I never understood why everyone hated Maggie Thatcher. Perhaps I was too young. Born in late 1980 I had no direct experience of the unemployment and closures of that decade, whilst the Poll Tax marchers were simply nuisance crowds who blocked the roads. Stuck on the No 14 on Argyle St, I just ate my Monster Munch and asked mum “Why aren’t we moving?”

To me, Maggie was just a puppet on Spitting Image with mad eyes. She was funny, clubbing the other ones with her handbag. I never felt the hatred for her that everyone else in Scotland seemed to have. Even now – older and, dare I say it, well educated – I don’t hate her and just felt embarrassed by those morons whooping and jigging in George Square on the day of her funeral.

The rage of the 1980s simply passed me by. Thatcher and CND and the miners’ strike belong in the same distant era as Dexy’s Midnight Runners, The Young Ones and the Sinclair C5. So these days, you could forgive me for feeling a mite confused, because the 80s are here again. Only this time, there’s a much nastier sting.

Unemployment is back, rich boys are in charge, what little industry we still have is threatening to close and picket lines are on telly again. We could be back in that troubled decade, were it not for the blessed absence of perms and neon leg-warmers.

We have to accept unemployment now. It’s here to stay, because the Government desires a level of joblessness. Those beneficent post-war pledges of full employment now seem so rosy and impossible: why would a government ever want full employment, when having a constant pool of surplus labour means big business can grow fat, fat and fatter still?

Unemployment keeps down wages and means companies will never need to offer better conditions, as there’s always a luscious pool of excess labour from which they can take their pick. No need to tempt anyone in with decent wages or conditions when desperate workers are beating down the door. People compete with one another, scrambling for the right to stack shelves or mop floors, falling over themselves to be allowed to don a jaunty McDonalds cap or a tabard.

What’s the alternative to working for such trashy wages in these appalling jobs? To go on the dole and wait for something better, perhaps? Yet the Government have made that option so unpalatable that only the truly desperate or sick would try.

Iain Duncan Smith is moulding his policies with the Victorian Poor Laws squarely in mind: make the welfare life so unpleasant the thought keeps people awake at night. It’s no longer a safety net, but a hostile deterrent to keep the poor in line and force them into the maw of big business.

But big business may not want you. “Thank you, we have quite enough”, they say when you apply for their bare, grim McJobs. “We’ve got graduates stacking our shelves and lots of sick people answering our phones, and your mum and sister and limping grandmother are cleaning our floors. We’ll let you know when we need someone else.”

The flaw in this almost-comic pantomime villainy is that there’s a whopping fat fly in IDS’s ideological ointment: there are no jobs to which you can direct the unemployed, no matter how terrified of the alternative they are.

People who’ve read my previous columns will know I once had a harsh attitude to the unemployed. In Glasgow, where I live, there is always call-centre work. It’s hideous, depressing, low-paid work but the fact remains that these jobs are available and – believe me -they will employ anyone, as a giggling agency worker confirmed whilst arranging an interview for me with the Response company.

“Just don’t wear trainers”, she said, “and the job’s yours.”

Last month I did an experiment. I applied for call-centre jobs. I sent out innumerable applications and got not a single reply. Not even a patronising “Thank you for your interest” email. Simply dead silence. A few years ago, had I applied for these jobs, my mobile would have been flickering with constant calls and my inbox choked up with immediate requests that I come in for an interview. These days, there’s nothing.

The one certainty of work is gone. Not even Response would invite me for an interview. Before they would offer work, freely and ridiculously, to every no-hoper and desperado in sight. It was once common to see recruitment agency reps, desperate to soak up more and ever more call-centre staff, handing out flyers at train stations. You could spot their damp, spattered leaflets flapping on lampposts – come and work for us!

Even that, now, has gone.

But how to create more jobs without drying up the precious pool of surplus labour and making the fat cats howl? A far easier solution is to demonise the unemployed. Rather than admit defeat and incompetence and pitiless stupidity, the government blames “lazy skivers”, whilst the Daily Mail gleefully skips along behind them spitting out headlines about low-life scrounger Britain.

Soon the unemployed, blameless in creating the economic disaster which befell us all, are so despised that nobody will speak for them. And when nobody speaks for you, you’re defenceless. Surplus labour is no longer surplus – the clever trick that Maggie Thatcher never thought of was to put that surplus to work, only for nothing.

With forced labour, in the form of the icily-named “Work Programme”, you can create a sort of full employment, except with none of the drawbacks for profit-hungry bosses. Because actual jobs are just as scarce as they were in the 80s, yet there’s still a terror to threaten workers with if they demand pay rises or pensions or rights or all those inconvenient margin-reducers: a new kind of “unemployment” where you still have a job, but no wages.

Soon the logical outcome of this ideology will emerge. It makes no economic sense for businesses to employ people in minimum-wage jobs when they could sack them all, then plug the gaps from the ranks of the newly-unemployed for nothing. The fat cats will get even more of the cream.

Let’s just hope we’re not here when it happens.