Unemployment is down but are prospects up?

The government has fallen on today’s numbers showing employment up by 53,000 and youth unemployment down by 9,000. This is the first quarterly fall in unemployment for over a year. One coalition source describes the news as a ‘good reminder of what really matters, both economically and politically.’

Certainly, these figures will provide David Cameron with some protection in his first post-Budget PMQs. Ed Miliband won’t be able to make his usual jobs attack.

But politically one of the key questions will be who is getting these jobs. One of the worries for the coalition is that a huge amount of the new jobs that are being created are going to foreigners, who are often more motivated than their British counterparts and have more experience. What to do to give British workers a leg up is one of the coalition’s major preoccupations. This is a subject on which we have more in the coming issue of the Spectator.