Yes, spot on.

To argue that the eurozone crisis was nothing to do with the economy of the UK between 2010 and now is pretty ridiculous.

The scary thing is however that Labour supporters [ustill[/u believe the correct course of action was / is to spend more. Spend, spend, spend. It's really unbelievable and not hard to see why the Tories will be more trusted on the economy for a long time.

Apart from the fact that Labour had no such plans at all if they had won the 2010 election what exactly do you think Osborne is doing now ?

Do you still stand by this?

With a FTE of what exactly?

Any comment to make on yesterday's unemployment figures? 2.62 millions - hijghest for 17 years.

Remind me, who was in power 17 years ago?

So, it's at it's highest level for 17 years, yet also at it's lowest level for 4 years?

Its a headline figure that everyone hangs their coat on, and its good that its falling because it needs to fall quite a long way yet, but there is a lot more to it than the headline figure and I don't believe that many MP's have the nounce or the political will to look beyond it.

I could fix unemployment in a day if I were PM - I could pass a law that proclaimed that no-one in the country was allowed to work more than 30 hours a week in any circumstances - there aren't enough unemployed people in the country to fill the vacancies that that law would create, we'd be begging Bulgarians and Romanians to come here to fill those vacancies.

Now go away and privately look at your last months salary and work out how you'd manage on 75% of it on a permanent basis and while you're at it work out how you'd manage on 50% because 20 hour contracts are very common.

THATS the hidden issue behind employment.

You may be confusing employment and unemployment statistics

I'm not the only one it seems.

The Guardian, BBC , ONS among others all say 2.39m, So where is this other 230,000?

I was not arguing there was no room for labour flexibility. It is how that us achieved that counts. Unfortunately it is far too easy for legislation supposedly designed to introduce flexibility in the labour market to be exploitative, result in employee insecurity and it can also drive wages down.

My argument is that while planning at companies like Vauxhall isn't trivial they and similar companies survived without the need for labour laws that even if they didn't indulge in it themselves led to exploitation elsewhere.

If all employers were good it would not matter but they are not and I'd say even the good ones would occasionally abuse employment laws designed for flexibility if it suited.

The newly privatised Royal Mail has just agreed a deal with the union that they will not use zero hours contacts [uat all.[/u They will still be employing extra staff over Christmas to deal with the seasonal variation so if they can do that I don't see why similar companies and retailers in particular can't work out how to do the same.

Contrast that with the chairman of Dominoes Pizza and his desire to import cheap labour.

Overall I don't think in all my adult life I have lived through a period where [icapital accumulation[/i has been so slewed towards a very narrow band of society at the expense of the rest or it.

I don't think it is healthy at all for the top 1% to be racing ahead when the rest suffer a decline in living standards as wage increases (such as they are) fall so far behind the cost of living and [ione[/i of the reasons for this is underemployment and things like zero hours contracts keeping wages low.

This isn't the politics of envy either. I am up there at the top end of the wage spectrum and so should be Tory voting fodder myself but I have never yet seen a Tory administration that doesn't harm the interests of the less well off. This one is the worst I have ever seen for that.

What surprises me is many on here who espouse a right wing view are also worse off under this government but just can't see it.

Do you still stand by this?

Yes. The graphs kindly provided show this. Along with real wages falling and historically fast population growth there's little reason to assume it's going to increase significantly in the short term. I would imagine it will stay relatively flat. Boosted a little by falling unemployment but hampered by falling real wages, population growth and underemployment. It's just a guess as to which force will be slightly stronger than the others.

Surely not? Cleggers and Vince have told us many times how they have ameliorated would be Tory policy where it affects the less well off. Are you wrong or Cleggers?

What do you think?

Different measures of the labour market stats get reported and focused on which gets confusing.

eg "more people in employment now than ever before" - yes because the population/labour force is growing
"unemployment rate has fallen" - check whether the inactivity rate has risen before celebrating

There are three labour market statuses: employed, unemployed and inactive. Unemployed means you want a job and are looking and can't find one. If you want full time work and can only find part time work you are employed but a subcategory within that called 'underemployed'. Inactive means you aren't participating in the labour market - retired, in education, or just not looking for work for whatever reason (eg on disability benefits).

When you hear cynics saying "the government wants to put young people in to education because that gets them off the unemployed figures" they mean they are moving people from unemployed to inactive, so yes that does make the unemployment rate look lower. Also if people give up searching for jobs because they think there's no point....they also come off the unemployment figures, and go to inactive, which makes the unemployment rate look better!

IMO the best guide to how the labour market is performing is the employment rate for the working age (16 to 64) people. This excludes the 65s and over and is saying what proportion of your working age population is actually working.

In the early 1990s the employment rate was around 68 to 69 per cent and then it started to creep up during the mid 90s. When Labour took office in May 1997 it was 70.9 per cent. It continued to rise at this point, reacted 72 per cent in 1999, 73 per cent in 2004 and hovered around the 73 per cent mark for the next four years.

