The avalanche of good economic news continues today, with news that the number of people in work rose by 344,000 from Feb to April – the sharpest such rise since data began in 1971.
So if you’re Ed Miliband, how do you pick holes in this? You can say that much of this is self-employment – that’s up 8 per cent, but staff jobs are also up strongly. You can bemoan ‘zero hours’ contracts, but the total number of hours worked in the UK now stands at the highest for 25 years.
You can blame Londoners, and imagine that shows the economic weight of the south – sucking the life out of the rest of the country, as Vince Cable says now and again. Not so. The regional data shows a pretty widely-shared recovery: the biggest rise is in the North East.
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