Jobs

No one quite expected it, and even now ministers struggle to explain it. But the British jobs miracle has become the single biggest fact of economic life – proving that sometimes, things go badly right as well as badly wrong. Cameron has now overseen more job creation than his last six predecessors did at this stage (above). The excellent Michael Saunders from CitiGroup has produced an excellent report about it (pdf) and some of his charts are below. 1Jobs growth is beating every single forecast (see chart of total jobs, above), even the optimistic forecasts that George Osborne was publishing when he was talking about abolishing the deficit in five years. He has since given himself ten years, but look at these jobs.

The ‘debate’ about immigration in recent weeks has failed to focus on the crucial issue – the sheer scale that immigration has reached and its inevitable impact on our future. Perhaps this week’s ‘earthquake’ will prepare the ground for a serious discussion of what has to be done while preserving our open society and economy. The fundamental reality is that, under Labour, net foreign immigration was very nearly four million, while one million British citizens emigrated. Of Labour’s four million, only one third were from Eastern Europe, but those are the only ones that they mention. It cannot have escaped their notice that the other two and a half million are from outside the EU and are heavily inclined to vote Labour.

The British jobs miracle continues – and in ways that continue to surprise. Your CoffeeHouse baristas have been crunching the numbers. They’re startling in a number of ways. For example:- 1. David Cameron’s record at job creation is better than any of his last four predecessors – including Tony Blair in a boom. See chart above. 2. Jobs are being created so quickly that even the March Budget prediction is out of date. The above graph shows a dotted line, indicating the OBR projections. The thick red one, above, shows that we're already ahead. 3.

[audioplayer src="http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_8_May_2014_v4.mp3" title="James Forsyth and Isabel Hardman look forward to the general election next year" startat=766] Listen [/audioplayer]In almost a decade as Conservative leader, David Cameron has tended to avoid talking about his political philosophy. He has presented himself as a pragmatist, suspicious of anything ending in ‘-ism’ — and the very opposite of a swivel-eyed ideologue. There is something to be said for this, but it raises the great question: what is a Conservative government for? There was no clear answer at the last election and so no clear result from that election. Voters had turned away from Labour, but were not quite sure how their lives would be better under the Conservatives.

Remember Labour’s defining mission: ‘education, education, education’? Yesterday we had the Conservative equivalent ‘jobs, jobs, jobs’. In what some might see as an important day in the development of the mission of the Conservative Party, the Chancellor pledged the goal of Full Employment: ‘Today I’m making a new commitment. A commitment to fight for Full Employment in Britain, making jobs a central goal of our economic plan.’ What does this mean in practice? It suggests that cutting taxation and cutting the deficit is all about creating the conditions for work, not that tax cuts, and balancing the books are ends in themselves. It creates a moral imperative for economic reform which is not just about rolling back the size of the state.

Work and Pensions Questions in the Commons has long been a battle between the two main parties for the moral high ground, but today Esther McVey, who appeared even more energetic than usual, made that battle just a little bloodier. She scolded Sheila Gilmore for not smiling when she talked about more people in employment and then listed 'all the good news that is happening'. Then she told Stephen Hepburn that he hadn't read the figures on the labour market, joking that 'the honourable gentleman spoke with gusto but that was all he spoke with'. She was quite keen on the word 'gusto', actually, praising Nigel Adams for asking a question 'with such gusto'.

The Lib Dem conference rally was never going to be the same without Sarah Teather and her comedy routine. With Teather persona non grata following her decision to step down, it was duly a much tamer affair. The only risqué jokes were about Lembit Opik being bitten in the nether regions by a sausage dog. But seeing as Lembit has infuriated party loyalists by again calling for Clegg to go, they got a laugh from the leadership. The message of the conference rally was that the Liberal Democrats are the party of jobs. Nick Clegg claimed that the Tories weren’t the party of jobs, but the party of fire at will; a reference to the Beecroft proposals. But Clegg seemed much happier when he moved on to attacking the Labour party.

Jobs are being created in Britain, but the economy isn't growing. In the last year, the number of people in work rose by 2 per cent, but economic output rose by just 0.3 per cent. As the below graph shows, employment is now 0.7 per cent above its pre-recession peak, whereas GDP is still 3 per cent below it. This adds up to a big drop in productivity. Output per worker is now 3.8 per cent below its 2008 Q1 level, and 13.3 per cent lower than it would be if the pre-recession trend had continued. In a piece for this week's issue, The Spectator's business editor Martin Vander Weyer points out that this slump is 'the equivalent of an extra five-minute fag break outside the fire exit for every employee, every hour'. (On the latest figures, it's more like an eight-minute break.