SOCIALIST ACTION Prior to last year's general election, the Tories' advertising machineengineered by Saatchi and Saatchi - was campaigning vigourously with giant-sized posters proclaiming 'Labour isn't working'.
The posters showed a dole office with hundreds of people queuing outside. After a year with the Tories in office, this advertising campaign has slapped back into Between May and June, there was a 10% increase in the jobless total - pushing it up, at 1.6 million, to the highest point since the end of the last war.
The section of society that will inevitably bear the brunt of this 10% increase is that which is already the hardest hit - young workers and those who are leaving school this summer. Among schoolleavers, unemployment increased by 137,509 to 186,926. This is expected to rise still further this month, with the bulk of schoolschool without any experience of a workplace, young people are isolated and less aware of the need for an organised struggle along the lines of trade union achon cle COSMETIC But what of the 'Youth Opport. unities Programme? Is this perhaps a serious attempt being made by the government to shield young people from the effects of the deepening economic crisis? The impression that the YOP is designed to create is that youth can use it to escape from the dead-end of the dole scrap-heap, by getting an apprenticeship-style training for a skilled career.
In reality, however, the YOP is no more than a cosmetic measure to keep official unemployment figures down, and also in many cases a means of providing cheap labour- a state-financed £23.55 per week- to capitalists or to public sector projects which can conveniently help to disguise the cuts In many cases, employers 'discover at the end of the training period that they do not have a vacancy. Not, that is, for a trained worker who will want union rates. But another 'trainee' who just happens to be provided free by the government - that could be a different story.
MASS CAMPAIGN Because of the position of young people in the field of unemployment, they will become more and more thrust to the forefront of the struggle. But in order to adopt an effective role, they will need to have a focus around which they can organise.
That focus must be provided by the Labour Party Young Socialists, which is the only youth org anisation which has the potential for developing into a truly mass organisation which could have an audible voice within the labour movement generally.
In order to attract young people to its ranks, the LYPS should begin now to organise an active response to the Tories' attacks, by building a mass campaign which can overcome the isolation of unemployed youth today.