I find it interesting that unemployment has been an issue of glaringly huge proportions for quite some time within the free market world.  That there have been sound ways of alleviating it during the course of these past decades, yet left untouched by those in power is disheartening, very telling and ultimately totally inexcusable.
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…Characteristically she covered her own weakest flank – unemployment – by counter-attacking Labour’s  record in the 1970’s. ‘In the end Labour always runs away,’ she jeered in her adoption speech at Finchley on 19 May:

            ‘They are running away from the need to defend their country…They are fleeing from the long overdue reform of the trade unions…They are running out on Europe…Above all, Labour is running away from the true challenge of unemployment.’

Promising to create millions of jobs, she insisted, was ‘no more than an evasion of the real problem’.  Real jobs could only be created by gradually building up a competitive economy with profitable industries that could hold their own in world markets.  ‘We Conservatives believe in working with the grain of human nature, in encouraging people by incentives, not in over-regulating them by too many controls.’ ‘A quick cure,’ she repeated several times in another favourite formulation, ‘is a quack cure.’

Margaret Thatcher circa 1983 (excerpt taken from The Iron Lady by John Campbell, pg 222)