News of 800 job losses at Honda’s Swindon factory are making the headlines — factory closures always do. They can leave scars that never quite heal, and for those affected it will be no comfort at all to know that there are today more people working in the UK economy than ever before. But it’s true.
As the below graph shows, the British economy is not actually shedding jobs at a particularly high rate. Even during the boom years, there were about 1,500 redundancies every day. What mattered was that the number of jobs created was greater. But there is an in-built new bias, because the jobs created tend to happen on a far smaller level and don’t make headlines. Factory closures do.
What matters is that, since the general election, jobs have been created at a faster rate than people have been laid off.
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