𝓤𝓷𝓲𝓽𝓮𝓭 𝓝𝓮𝔀𝓼

With her budget only two weeks away, Rachel Reeves needed today’s employment figures like a hole in the head. You guessed it, unemployment has risen again, this time to 5%, representing a big jump from when Labour took office just 16 months ago. This is alarming for young people trying to take their first steps into the world of work, yet finding doors slammed in their faces, and even more so for the 134,000 people who have been made redundant in the last few months. But should we be surprised? Anyone who’s lived through Labour governments before certainly won’t be. I’ve lived through two of them – the ill-fated 1974-79 government, which ended in the appalling “winter of discontent”, and the 1997-2010 one, which climaxed with one of the deepest recessions any of us could ever have imagined.

The first saw unemployment rising from 3.6% to 5.3%, and the second from 7.2% to 7.9%. In short, Labour always increases unemployment. And what did we expect, when just about the first act of this latest Labour government was to hike employers’ national insurance, costing businesses up to £25 billion? No wonder companies stopped hiring. No wonder our economy has almost entirely stopped growing.

Perhaps Rachel Reeves should have taken the advice of a Labour front-bench spokesperson, who, responding to incorrect reports in 2021 that the Tory Chancellor Rishi Sunak was about to raise employers’ national insurance, said in the House of Common that such a move would be going against the “strong advice of businesses and trade unions”, will “make each new recruit more expensive and increase the costs to business” and would take money out of people’s pockets when our economic recovery is not yet established or secure and only adds to the pressure on businesses after a testing year and a half.”

The only problem was that the front-bench spokesperson was none other than Rachel Reeves herself. How she can explain that one away, I’m really not sure.

No government can tax its way to jobs, growth and prosperity. It might pretend that it’s taxing to make the country fairer, or to “invest in infrastructure”.

But we all know the real story – that the country is living way beyond its means, spending more than £100 billion a year merely to service its debt, and struggling to fork out for a colossal £300 billion in welfare payments. Yet, the only solution – cut spending, cut tax, stimulate growth – is also the only solution that Labour can never bring itself to implement.

After that manifesto-breaking, growth-diluting first budget, Labour told us that it had “fixed the foundations” and “wouldn’t be coming back for more”.

We now know that neither of those things were true. Labour will be coming back for more. Far more. In just 15 days’ time.

By historic standards, today’s unemployment (1.79 million) may not in itself be a cause for panic. Thirty years ago, there were a million more than that out of work. But the direction of travel under this government certainly is alarming, made worse by the millions who are not officially classified as “unemployed” but are out of work and receiving sickness benefits.

I wish there was light at the end of this tunnel. Sadly, there isn’t. Not while Labour is in power. I fear that all we can do is wait.