Here in the UK, we had some new unemployment figures released yesterday and a pretty sorry state of affairs is revealed. The official figure of jobless stands at 2.46 million. Bad enough, you may say, but in reality it is much worse than it looks. Various governments over the last 30 or 40 years have found various ways of massaging unemployment figures to make them look better than the reality and an examination of the detailed figures for the current situation show just what a mess we are in. Of course things will just get worse because government spin wants to make us believe that things are good. Yvette Cooper, the Secretary of State for Work & Pensions welcomed the figures. The unemployment figures are better than many expected because of, she said, "the tough decisions families and businesses have taken to protect jobs, as well as the substantial extra investment in getting people back to work." What she is talking about, I have no idea.
Consider the number of people in part-time or temporary work. The Office of National Statistics tells us that the total number of "underemployed" people - ie people who are working in temporary of part-time jobs because they can't find full-time jobs is another 2.8 million. Then within the population of working age, we have a total of 8 million people who are "economically inactive". This huge number includes students, home carers [looking after family members], temporary sick, permanent sick, early retired and 724,000 "others". Under Labour the number of long-term sick has more than doubled. When there are complaints about people living longer, when we have doubled spending on the NHS and standards of living have risen, why do we have so many people permanently sick? Of course, the reason is that governments have used permanent sickness for off-loading people from the unemployment lists and to massage the unemployment figures down. The same goes for early retirees. Anybody over the age of about 55 who can't find a job can be made "retired" and shifted off the unemployment register. Then we send more and more teenagers to college to get them off the unemployment register as well for a few years. All of these "economically inactive" have to be supported to a greater or lesser extent by the state via social welfare payments of one kind or another and so the cost goes up and up and up.
Another statistic which has slipped out is that we now have fewer people working in manufacturing industry than at any time since the Industrial Revolution. I don't know what date they are taking to mark the start of that revolution but it must be of the order of 200 years. In 1810, Britain's population was about 17 million [including the whole of Ireland]. Now the total population of the UK [excluding the Irish Republic] is about 61 million.
Today the Corus steel plant at Redcar is to start the process of shutting down and is then to be "moth-balled". This is spin for closure. Yet another bit of manufacturing industry goes down the drain. It is, say the financial wizards who are so good at their own jobs, because wages and costs are too high - this came from, among others, a man whose bonus for 2009 exceeded £1 million.
The government has no policy whatsoever for the re-building the economy of this country. And neither has the Tory Party. I have even less confidence in "call me Dave" and his Old Etonian mates than I have in Gordon Brown and the dead-legs of New Labour. They waffle on about technology and training engineers and scientists, but to do what?????? Lord Adonis has been pushing plans for a new high speed rail system. This could create lots of jobs and provide a solid foundation for a part of Britain's manufacturing future. Because if we are going to recover, we have to make things the world wants to buy - just like the Germans do. Trouble is, if we went ahead with a new HS rail system we would give the work to foreign contractors employing foreign workers and we would buy all the equipment form foreign manufacturers. And the government would think it had done the right thing. After all, this is the government that has given the order for re-equipping the East Coast Main Line to the Japanese - and then told us the lie that this preserved 12,000 jobs. That got the inscrutable Japanese worried.
Is there any hope?
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