Almost every newspaper today leads on the chilling figure of 500,000 jobs to go. This was taken from a briefing paper held by Danny Alexander – a “gaffe” says The Guardian. Indeed: it was top secret – to anyone without internet access. “The OBR’s Budget forecast was for a reduction in public sector workforce numbers to 490,000 by 2014/15”. Read the offending sentence. This was not private advice, but posted online (here) and this is what it said…
But hang on. The same forecasts predict that the number of jobs in the economy will rise – by 1.08 million over the same timeframe. So by the same forecasts, the economy will create
three times as many jobs than the public sector is shedding. Here is the relevant table…
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