It is almost a cliche to describe jobs figures as a “mixed picture” — and yet that’s exactly what today’s are. Beneath the headline finding that the number of unemployed people has risen above 2.5 million, are numbers that will fuel not only David Cameron’s happiest dreams, but also his most paranoid nightmares. Let’s start with the nicer stuff first.
The graph above shows the cumulative change in employment levels since the recession started to take hold in 2008. What it shows is something that often goes ignored: that is was the private sector, not the public sector, that took the greatest hit from the crunch. At the depth of the recession, in 2009, around a million private sector jobs had been lost, whereas around 400,000 extra public sector jobs had been created, even if this was due in large part to the reclassification of the Royal Bank of Scotland and Lloyds as public sector agencies.
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