The matter of what is voted on is of course, a consideration for the Speaker. I do not always get to decide what is voted on in this House.
New clause 26, standing in my name and those of my hon. Friends, focuses on the issue of jobs and does so for the very good reason that that is the principal economic challenge facing us right now. If there was any doubt about that, we need only look at the news over the past 24 hours—1,700 jobs lost at Airbus, up to 5,000 job losses announced by the owners of Upper Crust, 4,500 at easyJet a couple of days ago, another 4,500 at Swissport, and many more around the country that do not make the front page of the national news. These are not just numbers. Every one of them is a human story of a livelihood taken away and a family wondering how they will pay the bills and what the future will hold for them.
Across the country, the claimant count measure of unemployment is up by 1.5 million since the start of the year. In addition to those out of work and the estimated 9 million on furlough schemes, it is estimated that up to 8 million employees are working fewer hours than usual. These stark figures show us that we are facing the jobs challenge of a generation. It is decades since young people leaving school, college or university graduated into a labour market such as this.
Giving my age away, I remember, as a young teenager growing up in Glasgow, attending the people’s march for jobs. Unemployment back then was around 3 million. The vocabulary of it infused the times—“signing on”; “the Girocheque”. It even gave birth to the great band UB40, named after the unemployment card that people got for signing on. The damage caused by that mass unemployment affected not just the city where I grew up, but the Black Country that I now represent, and many similar communities across the country. Long-term social and economic pain was caused by far too many people facing a life on the dole, and we must never go back to those days. If we have learned anything from that experience of the 1980s, it is that the cost of not acting is greater than the cost of acting, and we must do everything we can now to prevent mass unemployment. That is the challenge facing us.
At the start of this crisis we called for wage support to help people through. The furlough scheme and the self-employed furlough scheme were the right and necessary things to do, but as lockdown is eased, and support from those schemes starts to be withdrawn from next month, we can see the danger facing the economy. The danger is that businesses that have been just about hanging on start to let people go, caught between
having no income and facing rising employment costs. This is the moment that the Government need to act to preserve jobs, jobs, jobs.