Letter: Full employment: neither socialist folly nor rhetoric
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Your support makes all the difference.Sir: Yesterday (30 September) your editorial called full employment a 'meaningless tribal chant' and implied that the only way for Labour to win the next election is to 'break free from its past'. You are quite wrong. Indeed, the reality of the situation is quite opposite, as restating the attainment of full employment as the primary concern of the next Labour government will become a clear election winner.
Full employment is conveyed by the media in such contemptuous terms, as they are the same prisoners of economic orthodoxy as were our political leaders in the Thirties. For more than a decade now the field of political economics has been dominated by the belief that mass unemployment is either natural or simply unavoidable. This, again, is quite wrong. There is absolutely nothing 'natural' in having three to four million people unemployed; Keynes proved that in the Thirties, but, unfortunately, the concept was resurrected in the Seventies, courtesy of Milton Friedman, and then accepted as gospel by both the Tories and media alike.
The fact that direct Keynesian type reflation of the economy is no longer feasible due to our huge budget and trade deficits should not detract us from the pursuit of full employment. Other ways of achieving high and stable levels of employment do exist; economists such as Professor Richard Layard have been laying down alternative proposals for years and yet his recommendations have been largely ignored, mainly due to the belief that mass unemployment was a 'price worth paying'.
In its relentless pursuit to become electable, even the Labour Party was reluctant to raise the banner of full employment lest it became tarnished with the image of being the party of inflation and increased taxes. However, the British public can now see for itself that the abandonment of full employment has led to urban decay, rising crime, racism and overall social disintegration. The crusade towards zero inflation has not produced the promised land and trickle-down economics was, and is, an illusion.
Once the public has been made aware what damage the rejection of full employment has caused, they will soon see that it is not a socialist folly or merely empty political rhetoric, but that full employment is without doubt the only solution to this country's economic and social problems.
Yours faithfully,
DAVID HARRISON
Royal Leamington Spa
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