The leader of Grimsby council, Philip Jackson, attributes unemployment in the town in part to “attitudinal issues” and says that some families have not seen work in two or three generations (‘It has hit Grimsby very hard’: health in decline after years of austerity, 5 December).
This is merely regurgitating the same tired Tory talking points that were debunked a decade ago by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF), whose researchers – “despite strenuous efforts” – were unable to locate any such families with three generations of worklessness. “Even two generations of complete worklessness in the same family was a very rare phenomenon,” the JRF said, and there was no evidence of a “culture of worklessness” of the sort that Jackson refers to.
