Another Brown job

Will anyone take Gordon Brown’s claim to create up to 100,000 jobs seriously? As a statistician will tell you, “up to” includes the number zero. And as any economist will tell you, government can’t create jobs. The best it can do is move jobs, from the private to the public sector via tax – or from the future to the present, via debt. And in this case, I suspect it’s all a hoax anyway. Sure, Brown can hire some builders to renovate schools. But first of all, how many of his 100,000 were going to be hired by the state anyway? And of those who weren’t, can he be so sure they were all otherwise heading for the dole queue? It’s all a nonsense designed purely to enable him to trot out the line “we are creating 100,000 new jobs while the Tories would do nothing”. For Brown’s plan to work, no one must challenge his figures.