Full employment, Prime Minister? What exactly do you mean by that?

‘Two million jobs have been created since 2010 — but there will not be a moment of rest until we have reached our goal,’ said David Cameron in a Telegraph article a fortnight before the election: ‘Two million more jobs; or full employment in Britain.’ It was a bold statement. Indeed you might think, given unemployment at 1.84 million in the winter quarter, that the target for new jobs was actually an error on the part of who-ever drafts the Prime Minister’s prose. Either way, it drew little attention amid the smoke of battle. But now the air has cleared it merits revisiting, because it connects all the key themes (except perhaps the Scottish one — so full of perils that, like the Scottish play, it is best not named) of the coming phase of national politics: aspiration, equality, spending cuts, immigration and EU membership.

What is full employment, and is it a feasible target? When George Osborne declared it to be so in April 2014, I called him ‘cheeky’ — even though his speech was followed by yet another sharp fall in jobless numbers.