And wanting us to be just like Ireland.

The political right continues to press the argument that there must be further deregulation in all sorts of areas for the sake of the economy, including in the financial sectors. This is a huge part of what some of them imagine they would get by leaving the EU, without any negative consequences.

I am suggesting there are huge areas/populations in the world that were completely unaffected by the banking crisis - China being one, the arab states being another, Russia etc So was it really a global crisis or was our egocentric view that if affected Europe and the US then it must be global!!

So its all Milton's fault - don't blame Maggie because Blair/Brown decided to continue to follow her flawed economic theory. They had more than one economic cycle to sort things and return back to the good old days of large public ownership, union control, high taxation etc.

Suggest you read Darling's book - the labour top brass knew debt was getting out of control and something would have to be done. They did what Labour always do - shy away from making any tough decisions. If they had made any unpopular moves they would have been obliterated in the election.

simply a lie. when labour came to power it was approx 1.7m, when they left it was almost 2.5m.

You can make stats say anything can't you ?

rlAccording to the BBC who have taken these stats from the ONSrl unemployment in May 97 was 2.05m and in May 2010 was 2.49m, the trend of downwards unemployment being reversed in April 2008 when the figure was 1.66m and I'm sure we all know why stats tend to get skewed upwards from 2008 onwards ?

More telling is that its still around 2.49m which according to most commentators is far less than they would expect at this time, more worrying is that those same stat collectors and commentators don't know why.

Absolute numbers for employment/unemployment are meaningless without an indication of population.

And an indication of the underemployed.

not really, no. these stats, whichever you choose show unemployment higher when labour left power than when they arrived. are you suggesting those poor sods who lost their jobs from '08 onwards shouldn't be counted?

I'm not suggesting anything, I'm merely providing a link to stats which you failed to do, how you read them and what logic you read into them is entirely your perrogative.

sorry, here's the link.
rlhttp://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2007/mar/12/politics.pastrl

If we stick to the Office of Natonal Statistics figures then the claimant count in May 97 was 1.62m from an umployed figure of 2.05m, in Nov 10 it was 1.58m from 2.49m unemployed.

So if you're into plucking figures in order to wave a political flag then the very simplest of comparisons is true, the latest claimant figure is lower then when Labour came to power, or to put it another way the last set of claimant figures that the outgoing Tory party left was higher than the figures that the Tory/LibDem coalition are working with now.

I'm not quite sure what the Guardian correspondants comparison has to do with the Labour Party though being as they wouldn't really be responsible for causing the unemployment in May 97 would they ?


One very pertinent point from the ONS figures is that since mid-2005 the difference between unemployed and claimants has been growing and as all three party's can take responsibility for those figures then then question is, in Nov '12 almost 900,000 people were unemployed but not claiming JSA and as the notes to those stats in my link state that can be caused by the fact that the top line unemployed figures are actually an average over three months and therefore not a definitive snapshot figure whereas the claimant figures are accurate for that month - but mainly because there is a trenche of people who do not qualify for JSA when they are unemployed, mainly the young school leavers, and its they who should be our biggest concern and its they who have been contributing to the widening gulf between "unemployed" and "claimant".

we can stick to whatever figures you like, the simple fact is more people were unemployed when labour left power than when they came to power.

That would be two years into the global financial crisis.

One of the reasons that the deficit was lower under the Labour governments, until the global financial crisis, was that unemployment was lower than under the Conservatives governments of both Margaret Thatcher and John Major.

The Tories could, for the wrong reasons (IMO), maybe get this right. If, as I have previously proposed, they can split the French-German axis that dominates Europe and isolate France in policy terms we could all come out of this well. As I have said before, a Northern European powerhouse with France being isolated, possibly as the champion of the impoverished South would be a good outcome.