In his blog earlier today, Fraser Nelson argues:
‘The UK jobs miracle is happening mainly due to radical welfare reform – the type Labour ducked in office..Under Labour, record numbers of people in work were celebrate as an end in itself – but most of the increase was accounted for by immigration. So more jobs did not mean less poverty – not if a quarter of Glasgow and Liverpool were still languishing on the dole at the peak of a boom. This time, it’s different. The welfare reforms are restoring the see saw link between jobs and dole queues.’
I suppose I should by now get over the fact that intelligent, articulate journalists feel able to write with such certainty about data they simply don’t understand. It cannot be repeated too many times that the explosion in the numbers of people ‘on the dole’ (by which Fraser means the number on ‘out of work benefits’, including lone parents on income support and those on incapacity benefits) occurred in the period from 1979 to the mid 1990s, after which it began to fall:
So the rise occurred despite the low immigration of the 1980s; and the fall continued through the high immigration 2000s, in large part (I would argue) because of the success of welfare reform and of tax credits in improving work incentives.
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