Emma Harrison is the founder of Action for Employment (A4E), and she is establishing Working Families Everywhere on Cameron's behalf. You may know her from Channel 4's The Secret Millionaire, where she gave £50,000 away in front of a TV camera in 2007, after the poor had proved their worthiness for her bounty. The scheme is being piloted in Hull, Blackpool and Kensington & Chelsea, and will roll out in the next four years. Volunteers with no prior experience of social work, creepily renamed "family champions" (FCs), will enter "never-worked" families with drug, crime and child protection issues, and turn them into "working" families. Once polished, these families will inspire others, like a game of Social Democratic dominoes, but backwards. "Family champions are going to stalk the streets, they are going to find the jobs," says Harrison, who is clearly, like Margaret Thatcher, a Nietzschean. They will get a small wage and priority access to all other services the family is using, and they will be handpicked by Harrison. They may also get badges, but this is not confirmed.
Why does this feel so dodgy? I called Harrison's PR and asked her what will happen if there are no jobs. What then? "Emma believes there are jobs," she replied. "There are hidden jobs." Oh yes, those hidden jobs, buried under trees and lying at the end of rainbows. All the unemployed need is the imagination to see the invisible, and maybe a magic shovel and a friendly elf to hug them on the way to Mordor. So a slab of government policy is being handed to a woman who is in denial about the scale and cause of joblessness. The statistics are nowhere in the Working Families Everywhere material. There are 2.49 million people unemployed today in the UK.
Haringey to be twinned with Greggs:
Retailers Asda and Sainsbury's are among businesses that have signed up to a charity initiative that will see senior store and project managers despatched to work in deprived areas such as Tottenham and Lambeth, which were badly hit by this month's riots.
Ten companies, including BT, Dairy Crest and Greggs, have signed up to the pilot scheme run by Business in the Community. So-called "business connectors" will be seconded to communities for at least six months to provide assistance to residents and groups trying to tackle issues such as youth unemployment, educational underachievement and a weak local enterprise culture. Its chief executive Stephen Howard said it was a "crucial time" for businesses to get involved in communities: "I believe healthy back streets create healthy high streets."
This sort of nonsense must be stopped. The organised working class has been off the scene since June 30th. The trouble is the Tory loonies are working day and night to transport us back to 1811. The TUC demo outside the Tory Party conference will be something - but far from enough.
Name the day for the next strike now.