Even for Corbyn’s Labour Party, it takes a twisted cynicism to claim life today is as bad as the 1930s

THErE was no minimum wage, and virtually no protection against the sack. It would be another 35 years before there was any legal right to redundancy payments and the first employment tribunals — initially introduced as industrial tribunals — were almost as far away.

There was no equal-pay law for women, nor any right to maternity leave, compared to the 52 weeks that exists today. In fact, staff did not have a statutory guarantee to any paid leave at all, nor were there legal restrictions on working hours.

This was 1930, the beginning of a decade when the British economy struggled desperately with the Great Depression. It could not have been more bleak for workers — if they had a job at all.

Yet in a speech to the TUC yesterday, Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell drew a shameless and utterly fallacious comparison between those dark days of mass unemployment and grinding poverty and conditions under a Tory Government today.

Comrades

Brimming with apparent indignation at the suffering endured by Britain’s workforce, McDonnell promised to introduce the biggest overhaul of workplace practices for more than 80 years through ‘a significant extension of trade union rights’ and the modernisation of ‘corporate governance structures’.

The aim, he declared, was to reverse the Tory approach which has ‘produced a workplace environment of insecurity not seen since the 1930s’.

Even by the standards of this Labour Party, the suggestion the Tories have reduced Britain’s workplace to that of the era when the country was on its knees is a new low.

Not least because McDonnell unveiled his plan to the TUC at the very moment the latest economic figures utterly contradicted his antiTory message. Just when he denounced the Government to trade union comrades, the Office for National Statistics issued its new labour-market report, which showed UK unemployment had fallen by 55,000 to just 1.36 million, with the UK jobless rate at 4 per cent, its lowest for 40 years.

Across Britain, record numbers of women are in work, while youth unemployment is at a historic low and wages are growing significantly faster than prices. Earnings were up in the last quarter by 2.9 per cent, compared to an inflation rate of 2.4 per cent.

Contrast this with the reality of the Thirties. Whereas unemployment today is 4 per cent, in 1932 it was officially 15 per cent nationwide, though, according to some analyses, the real figure was 22 per cent. In some parts of the industrial heartlands, the rate was far worse, up to 70 per cent in certain blackspots.

Left-wing author J. B. Priestley wrote of the County Durham town of Jarrow, shattered by the closure of its shipyard: ‘Wherever we went, men were hanging about — hundreds and thousands of them.

‘The whole town looked as if it had entered a perpetual, penniless black Sabbath.’

For those in work, earnings were dismal. The average hourly wage for men was just one shilling six pence (7½p) in 1938 — the equivalent of £3.40 today — and women were paid barely half of that. In 1931, amid a deepening economic crisis and the formation of a National Government, public employees had pay slashed by between 10 and 20 per cent.

Poverty was bewilderingly widespread. In his 1937 book The road To Wigan Pier, which highlighted the appalling destitution in the urban landscape, George Orwell wrote of ‘labyrinthine slums and dark back kitchens with sickly, ageing people creeping round and round them like black beetles’.

And, of course, the welfare state was nothing like as extensive as today’s. For those eligible, benefit support amounted to just 15 shillings (75p) a week — little more than £30 today — and claimants had to do a tough ‘means test’ to prove they were sufficiently poverty-stricken to qualify. There was no NHS. Even for the employed, a doctor’s visit could cost half a week’s wages.

What makes McDonnell’s wilful ignorance of the Thirties more sinister is the ideological zealotry that drives it.

The TUC and the Corbynistas revel in this kind of messianic stuff, with its extravagant historical sweep and whiff of revolution. But the arrival of McDonnell at the Treasury would do nothing to enhance workers’ security.

Living standards would plummet and unemployment soar as the economy stalled. The imposition of full-blooded socialism under Corbyn and McDonnell, featuring confiscatory taxation, untrammelled trade union power and massive rises in state expenditure, would be a wrecking ball at the heart of Britain’s financial wellbeing.

Grievance

I know from my own career how flawed these policies really are. In the mid-Eighties, just out of university, I was a starry-eyed Left-wing idealist, eager to do my bit for the Labour cause.

So, as a resident of Islington in North London, I became an activist in Jeremy Corbyn’s constituency party, where I regularly heard him preach the gospel of fundamentalist socialism. ‘Our job is not to change capitalism but to overthrow it,’ was his battle cry.

Through my involvement with Islington politics, I also served as a councillor in the town hall, then a bastion of municipal radicalism.

It was an experience that left me profoundly disillusioned with Labour. Within the council, the obsession with workplace rights created an inward-looking culture of permanent grievance, bureaucratic mismanagement and union domination, where the demands of the staff counted far more than the needs of the taxpaying public.

This is what McDonnell now plans for Britain. He said in 2013 that he wanted to ‘drive the Tories from office’ through mass protests which would ‘bring this country to a standstill’. Well, his planned economic policies would quickly achieve the same paralysis.

It is precisely by following a course that is the opposite of McDonnell’s socialist vision that the Government can celebrate today’s record employment figures and growth statistics. He endlessly condemns ‘Tory cuts’, but in reality fiscal restraint has stabilised the economy by restoring soundness to the public finances.

Stifle

He goes on about ‘tax giveaways’ to corporations without any recognition that those tax cuts have boosted economic growth and Treasury revenues, with the corporation tax take rising from £44billion in 2015 to £58 billion this year.

He rails against job ‘insecurity’ caused by the gig economy of short-term and zerohours contracts with no acknowledgement that the flexibility very often suits workers and companies alike.

Under the guise of new ‘rights’ for workers under McDonnell, excessive state intervention would stifle this growth by undermining innovation and flexibility. Small companies simply wouldn’t survive. We need only look at European countries such as France and Italy, whose unemployment rates are double ours because heavy-handed state regulation makes recruitment too costly.

History shows that McDonnell and Corbyn would drag Britain back to the dark days of the Seventies when bullying, irresponsible trade union rule turned our country into ‘the sick man of Europe’.

But as we have seen, McDonnell is hardly going to let history get in the way of his hardline ideology.