Well, we’ve had the Help to Buy bubble, and now George Osborne has unveiled the Help to Work drivel. Those banks that wouldn’t give you a mortgage because you were an idle oik will henceforth have to stand to attention because you’ve got a job. However, a scheme whereby the taxpayer coughs up some 30% of a successful job-seeker’s salary would be (let’s face it) indistinguishable from a plan to double the National Debt. So while the Draper’s branding chaps have been on the ball here – “It’s all about help, Chancellor” – what the unlucky unemployed Yoof gets is not exactly what he or she sees.

Osborne’s scam sorry scheme gives three options to the long-term unemployed – work placements, daily job-centre visits, or compulsory training. I could be contentious here and express those options as working for nothing, sitting around doing nothing, and better than nothing….but I won’t, because I’m not that kind of chap. Instead, I’d merely like to ask what George means by ‘help’.

A work placement will help the employer’s bottom line: but would you, HR person, be that impressed by a candidate whose sole selling point was having skillfully negotiated an unremunerated contract? A day spent in the Job Centre might help the idle find a warm billet in winter, but if the carefully pinned-up jobs on the boards there involve nothing more gripping than being the night watchman for an Anarchist commune, will this activity be a career changing activity? And if one is to be compulsorily trained, can we trust the Whitehall twerps to help in assessing the demand for horse-whisperers?

Please don’t write me off as a whingeing Leftie: no Big State Commie me. But the simple reality is that I truly despise this sort of gesture politics. 99 times out of a 100 it is policy devised by people who never did, and never will, have any need for the “services” involved. And 100% of the time it involves an enormous amount of taxpayers money achieving diddly-squat.

I agree absolutely with the neoliberals who say it is not the Government’s job to find things for idle hands to do. That is the joint responsibility of the economic form and the citizen. Every Briton should get on his bike and find gainful employment. But if those claiming to furnish those jobs are actively engaged in offering them to Thai workers, then schemes like Help to Work are just so much hokum.

I don’t want to deny the average Korean assembly worker the right to a living. But under a capitalist system of mercantile globalism, “giving” an American job to an Asian is a lazy, exploitative way out: it is a sign that the company’s management is in the hands of heartless beancounters.

The job of Western corporate managers – especially marketing management – is to switch from low-cost volume production to high-margin added-value brands of the kind desired by the growing Asian middle class. For the time being, let the Asian tigers supply cheap commodities: we can’t compete with their cost structures. But if we’re going to retrain the long-term unemployed, let’s give them a reasonable salary and a sense of self-esteem from fashioning something admirable for the end user – and profitable for Britain.

Earlier at The Slog: The role of naturism in Tory local politics