Opinion: John Healey is trying to put work back at the heart of Labour

Finito World

Something interesting is happening to the politics of work.

For years, employment has tended to enter political speeches disguised as something else. It is a productivity statistic, a welfare problem, a skills shortage, a Treasury saving, a line on a spreadsheet. We have become rather good at talking about the economics of work while becoming strangely embarrassed about talking about work itself.

John Healey’s first Labour conference speech as Chancellor suggested that may be changing.

“Good work. Good jobs. Britain working again,” he told delegates in Liverpool. He spoke about “the rhythms of work, the value of work, the pride that good work brings.” And he returned repeatedly to the importance of the first job: the moment at which a young person earns a wage, acquires colleagues, learns to turn up on time and begins to discover that other people depend on them.

This matters because Britain has acquired a problem which is simultaneously economic, social and human. Nearly a million young people are now not in employment, education or training. Healey noted that two-thirds of them have never worked. His formulation was unusually stark for a Labour Chancellor: “The best thing we can offer a young person isn’t a benefit payment, it’s a first job with training and a wage.”

There is a danger in saying this badly. Illness is real. Disability is real. So are inadequate schools, poor transport, family breakdown, regional inequality and an economy which has not always created sufficient opportunities where people actually live. A serious politics of work cannot simply divide the country into strivers and shirkers.

But there is an equal danger in becoming so nervous of moralising about work that we cease to say anything meaningful about its value.

A job is not merely the opposite of receiving benefits. At its best, work gives structure to time. It creates relationships. It produces competence and confidence. It allows a person to discover that he or she can do something which another human being values. It generates the small accumulation of experiences from which a career — and sometimes an identity — is built.

That is particularly important for the young.

Healey recalled washing pots and glasses in a North Yorkshire pub, where he learnt “about turning up on time, about getting on with others, about respecting those with more experience.” These sound like modest lessons. In fact they are enormous ones. They are precisely the kinds of lessons which are extremely difficult for government to teach through a programme or an app.

The policy announced alongside the rhetoric therefore deserves attention. Healey committed £100 million to a Local Apprenticeship Service, run through mayors, intended to operate rather like a network of football scouts: finding young people with potential and connecting them with employers. The wider package includes using the National Wealth Fund to create or support another 130,000 jobs by 2030 and restoring the Union Learning Fund with £15 million annually for workplace skills.

There was also a larger industrial argument. Healey promised a “new age of industrialisation”, linking defence, advanced manufacturing, AI, technology and clean energy to the creation of skilled British jobs. Among the announcements were British-built floating docks for the submarine fleet, a new marine research vessel and investment associated with Rolls-Royce.

Here Healey may be approaching an important truth.

Governments cannot command fulfilling careers into existence. But they can create the conditions in which useful work multiplies. Procurement matters. Infrastructure matters. Training matters. Investment matters. And an apprenticeship which leads towards a genuine industry with genuine demand is very different from a government scheme designed principally to improve a statistic.

There is, however, an enormous unanswered question.

Healey also said that allowing the benefits bill continually to increase is not progressive, and described reform as a moral duty. At the same time, he acknowledged something which ought to hang over every promise made at this Labour conference: “the money New Labour had in the 90s is simply not there now.” He pledged that his Budget would observe the fiscal rules and maintain control of the public finances.

That tension cannot be resolved by rhetoric about hope.

If Britain is serious about getting hundreds of thousands of people into work, employers must actually want to employ them. The tax system must encourage hiring. Entry-level jobs must exist. Training must correspond to real vacancies. Transport and housing must make it possible for people to reach those vacancies. And businesses must believe that government policy will remain stable for long enough to justify investment.

The test of Healey’s agenda will therefore not be whether government becomes tougher or softer on welfare. That is the familiar political argument, and by itself it gets us nowhere.

The better question is whether Britain can once again construct a functioning ladder between childhood and economic independence.

For too many young people the bottom rungs of that ladder have disappeared. They leave education, apply online for jobs they never hear back from, accumulate rejection without acquiring experience and eventually become categorised by government according to their distance from the labour market. The longer that process continues, the harder the eventual journey back becomes.

Healey appears to understand that the first intervention should come much earlier: the first employer, the first apprenticeship, the first colleague, the first payslip.

For a publication concerned with education and employment, there was therefore something heartening in hearing a Chancellor speak not merely about jobs numbers but about the experience of having a job.

There is also a useful historical symmetry here. Healey reached repeatedly into Labour’s past — Attlee’s commitment to full employment, the New Deal for Young People under Blair and Brown, and the industrial communities of South Yorkshire in which his own politics were formed. But nostalgia will not itself reindustrialise Britain. Yesterday’s mines cannot simply be reopened, as Healey himself acknowledged. The question is what takes their place.

That may ultimately be the most important part of his argument.

Britain does not need to recreate the economy of 1950, or 1997. It needs to recover something more fundamental: the expectation that a young person entering adulthood should have a reasonable route towards useful, decently paid work — and that acquiring skills, turning up, becoming dependable and gradually becoming good at something are worthwhile achievements in themselves.

Healey ended with an old Labour economic metaphor: government cannot merely divide the existing cake differently; it has to make the cake bigger and share it fairly.

Quite so. But before Britain can bake a bigger cake, more people need to be invited into the kitchen.

On that, at least, the Chancellor has identified the right place to begin.