New polling: Public braced for higher unemployment and no Christmas parties

One of the great Cameron legacies has been an era of very low unemployment. In his biography, the former PM cited two defining moments of his teenage years; the first was getting caught smoking weed at Eton and the second was reading the 1982 IEA pamphlet ‘What cost unemployment?’.

While Cameron avoided many of the radical policies that emanated from the free market think tank, he did adopt one of the central tenets of the paper: that those in work should be better off than the unemployed. By the time he left office in the wake of the 2016 referendum, UK unemployment sat at just 5 per cent. When Boris Johnson took over in July last year, the number of people out of work was half what it was at the height of the financial crisis.

That era could now be coming to a close. According to new polling for The Spectator by Redfield & Wilton, four out of five UK adults now expect unemployment to be higher by the end of the year than it is now.