by jollytiddlywink on Mon Nov 08, 2010 12:35 am
Well done on using the correct definition of appeasement; giving fascists what they want.
I'm not sure what purpose exactly this is meant to serve. If you've been unemployed for a while, either you are trying to find a job or you're not. If you are still looking, is spending a couple of weeks doing manual labour going to help (unless you're a manual labourer anyway)? If you're not looking, and don't want to work, presumably a few week's work and then back on the dole would be preferable to getting a job.
So I think this won't be any help at all, at least for the reasons given. I suspect that as appeasement goes, this is the equivalent of turning up in the Munich of Daily-Mail-land and instead of offering Prague, saying 'here's a bottle of really nice beer made in Prague, would you like that instead?'
Frankly, I think they'd be on a better idea if they made it a public works project: picking up litter, painting over graffiti, planting trees, helping build roads, etc. Not because the unemployed should be punished or because they are supposedly work-shy, but because paying them a bit more to do work would be good Keynesian policy, and because the end results would either be socially (clean parks,nice trees) useful, or economically (newly-built infrastructure) useful. And that would surely be a better policy all round. Which means the Tories won't do it, of course.