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Employment

That was absolute confirmation that the Tories are now the do nothing party. We are offering real help to people in difficult times. Those on the Opposition Front Bench have absolutely nothing to offer people because they are setting themselves apart from the orthodoxy around the world that we need both monetary and fiscal action now to help the economy. The right thing to do is to ensure that the problems with the economy are as short and shallow as possible, to reduce the cost to people now and to the economy in the long run. That is exactly the opposite of what the Tories did in the '80s and '90s, when they said that unemployment was a price worth paying. They wanted us to believe that they had learned those lessons, but even this week the shadow Health Secretary said that a recession"““on many counts…can be good for us””." We have the Conservative deputy chairman saying that the recession should take its course. The only thing that we need to know about the Conservative Front Bench is that its members have not learned the lessons of the 1980s and 1990s, when they massaged and fiddled the unemployment figures and put millions of people on incapacity benefit rather than helping them. In the middle of the 1980s, there was no requirement that people look for work. The then Conservative Government did not provide support or reform the welfare state as they should have done, but those are exactly the things that we will continue to do. I turn now to the points made by the hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell (Chris Grayling). He trotted out his list of figures but, as I mentioned when we last discussed these matters, they are rather esoteric interpretations of the facts. He said that more public sector than private sector jobs had been created, but that is simply wrong: three quarters of the jobs that have been created are in the private sector. He said that we had a lamentable record on employment, but we had the second-highest level of employment in the G7—second only Canada. The hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell said that we were not going to act on unemployment, but we are proposing a package today that his party would not have proposed in the past, and could not propose today, because it is ideologically against taking action now to help people through the downturn. The Government will act because we understand the scars that the Conservative party left on communities, and we are determined to make sure that that never happens again.