Jobless figures may tumble in coming months, but it won’t be because unemployed people are finding jobs.

It will be the result of a cynical scapegoating government exercise called Help to Work, which ought to be renamed Help to Victimise. Even official understated figures indicate that well over two million people cannot find work in Britain today.

This is not their fault. The capitalist system depends on a body of jobless people to serve as a constant threat to those in employment.

Governments pay lip service to the goal of full employment but, if achieved, this would encourage workers to better their pay, pensions, working conditions and fringe benefits.

Despite the system’s inbuilt surplus workforce, all parties committed to neoliberalism pretend that people are unemployed because of their own innate weaknesses and must be helped into the world of work by compulsory schemes.

Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith, who lives in great comfort courtesy of his wife’s family’s inherited wealth, lectures everyone to stand on their own two feet.

Finding a job is, for him, a matter of people making themselves employable by improving qualifications, training or personal attitude.

They are encouraged to make these qualitative improvements by taking on unpaid work with charities for a six-month period, attending a jobcentre on a daily basis or signing up to a training scheme.

This approach appeals to well-heeled politicians and Fleet Street newspaper leader writers who portray people living on benefits as scroungers or layabouts rather than victims of an uncaring and inefficient
system.

Claimants are given ever-more stringent duties of attending meetings, sending CVs and writing job application letters, but they are set up to fail.

Not only do these rarely bring full-time employment but every missed appointment, late attendance or failure to reach an arbitrary letter-writing target can bring a benefits sanction.

Research indicates that sanctions — cutting benefits for weeks or months — leads to rent arrears, growing debts, less money for food and other necessities and a general feeling of desperation.

Vulnerable people suffering long-term unemployment need real help to find paid work, not an oppressive and debilitating regime that prioritises catching claimants out and hacking their benefits.

The government’s obsession with making cash-strapped charities an integral part of its scapegoating activities undermines their reason for existence — helping the less fortunate in society.

Unite assistant general secretary Steve Turner is correct to designate this scheme as workfare and to urge charities not to play this dirty role for the state.

Oxfam, the Salvation Army and the YMCA are among 30 organisations that have taken a similar view to Unite, launching a Keep Volunteering Voluntary campaign.

Coercion to work for a charity, on pain of having your benefits chopped, does not provide the right motivation for “volunteers.”

Labour shadow employment minister Stephen Timms criticises the government for its scheme — not because of its vindictive nature but because it’s too soft.

“This government allows jobseekers to spend up to three years claiming benefits before they get literacy and numeracy training,” he complains.

Shadow chancellor Ed Balls has already warned that a Labour government would strip claimants of benefits if they refuse to join his temporary job scheme.

If MPs backed public investment to create decent, full-time, well-paid jobs instead of bullying the unemployed, they might change the general contempt that many people feel for the political elite.