Is UK unemployment in reality the worst in Europe? – John Gelmini – in response to a re-blog of a Left Foot Forward article

United Kingdom: stamp (Photo credit: Sem Paradeiro)

Today, I re-blogged an interesting blog from Left Foot Forward, the leading left of centre blog. My original blog was:

Is a rise in self-employment disguising unemployment? | Left Foot Forward

I received the following response from John A Gelmini. Assuming that John Gelmini’s figures are correct, UK un-employment would be the worst in Europe, more of a problem than in Greece and Spain. Is it possible that John might be right? What would be the implications, if John were correct?

Personally, I have no means of proving or dis-proving John’s figures but am re-blogging his views, in the public interest, and would very much, welcome other views:

Under the system used by the DWP (Department of Works and Pensions) itself, a person applying for Jobseekers Allowance cannot qualify for it if they have the wrong kind of NI credits.

They also cannot qualify for the replacement for incapacity benefit, as many former builders and construction workers displaced in the recession, discovered when they applied for it at the Letchworth Jobcentre. They now work as taxi drivers at the taxi rank at Letchworth Railway station under the iron tutelage of North Herts District Council who inspect their cars using just one approved garage and issue their licences to ply for hire news

The unemployment figures have been little more than a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale for at least 30 years when Government Ministers in Mrs Thatcher’s Government started to fiddle the figures. The late Alan Clarke MP, admits as much, in his excellent memoirs which give an account of how it was done.

The true unemployment figures are about 16.5 million out of a potential workforce of 32 million.

There are a further 4.5 million illegal immigrants who do work but do not show up in the official figures. They work in agriculture for any one of 1000 agricultural gang-masters in East Anglia and tend to be Chinese, Lithuanian, Latvian and Eastern Europeans–The Poles who used to do it have now moved on.
Some in Leicester are Pakistanis and poor Indians working in curry houses and illegal garment factories for half the minimum wage and the rest are menial and domestic workers some living as quasi slaves.

People are counted as employed if they do more than one hour a week of part-time work and they are counted as having a job if they register a company at Company’s House and put themselves down as a director. Each time they register they are counted again, so someone envisioning themselves as an interim manager could register themselves at Company’s House stay on the bench, or on sabbatical, for years on end and still be included in the figures. The same person could set themselves up as a consultant, do no work, and again be counted as employed.

The Government has the real figures which include those in training schemes, those waiting to hear about benefits (they are deemed to be working), those who have given up looking for a job but are living off savings and supportive wives and partners (they are regarded as having a job too).

The school-leaving age rises to 18 next year, in a further attempt to massage the numbers, and soon the extra temporary employment created by the Olympics will disappear, thus creating a further cause for “statistical manipulation”.

On top of that, we have the phenomenon of the NI system having 19 million more numbers than there are people in the workforce. People buy these spare numbers in pubs and claim dole from several different offices whilst doing part-time work under different aliases causing further distortions to already completely bogus figures that the politicians claim they can “make no sense of”.