Brown's message has never been so needed

THE disclosure that only 63 per cent of Olympics construction workers are British is ironic.

This is because a jobs bonanza expected from the 2012 project was at the heart of a speech given by Gordon Brown on 5 June 2007 to the GMB conference.

"It is time to train British workers for the British jobs that will be available over the coming few years," he told the union in Brighton, just a month before taking over as Prime Minister.

He went on to outline plans to help reduce the tally of 30,000 Londoners who had been unemployed for more than a year by ensuring an estimated 200,000 Olympics-related vacancies in hotels, retail and hospitality as well as construction would mean apprenticeships for the local jobless.

The idea of "British workers for British jobs" was clearly nationalistic but it did imply that the aim was to equip Britons to fill vacancies, which is what Mr Brown now insists he meant all along.

Nevertheless, I recall vividly my anxiety as a reporter who had written a story from the draft version, wondering if Mr Brown would actually deliver the line. Surely, I fretted, he would baulk at a phrase that sounded horribly like a dogwhistle to xenophobes?

We soon learned the new Prime Minister had no such qualms. Over a period of months, the soundbite mutated and became more ugly.

By the time he gave his keynote speech to the TUC as PM in September 2007 it had turned into "British jobs for British workers".

By transposing the words, the idea of training people was lost: it now implied that jobs in Britain belonged to the natives.

In the past 18 months, the political and economic outlooks have changed utterly.

Instead of trade union worries that migrant workers were driving down wages, now the fear is mass unemployment.

And a PM who once rode so high he could outflank David Cameron from the hard-Right is weakened and forced to retreat.

But the Prime Minister's original policy has never been needed more. Long term unemployment, the worst sort of joblessness, is forecast to surge by 300,000.

If London is to avoid severe social problems, those Olympics jobs need to support the local economy.