A jobs miracle is happening in Britain, thanks to tax cuts. Why don’t the Tories say so?

Feeling the genitals of freshly hatched chickens may not be the most glamorous job in the world but at £40,000 a year it’s not badly paid. It requires some stamina: you pick up hundreds of chicks a day and check their ‘vent’ for boy parts. If it’s a baby hen, then she’s sent off for a life of corn and egg-laying. If it’s a baby rooster — well, best not to ask. Almost nobody in Britain wants to do it, so vacancies go unfilled. The poultry industry, in desperation, has asked the government to add ‘chicken sexer’ to its growing list of seemingly unfillable jobs.

This fits a trend. In five short years, Britain has gone from having mass unemployment to jobs galore. Unemployment is falling at a rate that confounds the economists, and employers are starting to panic. Maths teachers, chefs — the list of ‘shortage occupations’ grows ever longer. Construction companies are not tendering for work in London because they can’t find bricklayers. Financially this is a headache, but economically it’s a problem of success. The Prime Minister set out to get rid of the deficit. He failed. But instead he has presided over a jobs miracle — one that economists and policymakers are still struggling to understand.

Just before the Budget was published, the latest figures came out — all of them smashing records. There are 30.9 million of us in work, the most ever. That’s an employment ratio of 73.3 per cent, the highest in history. Employment is up by 1.7 million since Cameron took power and 1.5 million of these jobs are full-time. The number on Jobseekers Allowance fell by 30 per cent last year alone and the youth claimant count stands at its lowest since the 1970s. Birmingham added more jobs to its economy last year than the whole of France; Britain is adding more than the rest of Europe.