we forgetting why we on the Left fought for more state support for the parents of deprived children in the first place? The debate should not be about how we compel teenage mothers to work rather than exist on benefits, but rather how we prevent teen parenthood from being a negative for the parent and child. It is a negative mostly because it is a flag for material and social deprivation, two things which make being a successful parent – and holding a relationship together – much more difficult. The worklessness aspect is merely part of this, not its cause.

Some teenagers make excellent parents and have good jobs. These are the ones who have strong social networks, supportive parents, an engaged partner and an education which enables them to work and progress their skills and experience in the labour market and so provide for their children. We cannot give teenage mothers better parents or partners but we can help them to be better parents, by investing more in Sure Start parenting programmes and schemes such as Nurse-Family Partnerships which are proven to improve parenting in teen parent families.

We can provide free and high quality childcare for children up to school starting age so that mothers can genuinely work – it is ridiculous to claim that they could do so now, without such support. We can offer more rounded education in schools about how to run a home, a relationship, a family. We can radically reform Job Centres so that staff are better at helping and supporting people into jobs – at the moment their record is abysmal. We can improve social services, as the government is also suggesting, so that it provides meaningful help and protection to children and families. And we can look at ways to more actively engage fathers in their children’s upbringing – Australia’s version of our Child Support Agency is one model we could explore – so that this anarchic debate moves on from being just about young women and their feckless behaviour. Am I alone in thinking that these girls would probably greatly appreciate the emotional and material support of a partner? Where are all the men responsible for these children anyway?