EXCLUSIVE: IDS on British jobs

Last week, George Osborne boasted that Britain has the second-fastest job creation in the G7. In tomorrow’s Spectator, we disclose official figures showing that 154 per cent of the employment increase can be accounted for by foreign-born workers. We on Coffee House have often questioned Labour’s record: 99.9 per cent of the rise in employment was accounted for by foreign-born workers. The graphs for the Labour years and the coalition year are below:
 

 
The idea of 154 per cent is strange, so I will reproduce the raw figures below:
 

 
Now, no one outside Westminster expects the UK labour market to change the day a new government is elected, but what matters is that the problem still exists. Reforms have been promised, and Chris Grayling has made superb progress with the Work Programme. But the problem persists. Most importantly, the overall jobs figure can be illusory. What good is economic growth if it doesn’t shorten British dole queues?

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I have also interviewed Iain Duncan Smith for tomorrow’s magazine, and he said the problem was that successive governments, Conservative and Labour, treated welfare reform as an optional extra.