The last time it was 73 per cent was in May 2008. At the point the Coalition took office it was 70.4 per cent. It then pretty much flatlined and bottomed out in Sept 2011 at 70.2 per cent. But one thing to be said for the UK labour market's response to the most recent recession, was things weren't nearly as bad for employment as they could have been given the depth of the recession, the labour market is more resilient now than it was in the early 80s or early 90s recessions under Thatcher/Major.

In the past two years things have improved, and the latest figures are 72 per cent. So we're back to around where we were at the start of 2009 in the early part of the recession, or to where we were in 1999 when we were on the up.

However there has been an increase in the proportion of part-time working in that employment rate. Between 1995 and 2009 the proportion of the workforce that was part-time was about 25 per cent. Since 2010 it has been around 27 per cent.

Part-time working is ok for people that want to be part-time, but the underemployment rate (ie proportion of those that are employed that are working part-time but want to work full-time) has also crept up. This had been about 3 per cent in the mid 1990s and fell to below 2 per cent in the mid 2000s. It was 3.7 per cent when the Coalition took office and is now 4.9 per cent.

Top post from Sally. Explains it clearly and simply, and much better than I can usually manage.

Speaking of recovery, I see that Cameron and Osborne's much vaunted "export-lead" recovery has somewhat stalled. The UK's current account balance with the rest of the world is now £20.7 billion (5.1% of GDP), its highest since 1989. So it seems another soundbite has failed. No wonder they keep deleting everything they have said. I also assume that's why economic policy now seems to consist of trying to create an lending - housing market bubble again?

Moveable targets and vague threats of much deeper cuts in the second term, but not now, for the next fifteen to eighteen months expect a consumer lending frenzy, the exact opposite of what they have been preaching these past three years principally because nothing else works and they need to give themselves twelve clear months of good times and positive sound bites prior to an election.

But its ok because the public will swallow whatever they are fed, as we often see on here.

Have they run out of lead?

Yes two concerning pieces of news today to counter the encouraging growth figures:

- highest trade deficit since 1989 (5.1 per cent of GDP)
- new record level of public sector net debt (76.6 per cent of GDP) and borrowing for this year set to overshoot the forecast by £1bn

It is in pretty bad taste when you get jubiliant Tory politicians and media commentators saying the data "proves they have won the argument" and saying that Ed Balls must feel pretty silly now etc.

Yes we have got (still below trend) growth back but we had much better growth during Labour's time in office so this is nothing to shout about.

Ah but of course, the usual Tory response goes, Labour got growth just financed by borrowing and consumer spending, the country needs rebalancing towards exports and investment. Well the moderate growth we have got now is exactly the same - based on borrowing and consumer spending. So if this is winning the argument....yes Labour won that argument a decade ago, you can get growth through borrowing and consumer spending....well done.

The 2.62 millions came from that left-wing rag The Evening Standard

Quote ="cod'ead"The 2.62 millions came from that left-wing rag The Evening Standard'" The London Evening Standard? www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/uk-un ... rnalSearch Quote The number of people out of work has fallen to its lowest level in more than four years, raising hopes of a strong rebound from the recession. The jobless total dropped 99,000 to 2.39 million, a rate of 7.4 per cent, in the three months to October — and the number of people in work rose above 30 million for the first time on record. '"

Quote ="cod'ead"The 2.62 millions came from that left-wing rag The Evening Standard'" The London Evening Standard? www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/uk-un ... rnalSearch Quote The number of people out of work has fallen to its lowest level in more than four years, raising hopes of a strong rebound from the recession. The jobless total dropped 99,000 to 2.39 million, a rate of 7.4 per cent, in the three months to October — and the number of people in work rose above 30 million for the first time on record. '"

I remember the unemployment figures being "massaged" under that womans tyrannical time.
What they did was make claiming unemployment benefit more difficult along with other associated benefits.(sound familiar?)

Then, as was always spouted via the media "the number of unemployed, AND CLAIMING BENEFITS has gone down again" thus proving that governments assertion that they had policies that benefited everyone and that people were in work.
As usual with a tory government, it was a con trick, unemployment reached levels that were morally unacceptable and created generations of unemployable people. Money flooded out of the country to tax havens quicker than you could say boo and businesses were fighting each other to see which 3rd world sweat shops could produce their product at a fraction of the cost whilst still charging the consumer top whack and creating even bigger profit margins for the few.

It is unlikely though that such a situation would ever occur again, isnt it

When your senior advisors and Ministers base your party's policies around the principle that "unemployment is a price worth paying" then you're starting from a fairly inequitable position.

When you employ henchmen to keep you at arms length from your assertions that even the severely disabled and terminally ill are "fit to work" and should not be financially supported by the state then again you're starting from a fairly inequitable position.

Cameron has at least learned from his predecessors and stood some fall guys in front of him, he gets very little of the flak as a leader but when you have the perfect pantomime villain complete with built-in sneering face and a perfect history of failure in previous roles such as Ian Duncan Smith then you know you are on a winner - I can just see Cameron buzzing the intercom through to the IDS office, "Ian, I need to pop down to Tescos for some biscuits, come and walk ten yards in front of me will you..."

Then perhaps they're not worse off under this government, unless you know more about their own personal circumstances than they themselves do.

Today, it's 'underemployment is a price worth paying because the only important thing is that they're not on the unemployed figures'.