United Kingdom (Photo credit: stumayhew)
English: 1923 unemployment insurance stamp. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
This is a good article from the Guardian and worth a read. Check it out!
UK unemployment rise adds to pressure on Osborne’s austerity strategy | Business | The Guardian.
Whilst UK youth unemployment is still way below the 50% levels in some Southern European countries, many youngsters and their parents must be seriously worried.
Once again, there is pressure on UK Chancellor to slacken-off the austerity strategy and stimulate growth.
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Dr Alf's Blog 
The true unemployment figures are very much worse than anything the Government has admitted to because for decades different Governments have been manipulating the figures on a grand scale to try and convince people that everything is fine.
We are told for example that a million private sector jobs have been created since the Coalition came to power.
What is happening is that any part time job of 1 hour or more is counted as a “job “and whenever someone sets up a Limited Company to take on an interim assignment (remember those), or a small business, it is counted as a new business and a new job created.
Where a spouse is added as say Company Secretary, that counts as another “job created” even though that Limited Company may not have traded.
We have not had a Trade surplus in this country since 1982 and since World War 2 have averaged just 1.4% economic growth with zero growth since the Coalition came to power.
The stupidest economics student at GCSE level knows that to achieve full employment you need 3% economic growth so since Alan Clarke MP under the late Margaret Thatcher started the process of fiddling the employment figures we have never had accurate data.
The process accelerated when “Jobseekers’ Allowance” came in as a copy of what the Australians were doing in one of their deprived areas “Mount Druett”.
People including the young were transferred to quasi-workfare schemes by the million and thus unemployment was magically lowered, then as these people came off those schemes they reappeared as dole recipients, then new dole recipients would be recategorized on different schemes in the Benefits Computer (the “Holy Grail” which the public never see but which has all the accurate data).
Many, like those made redundant, still in receipt of severance pay or forced /sanctioned by DWP staff who are set targets for forcing people off the unemployment register are recategorized as working and others who are economically inactive or who are living off savings or who have given up are not counted at all.
Since there are now 7 million of these people, it is getting harder for the Government to make the figures balance.
This is why the BBC and economists relying on the official figures cannot explain why with the economy shrinking under austerity measures, the Government has managed to create all the jobs it claims to have.
The experience of most people, particularly with unemployed youngsters at home is that something is not quite right with the figures but they are unable to put their finger on it.
The number of NI numbers exceeds the official population by some 19 million leaving these as “spare numbers”.
Illegal immigrants, fraudsters and others buy these spare numbers in pubs for about £250 gbp and create aliases to claim benefits and sometimes work at the same time.
Since there are at least 4.5 million illegal immigrants (based on the number of notes and coins in circulation, the amount of food sold in supermarkets and by the number of mid term school enrollments of children with parents not recorded anywhere), there is more unrecorded economic activity in industries where the indigenous population do not wish to work.
The Borders Agency which has been abolished, could never find these people because most of them were let in before E-Borders actually went live.
We now have a situation under which true unemployment is rising faster than the ability of the system to manipulate the statistics sufficiently and one only has to look at entire streets full of cars day after day after day to see with one’s own eyes that large numbers of them are not working.If they were, the cars would disappear during the working day and at holiday periods and then reappear at night.
Telecommuting does not explain this either because most UK employers are like Lord Sugar and want people to work in the office.
The Government is in a difficult position because if they tell people the truth (unemployment, incapacity, economically inactive, economically discouraged, in training schemes, work experience placements, sanctioned by DWP staff, forced off the register, not counted, in receipt of severance pay,etc,etc) is really 16.5 million people, they will have to admit that the lying about unemployment and job creation has been going on for 31 years and that they have continued with the practices of others to conceal the true situation.
The system lacks statistical integrity and more and more people know it but cannot quite understand what is going on at even this level of detail but when they do someone will pay a high electoral price even though little will change.
John,
Many thanks. Surely, the point is that whichever measure is used to track unemployment, the trend is not improving.