THE LABOUR government's New Deal scheme for 18-24 year olds is now being forced on claimants of all ages. Single parents will also be offered a New Deal when their youngest child reaches the age of five.

The employment Services tell us that the New Deal scheme is an initiative to help people find work. This is rhetoric. The ones who will gain are the employers who will be paid £75 per week for every person they take on. There is no law to compel employers to pay any wages higher than this.

If someone getting Job Seekers' Allowance refuses a New Deal placement they will have their benefits stopped!

Most jobs these days pay poverty wages. Scams such as New Deal will do nothing to alter this. It is, in effect, a forced labour scheme.

Of the 40,500 jobs created in Lancashire since 1984 only 4,500 were full time. More than 40pc of jobs were part-time and one quarter of all jobs were temporary or casual. New Deal will do nothing to address the serious problem of unemployment, casual labour or poverty pay.

Moreover, British capitalism can only sustain the privileged living standards of an ever diminishing section of the population and then only at the expense of the mass, who will be condemned to increasing unemployment and poverty. The Labour party, in conditions of crisis, has stood against the interests of the mass of the working class.

New Labour will not and cannot organise the ever increasing poorer sections of the working class and neither will its admirers on the left.

M Naughton

Nevis Grove, Bolton

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.