Jobs

Why I now believe in positive discrimination

The Prime Minister no doubt knew he would be fanning the flames when he waded into the argument about the admission of black undergraduates to universities like Oxford and Cambridge. We should do him the courtesy of trusting he means it when he says he feels strongly about discrimination in the awarding of university places – and I think he does. In this week’s issue Toby Young marks David Cameron’s essay with tutorial authority, and finds his case wanting. Particularly valuable among Toby’s marginal notes is his point that you can’t accept applicants if they haven’t applied – and black and working-class students disproportionately don’t. But we enter a vicious

Jobs miracle or low-pay disaster? Andrew Lilico and David Blanchflower debate

Dear David, From Q2 1979 to Q1 1981, quarterly real GDP fell in the UK by 5.5%. Unemployment rose rapidly, from 1.4m in Q2 1979 to 2.4m by the end of the recession, then continued rising through to its peak of 3.3m in 1984 – 12% of the workforce. Unemployment stayed above 3m for 51 straight months. This is the pattern economists expect in a serious recession. Unemployment rises, then stays persistently high, falling back only well into the recovery. It has also been the experience of much of the developed world since the Great Recession of 2008/09. So, for example, whereas US unemployment was below 5% in 2007, it rose

Wanted: online news editor for The Spectator

The Spectator is creating a new position, fusing together the work of print, digital and broadcast journalism. We’re looking for someone who can write, loves language and loves intelligent debate – but the emphasis, for this job, will be on audio and video. It’s a great time to join Britain’s  most influential magazine. We recently celebrated the highest sales in our 185-year history; both print and digital are rising, our website is now read by two million people a month. But the staff team is small; there are only about a dozen of us. There is growing demand for our video and podcasts, and we need someone to help us meet that demand

From the archives: the liberty of the battlefield

From ‘Soldiers for the land’, The Spectator, 13 November 1915: It is certain that, when the war is over, tens of thousands of soldiers will not want to return to their former urban occupations. No man who has enjoyed the liberty of a greater world and a freer life will be reconciled easily to resuming his job of, say, working a lift, or enduring stuffy hours in a shop, or addressing envelopes in an office. The nearest reproduction of the campaigner’s life which will be normally possible for him will be settlement on the land. There he will campaign, against all the pests which try to cheat the farmer of his

Matthew Parris

Here’s what’s wrong with the ‘public sector ethos’

An infuriating benefit of readers’ online comments beneath the efforts of a columnist like me is that as you read the responses an understanding dawns of the column you ought to have written. Some readers are stupid, unpleasant or obsessive; but most are not. As you learn their reactions you see where your argument was not clear, where you were short of information, and where you were simply wrong. But more than that, you sometimes tumble for the first time to where the nub of a problem that perhaps you danced around may lie. Last Saturday I wrote for the Times about the self-righteousness of spokesmen for public services threatened

Does George Osborne really want to make himself the scourge of the strivers?

Without George Osborne, we’d probably be living under Prime Minister Ed Miliband right now. His value to the government goes far beyond his brief as Chancellor; he is across most departments most of the time. But as Chancellor, he is judged by the success (or otherwise) of his Budgets – which is why he is now in a moment of great danger. His love of complexity has come to threaten not just his own reputation, but that of the Conservative Party too. Sometimes, Osborne is so clever that he can be downright stupid: This is one of these times. In my Telegraph column today, I say that Osborne is currently

The clock towers bigger than Big Ben

Bigger Bens Big Ben will have a £29m refurbishment. Who has the biggest clock tower? Kremlin Clock: Installed on the 232ft Spasskaya Tower. Clock has a diameter of 20ft. Big Ben: Installed on 315ft Elizabeth Tower. Clock faces are 24ft across. Metropolitan Life Insurance Building, New York: 700ft high (although the clock is only two-thirds of the way up). Clock is 26ft 6in in diameter. Abraj Al-Bait Towers, Mecca: Clock is on 1,972ft tower and visible from 15 miles away. Clock faces are 151ft in diameter. Brussels clout How important is the EU as an export market? Britain’s top ten export markets by value in August this year: Value US

The jobs miracle continues: UK employment now at all-time high

Another milestone has been reached in the recovery: 73.6pc of working-aged British people are now in employment (see above) – the highest in recorded history. And, needless to say, the highest of any country in Europe. What kind of jobs? Mainly full-time employees (up 2.1pc) not self-employment (down 0.6pc). The total number of hours worked is also up, and Britain is working almost a billion hours a week. Unemployment is down, and as Michael Saunders from Citi notes (pdf):- The drop has been concentrated in the long-term jobless rate (ie the share of the workforce who have been out of work for more than 12 months), which has dropped from 2.2% a year

Come work for us: The Spectator is looking for an assistant production editor

The Spectator is looking for an assistant production editor, to help us produce our magazine and supplements. The job will be three days a week, ideally Tuesday to Thursday, and initially on a six-month contract. What kind of person are we looking for? You are a careful, rapid and sensitive text sub capable of hitting tight deadlines with grace, and comfortable creating elegant layouts from template in Indesign. Your proofreading is reliable and judicious. Your headlines are both witty and to the point; you also know to rethink them so that they fly on the web and via social media. You can keep complex publishing projects running smoothly to timetable,

Full employment, Prime Minister? What exactly do you mean by that?

