Demand for real work

Some of what he said needed re-stating. It does nobody any favours to rely on a weekly Giro if there is a real alternative of work with realistic wages attached, or a serious prospect of proper training.

Equally he's right to want to intervene in situations where unemployment becomes a family norm across several generations, where adolescents have no role model of a working family member, and little encouragement to sandblast their way out of cyclical poverty. The real world of benefits is not about trips to Jamaica, it's about just getting by and sometimes not even that.

The problem that many groups will have with what Mr Darling proposes is their suspicion that the promotion of self-reliance is Ministerial window dressing for cutting back burgeoning expenditure; that the real authors of the new policy inhabit the Treasury. However, given the immense proportion of the national budget now devoted to social security it's perfectly valid for any Government to examine whether it operates efficiently, and whether the most needy recipients are anywhere near the front of the queue. Arguing for the status quo is not realistic.

Yet unease persists, and it's not difficult to see why. Part of it has to do with tone.

This is not a Government which ever pops up in studios, railing against employers who ''rationalise'' by ''downsizing'' their workforce, continue that practice until too few people are trying to do too many jobs, and then stifle protests about stress levels by nurturing a climate of fear and insecurity.

This is not a Government which seems much concerned with enforcing the statutory requirements on companies of a certain size - including Government departments - to hire a specific percentage of people with disabilities. The disabled community does not feel that this is a Government in there pitching for their rights as potentially employable and valued members of society; it feels it's dealing with an administration working out whose benefit it can claw back. That perception may be less than entirely fair, but it's certainly widespread.

In a sense it's the same kind of tone adopted by the Home Secretary a day earlier when he promised to withdraw benefit entitlement to asylum seekers. Somehow it would have been more comforting to hear a Labour Home Secretary rail against some of the terrifying personal circumstances which caused most refugees to flee here in the first instance.

Now both Mr Darling and Mr Straw are at pains to emphasise that what they are about is rooting out inappropriate misuse of the welfare state - both insist that genuine claimants have nothing to fear. But they do fear. And with good cause.

If you are already vulnerable as a lone parent, if you are a refugee with few friends or basic linguistic skills, if you have already been effectively sidelined because of injury or incapacity, then much of your daily life is poisoned by a dread that the slender support mechanism keeping your show on the road may suddenly be removed by a new set of guidelines, or officialdom moving the goalposts just far enough to leave you ineligible.

Going to an interview with a well-informed Social Security or Job Centre official who can point you in the direction of possible employment or educational opportunity is a splendid idea on paper. But most people's previous experience will not encourage them to think of this as friendly, well-intentioned intervention - they'll be convinced it's a ploy to cut their benefits regardless of need.

And that is the other mindset Alistair Darling has to change if he's genuinely concerned about giving people real chances. The people who administer the social security system have to be persuaded that this is opportunity driven rather than economy driven, and the targets they are given should reflect that. They should be skewed towards finding people real jobs rather than saving their branch real money. If they get the first bit right, the second will follow. And if they get the first bit right then gradually people will become less suspicious of their motivation.

The Minister, looking at long-term unemployment, chose to flag up those people who had not worked for a very long time and implied that this was due to a culture of fecklessness. And in truth we all know people who are strangers to the concept of a honest day's work and would prefer to keep it that way.

But we also, all of us, know many people whose lives have been blighted by redundancy, who are desperate to re-enter the employment market, and who become disillusioned and depressed, often clinically so, when their best efforts fail to find a purchaser for their skills and talents.

Part of this is down to a rampant ageism in the marketplace. We're still living with the hangover of the early eighties where assumptions were made about only the sub-thirties having energy and enthusiasm, and about the post-forties being collectively an ideas-free zone. Many companies have addressed that fallacy in recent years, understanding that success is contingent on the right mix of youth and experience.

But there are still hundreds of thousands of unemployed people, many of them middle-aged men with a wealth of expertise, who have become long-term victims of short-term thinking. A Minister making a full frontal attack on this legacy would be a Minister more widely believed when he said he wanted people to get back into work. In short, I'd like someone to stand up the the Commons and say that as part of welfare reform and job creation they will henceforth wage full-scale war on dodgy employers and on those who blatantly discriminate on the grounds of age or disability. I'm just not sure I should hold my breath.