170,000 people out of work in Scotland and numbers likely to rise above 250,000

At this time when unemployment is rising and predicted to rise until 2011 and not expected to fall to 2008 levels for 9 years –why are all the funds established to fight unemployment been cut!!!!

Our Skills Development Scotland Training for Work programme has been cut by 50% and this seems to be widespread

The work of the Prince’s Trust has been put on hold until next year

The Economic Development budgets of Scottish Councils are under threat and being cut

European funds have been cut and others finished

And all this at a time when the UK Treasury figures show that Welfare payments will exceed Income Tax receipts by almost

£25 billion by the end of this year — it is costing us more to keep people out of work than those who are earning can pay tax to do so.

I have always said that the best way to solve this problem and the problems within our communities is to facilitate the return to work. We work with employers and people within our communities to get the ‘job match’ required in getting back to work and sustaining it.

This is a double winner

- it costs less than keeping people out of work

- new employees start to contribute by way of income tax to the general good of our country

We need more funding to get people back to work –it doesn’t need to cost a lot per person. In some of our programmes this figure can be in the low £100’s

It never ceases to amaze me how smug and hypocritical we are in the Western nations when we raise objections to how another nation carries out its own internal business. Look at the headlines about Tiananmen square in China?
All this happened 20 years ago and the US and the UK are up in arms at access to the Square, human rights, an undemocratic regime etc etc ?????
Have the observers forgotten about Guantanamo Bay, Iraq or even the water-boarding torture of prisoners by the enlightened West???
Or the torture of the general public forcing 19 million to watch Britains Got Talent