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Youth Unemployment

My party's policy for growth is to rebalance the British economy, and to invest in industry, manufacturing and engineering, which are vital to the north Staffordshire economy. This Government give corporation tax cuts to the banks and the supermarkets, and end initiatives that help investment in science, manufacturing and engineering. Welfare bills and jobseeker's allowance accounts are being added to by the undermining of the economic recovery and the scrapping of the future jobs fund, which itself imperils the Government's hopes of paying down the deficit. The argument about the extraneous cost of the future jobs fund is economic nonsense. My right hon. Friend the Member for Birkenhead (Mr Field), who is no longer in the Chamber, mentioned the great success of the scheme. Government Members like to pray my right hon. Friend in aid at every single opportunity, but on that point they would do well to listen to him. Many of my colleagues wish to explain the success of the future jobs fund in their constituencies, but it would be unfair to leave my speech without a good old-fashioned example of Liberal Democrat hypocrisy. In a letter dated 21 April 2010, the Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions, the hon. Member for Thornbury and Yate (Steve Webb), wrote:"““We have no plans to change or reduce existing commitments to the Future Jobs Fund. We believe that more help is needed for young people, not less.””" We now know how far those commitments go. Liberal Democrats say that they did not know what the books looked like or what the conditions were, but the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills spent his life writing about the storm and the catastrophe and the crash and all the rest of it, so the situation was not exactly unacknowledged. That talk was either over-egging or dissimulation. The youth unemployment crisis and the future jobs fund policy points to three things: first, a series of broken promises, denials and U-turns by this shoddy Tory-led Government; secondly, the fact that they have no policy for growth or job creation, eggs Benedict and all; and thirdly, the perils of the Government's vision of the big society. Labour believes in civil society working with the state, but the Government believe in the withdrawal of the state, which will have terrible results in the communities that we represent.