Dr Jeevun Sandher

I want to start there. I disagree with the Conservatives’ motion. It effectively says that if we cut national insurance contributions, good jobs will follow. The first thing to note is that, yes, we did raise national insurance contributions in our first Budget, and there are a million more people in work today. The second thing to note is that the Conservatives’ mistaken moral aims would lead to poorer material ends. They are googling; they are finding out the difference between the pay-as-you-earn measure of employment and the Office for National Statistics measure of employment. There is something else on which I disagree with the Conservatives. I read the document entitled “The Right Way”, which they produced before their conference. It effectively said that if the Government just step away and create the right conditions, businesses will create the prosperity and good jobs that we need. We have seen that this has not worked. Post-industrial areas are still post-industrial. We saw the Government step away in the 1980s, and we saw those areas remain poor over time. In places like Middlesbrough, the employment rate is 20 percentage points lower than the national average. For non-graduate men, the employment rate is down by about 20 percentage points, too.