And yet again, you'll be able to show that there are decent jobs for everyone who is unemployed. The unemployment are a myth – and have been for 20-30 years.

I was once unemployed and it was a dismal period of my life ... I felt useless, impotent, frustrated, unwanted, stupid, cast aside and outdated ... until I got back into work.

But, whilst I was unemployed, the likes of you would have added "workshy and feckless" to my list of attributes.

Well done for understanding.

I've been unemployed too – and it's soul-destroying.

I've also worked for pennies in a tea shop. And for £60 a week, managing a shop, taking orders, dealing with customers, looking after the float at my own home, locking and opening up etc. I lost my home as a result.

I left the place that I lived in, where I had all my friends, and moved south to start all over again. I've slogged around streets selling things to people in their offices, sometimes barely taking enough home to cover my transport into London from where I was living in Reading with my parents – itself far from a pleasurable experience in my mid twenties.

I've actually been accepted for a job – and then find someone higher up has withdrawn the offer. I've lost a job on the basis of not being good at something that I was not interviewed and employed to be good at.

I've sat at home and tried to write and sell stuff, when I couldn't be out actually trying to get work, more than once to be told that I was 'over-qualified'.

People who fall for the idea that the unemployed are, per se, workshy, are, at the very best, incredibly naive.

George Osborne couldn't run a tap properly and this doofus is the Chancellor ? He's a joke like the rest of them in the Coalition.

The pertinent point to make, every time, is that they all applied for the job, ALL of the political party's stood at the last election, none of them withdrew their candidates stating that the economic recovery was too difficult a problem to fix, ALL of them had a plan that they thought would fix the thing - and the current incumbents DID think that they were applying a fix.

Or did they ?

There are those who tout the opinion that this is a political party shielding themselves behind a bad world economic cycle to impose their own very severe political ideology upon a country, a sort of "crash and burn" where they get one chance in 100 years to blame everyone else for the effects of pulling the plugs out on any social responsibilities that they may have been forced to support in the good times.

That would be very evil.


the more I look at them and the longer this goes on the more confused I am as to which of the two options it is, are they totally bereft of ideas or totally full of ideology, or indeed just totally self interested at the expense of everything else ?

Goalposts on wheels. Neat trick.

So are you confident that the Q1 2013 growth figures will positive, yes or no? Otherwise we will be in a triple dip, despite your insistence that we're not.

I don't think there is any doubt at all regarding the motives of the tories. They are seizing the opportunity to shrink the state by as much and wherever they can. Gifting prime contracts to their ultimate paymasters without any real tangible, long-term savings. They've even entered territory that Thatcher and Major daren't ever tread.

I don't blame Labour or the Tories for that matter for the circumstances in which I live. I blame a faulty gene that I more than likely inheritated but couldn't have been detected at my inception.

I have paid my income tax and National Insurance on the understanding that if I became unemployed or ill or both I would have my basic needs taken care of, just like I understood that when I paid my income tax and National Insurance while I was working that I was paying for other peoples children to be educated and OAP's state pension.

They all appear to reprising the rlAnne Elk sketchrl

It will be due to "one off factors" - the snow.

And Osborne will say the triple dip means its even more crucial than ever to stick to his plan.

rlDanny Alexander on Daily Politicsrl

A graphic example of the Anne Elk effect

Excellent, its always someone elses fault.

Neil actually asks the question that I raised last night - "You knew what the problems were when you formed the coalition..."

The answer ? "We relied on forecasts by economists which were wrong"

Not, "We're making this up as we go along but really there is only this one idea of what to do"

And of course you can always rely on "We inherited the biggest ...."


Still they struggle for ways to explain that as fresh faced graduates who haven't even started to shave yet they shouldn't have applied for the job in the first place, but hey, its good money...

"Do you accept that the deficit will be higher this year than last ?"

"Its all the OBR's fault..."

"Why don't you fire the OBR ?"