James Purnell made his Marr debut today, filled with the Brownite script. Our new Work & Pensions Secretary should have looked more closely at those fake statistics he was given to regurgitate, because he repeated the most outrageous claim they make: that Britain has reached full employment. As he told Marr:-
“We used to even worry as the Labour Party if we could commit to aiming for full employment. Now we’ve reached it. We have the lowest unemployment for 30 years.”
If he genuinely believes this, God help us. I recommend he downloads this table (click here) from his own department, memorises its most egregious points, and sees what “full employment” soundbite means in the real world. Scandalously, after ten years of growth, a quarter of Glasgow and Liverpool are on the dole (by which, I mean working-aged people on various out-of-work benefits).
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