By Rab Bruce’s Spider

Home Secretary Priti Patel (don’t laugh at the back there!) has claimed that the millions of people she describes as being economically inactive can take up the jobs of the millions of foreigners who are not going to be available due to being deported / encouraged to leave / not allowed into the UK. Quite apart from the basic fact that there aren’t enough of the people she puts into this category, I have another problem with the term "Economically inactive". What does it mean? Who is actually included, and are they really economically inactive?

What Priti Patel seems to mean is that these are people who don’t work to earn a living, such as students, carers and pensioners. Now, in the privileged world of Patel and her fellow Tory Cabinet Ministers, perhaps students can afford to live off the allowance Mater and Pater provide, but a great many students outside of that privileged bubble have part time jobs to help pay their way through study or, at the very least, provide them with some weekend boozing money. So, if being economically inactive applies to people who don’t earn any income, then it certainly doesn’t apply to an awful lot of students.

As for carers, these people deserve praise rather than any implied criticism. If you are caring full time for an elderly or disabled relative, you know only too well that this is a 24/7 job. It’s also unpaid. Carers don’t do this for anything other than love and dedication, and there is no way they would have free time to take over a job picking fruit or working in a hospital or school.

Ah, but what about pensioners? Those idle loafers, having spent their lives working to earn the worst pension in the OECD, are now living a life of luxury, contributing nothing to society. Why can’t they go out to the fields and pick fruit and vegetables? Why can’t they take jobs in care homes where they can take care of … other pensioners? Make them earn their paltry pension seems to be the message, and that’s pretty much in keeping with current Tory philosophy.

But are these students, carers and pensioners really economically inactive? It depends on what the term means, but my reaction on hearing it was that very few people are economically inactive. Even if you are a pensioner, you need food. You probably also pay bills. I know my bank statements show I spend rather a lot of money on such trivial things as food, heating and Council Tax. And each time I spend money, am I not contributing to the UK’s GDP? Whatever you may think of GDP as a proper way to measure an economy, every £ spent adds to it and fuels the demand for goods or services. A pensioner may not spend as much as other people because they are on low income, but that’s the fault of the appallingly low level of the State Pension as anything else. Students can surely be excused even if they don’t have a job and live on fresh air for three or four years, since they will – or would in a normal economy – find well paid jobs and thereby benefit society both through their chosen career and by paying higher taxes. Unless, as happens to far too many in Tory UK, they end up in a dead-end job earning the minimum wage because the economy has been turned into a low tax, low wage dystopia.

As for making carers take up low-paid employment, who will then look after the person they were caring for? That creates another job which would need to be filled.

Priti Patel’s idea, as you would expect, is farcical. It’s an attempt to paper over the societal cracks Brexit is creating. It will no doubt appeal to Tory hardliners who won’t need to rely on a State Pension and who view students, the poor, the disabled and the unemployed as being of little value. Unless the UK Government is going to set up convoys of buses to transport thousands of the so-called "economically inactive" from inner cities out to the countryside to work in the fields, geography alone will condemn this farcical idea to the dustbin of history.

And if anyone ever accuses me of being economically inactive, I’ll invite them to pay all my bills for a few months to see just how inactive I am.