Lilley unites us in misery: On Tyneside, the planned change in support for the unemployed is a sick joke

SOONER or later, almost any Tyneside conversation about the Government's latest proposals for benefits for the unemployed veers towards health matters. There has been an increase in benefit claims for such medical arcana as 'vibration white finger', 'mucous membrane disease', and 'beat knee': ailments caused by certain types of work but acknowledged mostly in redundancy.

Acute depression, alcoholism and suicide are also mentioned among the afflictions of the jobless.

Kevin Flynn, a prominent Newcastle trade union activist, uses the terminology of Aids. The Government's proposals would lead to 'full-blown workfare', he said.

Stuart Christie of Hebburn, a redundant Swan Hunter millwright, sitting in a pub overlooking a silent Tyne, was 'on the sick'. His wife, Jaqueline, an unemployed machinist, has been on 'invalidity' for three years, having severed a tendon in her finger.

A driver employed by Bass in Hebburn was morose over his beer. 'If a man works all his life and has paid all his contributions, and then is offered only six months' dole, that's fraudulent. All the Tory Government has done is to unite us in our misery.'

Opinion throughout Tyne and Wear seemed to be that the Government's plan would lead to even more wretchedness. Last week's White Paper proposes that benefit be payable for six months on the basis of claimants' National Insurance contributions. Under the existing system, a person who has paid the stipulated amount of NI contributions and is judged to be 'genuinely' unemployed has unemployment benefit paid for a year. Under the proposed scheme, the claimant would be means-tested (as for income support) after six months. Those with savings of pounds 8,000 - from, say, redundancy payments -would receive nothing. The new six-month dole would be called a 'jobseeker's allowance'.

The effect, according to Mr Flynn, will be to 'force people to work for buttons'. To avoid this, they might try to rely on their various disabilities, even though the Department of Social Security has cracked down on such claims (doctors appointed by the DSS refuse, for example, to assess for mucous membrane disease).

Miners and shipyard workers, once the backbone of the region's labour force, used to endure industrial afflictions in silence, fearing to jeopardise their jobs. Now that nearly all the mines and yards have closed, there has been a marked rise in claims for industrial disablement benefit and reduced earnings allowance. In Wallsend, where male unemployment is as high as 45 per cent, the 'People's Centre' takes the view that 'the prospect of an extra pounds 37 per week on top of unemployment benefit or the paltry wages in the service centre or light industry begins to look attractive'.

Despite a 1.2 per cent fall in Tyne and Wear unemployment, the number of disputes with the DSS over benefit entitlements of people suffering from work-related illness has increased. Between February and September, the Wallsend People's Group helped 22 applicants win claims for disability living allowances. Yet the group says that thousands more, most of them women, are reluctant to pursue claims in a region averaging 12.3 per cent unemployment.

Mr Christie said: 'A lot of people have lost the will to fight. They've been degraded. In 1991, for instance, when I still had a job at Swan Hunter, the jib of a crane came down on a naval vessel. A team of us worked seven days a week for two weeks to put matters right. Swan Hunter said: 'Good men, we'll see you right.' We all expected a pounds 1,000 bonus. Instead we got a letter of thanks and a food hamper: a half-bottle of champagne, a jar of imitation caviare and peaches in brandy sauce. We gave it away.'

There were traces of 'lost will' at a lunchtime meeting called by Mr Flynn at the TUC office in Newcastle's Cloth Market. Fewer than a dozen turned up to hear a sympathetic civil servant speak anonymously about the jobseeker's allowance. 'We have the worst unemployment benefit in Europe,' he said.

'Every country, except Italy, operates the 12-month system. Italy has only just introduced a six-month system, so how can Lilley and Portillo say it's the better system?'

Noting near-apathy at the meeting, a young speaker interrupted: 'We need to strengthen our language . . . to say we're going to stop this legislation.'

Peter Lilley, Secretary of State for Social Security, says the planned allowance should 'help the jobseeker and motivate the workshy'. Mr Christie retorts: 'I've tried bricklaying, gardening, being a handyman; jobs lasting two or three days,' he said. 'If they sent me to a government-subsidised training course, I'd turn it down. I don't want charity from anybody. I want a working wage.'

In nearby Jarrow there is little sign of a busy, working community. At Winners, a local supermarket, Maureen Pervie, the manager, said it was rare for a vacancy to arise.

'We had one a long time ago, on the till,' she said. 'For pounds 3.15 an hour, people hold on as long as they can.'

That is 35p below the minimum wage suggested in the Labour Party's Social Justice Commission report, whose publication coincided with the Government's White Paper. But it is pounds 1.85 an hour more than the going rate in many of Tyne and Wear's security firms.

If miners and shipyard workers think beyond their redundancy payments, they usually contemplate two jobs in particular: security work and driving taxis.

Paul Chambers, a former finance company manager who runs Viking Taxis in Jarrow, said there were 300 taxis in the borough five years ago; now there are 500. Drivers who used to earn between pounds 500 and pounds 600 a week were now taking home pounds 150. 'Last week, one man cleared only pounds 108,' he said.

Mr Chambers sees the proposed jobseeker's allowance purely as a device for forcing the jobless into low-paid, dead-end occupations. 'I've given up on the Government,' he said.

Kevin Flynn likes to quote an old Tyneside saying: 'There's plenty of work around, as long as you don't want paying for it.' Meanwhile, Mr Flynn said, 'Come April 1996, you'll have to jump through hoops for the mad Peter Lilley.' By then, 'beat knee' may be regarded as a lame excuse for failing to do so.

(Photograph omitted)