Is there anything wrong with these sentiments?

[R1Geezer]

http://news.sky.com/s...Should_Get_On_The_Bus
imporvement on Tebbit I guess!

[jake-the-peg]

Which number bus do you catch to this mythical land where employers are screaming out for employees?

Comments like this when you're about to increase unemployment by 1 million are somewhat unfortunate to put it mildly.

Having said that his words were twisted a bit - it's rather difficult to talk about increasing people's mobility in employment without some journalist trotting out Tebbit's arrogant and timeless quote

[jno]

Airbus, jake?

[chelle7272]

If you're unemployed here youwouldn't be able to afford the bus it's so expensive!

[New Judge]

IDS has a point.

In the area he particularly mentions (S. Wales) a quick search shows that large numbers of jobs vacancies exist:

http://www.jobswales.co.uk/

http://www.cardiffjobs.co.uk/

Of course they may not be suitable for everybody, but I only had a quick look. Naturally many of them will exist in Cardiff, Swansea or Newport rather than Merthyr, Treforest or Ystrad Mynach, but that’s exactly what IDS is emphasising.

Most people working in London and many other big cities commute daily, some of them considerable distances. By contrast, there is certainly an attitude amongst some of the unemployed elsewhere that travelling any distance to work is unthinkable.

Job vacancies do exist and those seeking employment cannot these days expect a job to exist on their doorstep.

[boxtops]

I heard that on the radio this morning, I thought he must be in cloud cuckoo land. If you spend your money on an hour's trip to Cardiff, you get there and find that all the people in Cardiff are also looking for jobs. I do agree that "some people" appear not to get off their backsides and take any job to get off the dole queue, but this is a wild generalisation and I don't think it's done him any favours.

[New Judge]

They don’t have to travel to see what vacancies are available, boxtops, they can look online as I did.

I agree that some places are not well served by buses and that the fares are sometimes expensive. Nonetheless these are problems that many people in rural areas manage to overcome. I accept that it is difficult for many unemployed to get work. However, IDS is quite right to suggest that some of them are not doing too much to help themselves.

[ludwig]

// Which number bus do you catch to this mythical land where employers are screaming out for employees? //

I don't understand jake - whenever there's a discussion about immigration you're the first to claim that we deparately need lots of migrant workers to fill all the vacancies and stop the country collapsing.
Maybe they could get on the same bus the migrant workers use.

[New Judge]

Thanks for the reminder, Ludwig.

I have argued many times with jake and others how preposterous it is that the UK imports vast quantities of labour whilst paying a similar number to spend their time in the pub or betting shop.

Jake has always countered that the labour imported is of a highly specialised nature with skills unavailable from the home produced market (presumably because of the dire state of our nation’s education system).

Of course all of the Eastern Europeans that have arrived here in the past decade are now gainfully employed in the professions – law, science, medicine, finance and the like. This does pose the question why the two million or so long term unemployed have not managed to secure work on farms, or in factories, warehouses, supermarkets and car washing businesses which have created vacancies in the same period.

Perhaps it’s because none of those vacancies were in Merthyr Tydfil.

[jno]

"all of the Eastern Europeans that have arrived here in the past decade are now gainfully employed in the professions"

I think quite a lot of them have actually gone home, New Judge, as conditions there improve and conditions here worsen.

This is a year old but I don't know that the situation has gone into reverse since then

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8243225.stm

Bear in mind too that the situation is about to get dramatically worse: not only will those in the public service be sacked but all those private sector workers who take government contracts will be on the brink too. My guess is a lot of bus trips into Cardiff are going to be fruitless.

[karenmac60]

Hmm, that's handy to know if I lose my public sector job - I'm sure the commute from west Scotland to Cardiff'll be a dawdle!

[New Judge]

Yes jno some of them have left, but huge numbers of them still remain and are still employed.

I know we’ve strayed a little from what may happen in the future to what has happened in the past, but I believe they are connected.

The country cannot have it both ways. In the past few years the electorate has been bamboozled into believing that mass immigration is necessary to keep vital services running. Many of these services do not involve highly skilled activities that cannot be easily learned. Yet at the same time we are told that, despite having somewhere between 1.5m and 5m unemployed (depending on what measurement you believe) we still have to import labour. Clearly there were large numbers of people during that time who had no inclination to seek work and who made no significant efforts to do so.

It may well be more difficult to find work in the coming years. However IDS is suggesting that the unemployed will have to be flexible in their approach to finding work – as they should have been in the past. The immigrants about whom the home grown population complain as having “taken their jobs” demonstrate that such flexibility produces results. People travel from Eastern Europe and find work. They travel from Australia and find work and accommodation (go in a bar in London’s Earl’s Court to see what I mean).

The world owes nobody a living and sometimes it is a bit inconvenient to go out and make your own.

[brionon]

But What a good idea to save money ! Put Half a Million Tax Payers on the Dole.