It isn’t a perfect correlation, but it is a strong one: the towns and places most affected by the riots of the last few weeks also have some of the highest levels of worklessness in the UK.
It would be wrong to attribute the recent outbreak of lawlessness solely to this fact. In the final analysis, the riots were just drunken thuggery writ large, no more, no less.
Many of the convicted have a history of crime and hooliganism, so it is no surprise to see them take to the streets when encouraged by the malevolent instruction of social media.
Not enough is yet known of the rest of their backgrounds to reach firm conclusions, but it nevertheless seems reasonable to assume that many of them would not have been in gainful, full-time employment.
Idleness does not make for happy and contented communities, and in much of Britain it has reached epidemic proportions.
Employment data published this week makes particularly disturbing reading. The good news was that unemployment fell a bit, and that wages continue to rise at a fair old clip, undoing much of the damage inflicted by the recent cost of living crisis.
But beneath the surface lurks a much more ominous story – a massive long-tail of worklessness and supposed disability that refuses to go away.
At the last count, 9.4m 16 to 64-year-olds were deemed “economically inactive” – that is neither in work nor looking for it. This is 350,000 more than a year ago and 859,000 higher than just before the pandemic.
The numbers may not be entirely reliable: increasingly small sample sizes have led to mounting concern over the quality of the Office for National Statistics data.
All the same, the big picture would seem broadly correct, and in any case is backed by a growing mountain of anecdotal evidence.
Many of these people will of course be stay-at-home mothers, carers, students and others with a perfectly legitimate reason for not being in paid employment. Non-earners of this type cannot be regarded as a “problem”.
Indeed, until quite recently Britain compared well to other high-income economies on worklessness, with some of the lowest rates of it anywhere in the world.
Primarily, this was because out-of-work benefits tended to be stingy relative to the rest of Europe, while Britain’s flexible labour market provided myriad opportunities for employment.
Down and down went the number of economically inactive to previously undreamt of levels. The resulting “jobs miracle” was rightly hailed as one of Britain’s biggest economic achievements.
But then came the pandemic, and the trend was rudely interrupted. Britain’s reputation as the poster child of full employment was turned on its head.
The big change was in the number of people not working because of illness and incapacity. This reached a peak of 2.83m in April this year, and has declined only slightly since.
Furlough gave the population at large a taste for idleness, and once lockdown ended many people never went back to work again.
No other country seems to have suffered the same degree of scarring. Other “rich economies” soon recovered pre-pandemic levels of labour force participation. But not in Britain.
To blame it on NHS waiting lists, as some on the Left do, is nonsense. In its last “fiscal risks” report, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) estimated that only a quarter of the long-term sick inactive population was on an NHS waiting list. This is not enough to account for the steep rise in worklessness.
Part of the explanation is no doubt our old friend, an ageing demographic. The rise in those claiming incapacity benefits, which are considerably more generous than ordinary out-of-work entitlements, is particularly marked in the 50-66 age bracket. There has also been a striking increase in mental health issues among younger people.
But whatever the cause, it almost beggars belief that, with such a huge stock of unemployed workers to draw on, employers should still be turning on an unprecedented scale to migrants to fill key positions in the labour market.
Responding to Monday’s shock surge in the economically inactive, the British Chambers of Commerce lamented “widespread recruitment difficulties and ongoing competition for skilled workers”.
The juxtaposition of acute labour shortages on the one hand and growing worklessness on the other could scarcely be more striking.
As I say, it may be a bit of a stretch to attribute the riots directly to this dire state of affairs. What is not in doubt, however, is that it provides fertile ground for social discontent, resentment and crime.
On one side we have a large, growing and increasingly alienated part of the population who can’t or won’t work, and on the other a large and growing number of migrants only too happy to fill the roles employers are crying out for.
An evident skills and geographic mismatch between the disaffected and the jobs-rich parts of the economy make this a particularly tough nut to crack. Yet things plainly cannot carry on as they are, and not just because of the social deficiencies highlighted by the riots.
Some of the biggest growth in government spending over the past decade is on welfare, with the costs of supporting such a large proportion of the population in idleness beginning to become unbearable.
Estimates by the OBR show that there are big gains to be had from getting this right.
In an upside scenario which sees rates of labour market participation returning to their pre-pandemic trend of improvement, government borrowing would be reduced by £18.7bn in three years’ time, of which £6.5bn would come from savings on welfare, £10.9bn from higher tax revenues, and the remainder from lower debt interest payments.
Yet in a downside scenario where working-age participation continues to fall, borrowing rises by £20.1bn with higher welfare support, lower tax revenues and lower interest costs – a difference of nearly £40bn.
Regrettably, it is not at all clear that the newly installed Labour Government has the stomach for the carefully calibrated mix of stick and carrot that getting it right entails.
Nor is it just the assumed injustice of cutting benefits that threatens to hold Labour back. A large part of Labour’s plan to “make work pay” involves beefing up workers’ rights and increasing the minimum wage.
That this will have precisely the reverse effect, by making jobs scarcer, does not seem to have occurred to the clever clogs who designed the policy.
During the election campaign, suggestions from Mel Stride, then work and pensions secretary, that too many people were claiming unemployment benefit as a lifestyle choice rather than a necessity were derided as a Tory trope.
I wonder if Downing Street still thinks that after the wakeup call of the past few weeks.