‘Two million jobs have been created since 2010 — but there will not be a moment of rest until we have reached our goal,’ said David Cameron in a Telegraph article a fortnight before the election: ‘Two million more jobs; or full employment in Britain.’ It was a bold statement. Indeed you might think, given unemployment at 1.84 million in the winter quarter, that the target for new jobs was actually an error on the part of who-ever drafts the Prime Minister’s prose. Either way, it drew little attention amid the smoke of battle. But now the air has cleared it merits revisiting, because it connects all the key themes

Demob unhappy

After all the carousing and flag-waving that followed VE day in 1945, millions of young men fortunate enough not to be still fighting the Japanese faced a problem. Having spent five or six years in uniform, they needed jobs. For those who lacked explicit civilian skills, which meant most, it was hard to persuade employers that a talent for flying a Spitfire, commanding a gun battery or navigating a destroyer qualified a man to run a factory or even sell socks. For years after the shooting stopped, newspapers bulged with small ads placed by demobilised officers. Many such entries exuded unconscious pathos. That quirkily brilliant writer Richard Usborne had the

Lawyers, journalists, chefs, bankers, doctors – the robots are coming for your jobs next

At the Hannover Messe robotics fair in Germany yesterday, UK company Mobey Robotics launched the world’s first robot chef, capable of watching and mimicking the kitchen skills of a human chef and recreating them with superhuman consistency. There is already a restaurant in Soho with touch-screen tables where you can place your order and pay your bill, and restaurants in Japan where robotic waiters serve food. As these new technologies become cheaper and more widely available, they are likely to replace the need for human labour in restaurants altogether. If you find this a bit unlikely, remember that we’ve already accepted robots at the supermarket checkout, the airport check-in, the

I know just the vicar for my parish church. Pity he’s fictional

For cheap laughs you should look at the situations vacant column of the Church Times — pages of jobs for Anglican clergy. The language, with its dreary emphasis on compliance and its neglect of individualism, may help to explain why the Church of England has become the Labour party at prayer. Number one word in these adverts is ‘team’. Applicants need to be ‘team players’. Other hot words: ‘passionate’, ‘change’, ‘management’ and ‘skills’. A couple of weeks ago the Diocese of Lichfield needed a ‘team rector’ near Tamworth — ‘a visionary, imaginative and inspirational team leader, passionate for evangelism and discipleship, with experience of managing change and able to enjoy

Want more diversity? Hire groups, not individuals

If I were to give you a budget to choose your perfect house, you would quickly have a clear idea of what to buy. And typically your perfect house will be a bit boring. That’s because, when you can only have one house, it cannot be too weak in any one dimension. It cannot be too small, too far from work, too noisy or too weird. So you’ll opt for a conventional house. On the other hand, if I were to double your budget and tell you to buy two houses, your whole pattern of decision-making would change. You would now be looking to buy two significantly different properties with

Record employment figures create more problems for Labour

Britain has reached its highest ever level of employment. According to new figures from the ONS, the employment rate has risen to 73.2 per cent — or close to 31 million people in work. This stands as the joint highest rate since records began in 1971. Unemployment is down to 1.86 million. The short-term jobless rate is also at its lowest rate since 1992. Pay is also increasing, with private sector earnings (excluding bonuses) up 2.1 per cent year-on-year at the end of 2014. Youth unemployment has increased slightly, something Esther McVey has described as a ‘tiny blip.’ But never in British history have there been so many job vacancies. Never

Sebastian Faulks’s diary: My task for 2015 – get a job

Just back from Sri Lanka, a place I first went to in 1981. It was then a dreamy island. I remember giving the room boy who had brought my case to the bandicoot-infested bedroom in Colombo a few rupees, but he wasn’t interested. He just wanted to sit on the bed and talk — about London, England, cricket, life. Three decades and a civil war later, people are aware of money, there is bottled water, and a pot of tea doesn’t take half an hour to arrive. One thing that seems unchanged is the optimism of the people. The new president, Mr Sirisena, has promised an end to the corruption

Rachel Reeves’s ‘staggering’ and ‘astonishing’ future of welfare speech

Rachel Reeves, the Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary, gave a speech earlier this week on the future of the welfare system. The choice that she presented was one between ‘…failing programmes and waste driving up social security spending under the Tories’, and Labour’s reforms to ‘…make work pay and get social security spending under control’. To claim that the current government has failed to control benefit spending is a bold tactic from a Labour Party economic spokesperson, and the numbers used to support the argument were so striking that they deserve some scrutiny. Claim One: The Conservatives have spent £13bn more on social security in this parliament than they had

Want a fun job? You just have to pick the right parents

Recently one morning, as I was weeping over Caitlin Moran’s (daughter of Mr and Mrs Moran of Wolverhampton) brilliant book How to Build a Girl — specifically, the heartbreaking way she writes about coming from an impoverished family — a report came on to the radio with the glad tidings that working-class white children are now doing worse in schools than any other ethnic group. Said one Graham Stuart, the Conservative chairman of the education select committee, ‘They do less homework and are more likely to miss school than other groups. We don’t know how much of the underperformance is due to poor attitudes to school, a lack of work

Liam Byrne’s burger flip

‘As someone who started work behind a fry station in McDonald’s, I know that any job is better than no job,’ says former Labour minister turned Miliband demotee, Liam Byrne in a speech today. ‘But I also know that a good job is better than a bad one and right now we’re simply not producing enough good jobs’. Byrne graduated to become a merchant banker at Rothschild. But he hasn’t always been so critical of his ‘would you like fries with that’ days? Just a few months ago, he was reading from a very different menu: ‘One of the highlights of the week was a visit to Bordesley Green McDonalds [sic]. I started my

The British jobs miracle, in six graphs.

No one quite expected it, and even now ministers struggle to explain it. But the British jobs miracle has become the single biggest fact of economic life – proving that sometimes, things go badly right as well as badly wrong. Cameron has now overseen more job creation than his last six predecessors did at this stage (above). The excellent Michael Saunders from CitiGroup has produced an excellent report about it (pdf) and some of his charts are below. 1Jobs growth is beating every single forecast (see chart of total jobs, above), even the optimistic forecasts that George Osborne was publishing when he was talking about abolishing the deficit in five