Chancellor ready to lead fight for ‘full employment’

CHANCELLOR GEORGE Osborne has declared he will fight for “full employment” in Britain, making job creation a central plank of the Government’s economic plan.

Speaking to workers at Tilbury Port in Essex, he said his “ambition” was to achieve the highest employment rate of any of the developed nations of the G7.

Mr Osborne was careful to say he was not offering a Government “guarantee” of a job, but with more than two million still seeking work, he said it was essential to get more people back into employment.

“It will take time to fix that,” he said. “But we will not rest while we still have so much wasted potential in some parts of our country.

“That’s why today I’m making a new commitment. A commitment to fight for full employment in Britain.”

Mr Osborne said employment rates would continue to fluctuate — and stressed that he was not promising to abolish the ups and downs of the economic cycle.

“As we learned again recently, you can’t abolish boom and bust,” he said.

“So attempts past and present by governments to ‘guarantee’ a job to every person are doomed to fail.”

He added the Government would not try to lower the unemployment rate by creating “artificial” public-sector jobs, which simply ended up destroying employment as public spending spiralled out of control.

“You end up with more people unemployed instead of less,” he said.

“That’s what happened before we came to office. The politicians talked of guaranteeing full employment and ended up with a great recession and soaring unemployment.”

He said the Government’s approach depended on providing the right environ- ment for business to create jobs — cutting taxes on employment, reforming welfare.

“There is no reason why Britain shouldn’t aim to have the highest employment rate of any of the world’s leading economies,” he said.

“To have more people working than any of the other countries in the G7 group, that’s my ambition. The best place in the world to create a job, to get a job, to keep a job, to be helped to look for another job if you lose one. That is what I mean when I say that we are going for full employment.”

For Labour, shadow chief treasury secretary Chris Leslie said the coalition’s economic strategy had doubled the number of young people stuck on the dole.

“Full employment is the right aspiration but Osborne has announced no new policies today to help people into work,” he said.

Pictu re: PA. Chancellor George Osborne speaking to workers at Tilsbury Port in Essex.