It’s the 200th anniversary of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice this week, so perhaps it’s the passionate letter from Darcy to Elizabeth that’s inspired such an enthusiastic burst of letter-writing from Conservative MPs complaining about stories in the press today. Earlier, we had Jake Berry complaining to the BBC, and now there are more. Sadly, the latest missives I’ve got hold of from Harriett Baldwin don’t contain declarations of love, or any insults for the recipient’s mother: instead, Baldwin is angry about an article by Ed Miliband in today’s Sun.
Plugging his party’s policy for every big firm receiving a government contract to train young people, the Labour leader writes:
‘Among the major European countries, we are in the relegation zone when it comes to youth unemployment. Only crisis-hit Spain has higher numbers of young unemployed than the UK.’
Now, as the graphs below show, Miliband is right when he says the UK has higher numbers of young unemployed than any other EU country apart from Spain, but that’s not much use as the UK also has a larger population than most other EU countries.
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