Jobs

Tuesday

Fraser Nelson

Your Autumn Statement check-list

I very much doubt today’s Pre-Budget Report will be memorable; a shame, given the circumstances. The supplementary Office for Budget Responsibility document will be more interesting — and relevant to people’s lives — than the Budget itself. Sure, everyone focuses their attention on the Red Book (or Green Book, as it is for the PBR) and GDP projections. But even GDP isn’t really useful. You can manipulate GDP by printing money, or by borrowing money. Gets you nowhere. GDP is only useful insofar as it’s a proxy for national prosperity. And thanks to the OBR we’ll have other, more useful metrics today. Here’s my guide to them:   1. Net

Friday

Jonathan Jones

200,000 extra working pensioners

Despite – or perhaps because of – the recession, pensioner employment has increased dramtically over the past few years. In his Telegraph column today, Fraser remarks on this important but largely ignored trend in Britain’s workforce. ‘A million jobs have been lost since the Great Recession began’, he says, ‘but the number of pension-aged people in work has increased by 200,000.’ Here’s that phenomenom in graph form: Why has this happened? Fraser puts his finger on one important factor: ‘Crucially, they pay less tax. A pensioner manning the tills in Tesco will take home 12 per cent more than a working-age colleague on the same salary.’ You see, employees over 65 don’t

Wednesday

James Forsyth

Miliband finds his niche

I spent this morning with Ed Miliband on a trip to a factory in Sunderland. Miliband was visiting the Liebherr plant there, which manufactures cranes. The centerpiece of the visit was a Q&A with the workforce. Now, a factory in the North East is not the toughest venue for a Labour leader to play. But Miliband appeared far more comfortable in this setting than he does when giving a traditional speech from behind a podium.   Unlike Miliband’s Q&A at Labour conference, the questions were not softballs or traditional left-wing fare. One set of three questions were: why don’t we close the borders, bring back national service and do more

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Unemployment rate highest in 15 years

Today’s unemployment figures do not make for cheery reading. Youth unemployment is up to over a million and unemployment overall has reached 2.62 million, meaning that the unemployment rate is the highest it has been for 15 years. Laura Kuenssberg tweets one particularly striking statistic: ‘Number of UK Nationals in work fell 280k compared to this time last year, number of non-UK Nationals in work increased 147k over same time’ This suggests that it’s a touch too simple just to say that there are no jobs out there. It also means that we really should think about why non-UK nationals are proving so much more adept at finding work than

Saturday

James Forsyth

If Clegg wants to reduce youth unemployment, then he’s going to have to look at regulation

Nick Clegg’s interview in The Times today presages a major Lib Dem effort to try and promote policies to reduce youth unemployment. With figures out on Wednesday expected to show youth unemployment going over a million, the Lib Dem leader is keen to show that the government is acting. But as The Times reports, the quad—Cameron, Osborne, Clegg and Alexander—are divided on what to do about the matter. The Tories are keen to do Beecroft for young people, removing some of the employment protections that make firms so reluctant to hire new staff. But given how the Lib Dems have set themselves so firmly against the Beecroft review and its principal

Friday

Fraser Nelson

The austerity myth

CoffeeHousers may remember an odd New York Times editorial recently where they tried to blame the evaporation of British economic growth on austerity. Perhaps the newspapers’s famed fact-checkers had taken the day off, because the slightest piece of research would have exposed the premises of the piece as bunkum. This morning, the ONS has produced monthly public finance figures, showing current spending is still rising in Britain. But first, let’s get to the New York Times editorial: “Greece, which has been forced into induced recession by misguided European Union creditors, Britain has inflicted this harmful quack cure on itself… Austerity was a deliberate ideological choice by Prime Minister David Cameron’s

Wednesday

James Forsyth

Miliband attacks Cameron on jobs

Ed Miliband chose to ask all six questions on the economy today, making only the quickest of references to the Liam Fox story that the Westminster village is currently obsessing over. Armed with ammunition from the latest unemployment numbers, Miliband did a solid job of pushing Cameron onto the back foot. But there was one moment which will worry Miliband’s supporters: the spontaneous way the government benches fell about when Miliband claimed that Scottish and Southern Energy’s decision to start selling its electricity on the wholesale market was the result of his conference speech. Three Labour backbenchers did ask questions about Liam Fox. Cameron said he would look at publishing

Friday

Fraser Nelson

Obama’s plan B: tax cuts

Washington, DC The clue is in the name. A stimulus is supposed to stimulate, and Obama’s first attempt stimulated nothing more than the American national debt. So he’s trying again, with a $447 billion package (he’s careful not to call it a “stimulus”) in what will probably be his last roll of the pre-election dice. But $245 billion of it would be debt-financed tax cuts.  Not sales tax cuts, the type of which Ed Balls is prescribing for Britain. It’s all payroll tax cuts: reducing the tax on jobs in the hope of encouraging more hiring. Given the temporary nature of the tax cuts, I doubt this will be the

Saturday

Edward King

Empty lines on a CV

The intern is everywhere, slowly but surely, infiltrating every office on the planet. But while the internship is now ubiquitous, having become the standard first rung on most career ladders and the most frequent stepping stone between education and a career, it remains a largely unexamined and unregulated sector. Somewhere between an apprenticeship and a temp job, the internship resists easy definition and is understood more in terms of social cachet than actual responsibilities. Having had his fair share of directionless and underpaid internships between various degrees at Stanford and Cambridge, Ross Perlin, a researcher in linguistics, decided that the phenomenon deserved closer scrutiny. The result is Intern Nation, an

Tuesday

Martin Bright

The Cabinet should show its Big Society credentials

As we prepare for the Big Society to mop up where the Big State used to be and ministers call for a culture of philanthropy to replace the hand out culture, I have a suggestion for the millionaire axe men of the Coalition government.  After the Comprehensive Spending Review, David Cameron should order each government minister to publish details of his or her charitable giving and the number of days a year they spend on voluntary work. This, after all, is what they are demanding of the rest of us. The richer members of  society will now be expected to underwrite the arts and the charitable sector, while the rest

Wednesday

Martin Bright

Where Are the Jobs in the Election Budget?

I agree with Fraser that there is a welcome modesty about Alistair Darling’s budget. It was also good to see Maggie Darling outside Number 11, a wife of whom the Chancellor is justly proud.  But I did wonder where the measures are for tackling the joblessness, which will be the likely consequence of the public sector cuts any new government will have to impose. Last year we had a “budget for jobs” with the announcement of the Future Jobs Fund, but this year the only announcement was the extension of the young person’s job guarantee until 2012.  Unemployment has not hit the levels first feared at the beginning of the

Tuesday

Martin Bright

Britain: the Coming Crisis

Do we really have any idea of how serious this is about to become? As I sat watching BBC 2’s recesion drama Freefall tonight I realsied that we are beginning to get an inkling. This was a quick-hit drama intended as an immediate response to the recession and it was very rough at the edges, but it showed how quickly the culture has grasped that this getting very grim indeed. It was a conventional enough story of an aspirational family wanting to move to a new private housing estate, but it sent a chill through these bones. There was a fascinating set of statistics in Nick Cohen’s Observer column this weekend, which should send