Unemployment

Ahead of his PMQs debut, George Osborne is boosted by the news that unemployment is down again. As the chart above shows, the government’s jobs miracle continues with just over 31 million now in work. Between February and April this year, unemployment fell by 43,000 to 1.81 million. With inflation low and pay packets growing, the declining cost of living, the government is feeling vindicated with its economic plan. Employment minister Priti Patel said this morning: ‘Today's figures confirm that our long-term economic plan is already starting to deliver a better, more prosperous future for the whole of the country, with wages rising, more people finding jobs and more women in work than ever before.

After all the carousing and flag-waving that followed VE day in 1945, millions of young men fortunate enough not to be still fighting the Japanese faced a problem. Having spent five or six years in uniform, they needed jobs. For those who lacked explicit civilian skills, which meant most, it was hard to persuade employers that a talent for flying a Spitfire, commanding a gun battery or navigating a destroyer qualified a man to run a factory or even sell socks. For years after the shooting stopped, newspapers bulged with small ads placed by demobilised officers. Many such entries exuded unconscious pathos. That quirkily brilliant writer Richard Usborne had the notion of investigating the responses received by such men, who had risked much and borne life-and-death responsibilities.

Feeling the genitals of freshly hatched chickens may not be the most glamorous job in the world but at £40,000 a year it’s not badly paid. It requires some stamina: you pick up hundreds of chicks a day and check their ‘vent’ for boy parts. If it’s a baby hen, then she’s sent off for a life of corn and egg-laying. If it’s a baby rooster — well, best not to ask. Almost nobody in Britain wants to do it, so vacancies go unfilled. The poultry industry, in desperation, has asked the government to add ‘chicken sexer’ to its growing list of seemingly unfillable jobs. This fits a trend. In five short years, Britain has gone from having mass unemployment to jobs galore.

The embarrassing truth is that David Cameron did not think carefully about this pledge to take net immigration into the 'tens of thousands'. The pledge originated in a Thick-of-It style farce: it was an aspiration mentioned by Damian Green, then immigration spokesman, that caught media attention. The Tories didn’t want to make a fuss by disowning it, so this pledge ended up becoming party policy and then government policy. Absurdly so: a country can only control who comes in, not who goes out. So immigration, not ‘net immigration’, should have been the target. And even then, it should have been immigration from outside the EU – which Theresa May has done a reasonable job controlling. But the not-so-embarrassing truth is that this is a problem of success.

The government’s Work Programme, launched in 2011 to help long-term unemployed people into work, has been widely condemned in the media. It has been portrayed alternately as greedy, cruel or incompetent, and sometimes all three. Yet one of these providers, Ingeus, helped me. Many journalists, who have no experience of such places, have maligned this scheme as well as others. This infuriates me. How dare they dismiss as a failure the scheme which saved me and many others (Ingeus has helped 215,000 into work) from long-term unemployment, benefits and the dismalness that entails? Following a nine-month period on Jobseeker’s Allowance I was referred to Ingeus in 2011. As well as claiming JSA I volunteered at an arts cafe in return for a meal at the end of each shift.

Everything seems to be falling into place ahead of the election for the Tories. Today’s data shows high street spending rising at the fastest rate for more than 13 years – and this is not a freak. In fact, it’s part of a broader picture which is more impressive (and promising) than George Osborne seems to realise. The Chancellor is a wee bit slow off the mark when it comes to recognizing the radical effect of his own tax cuts. He is still banging on about fiscal position when the consumer story is the one he should be telling. Here’s why: 1. Shops are busier than ever. Brits spent £331bn in the shops in 2014 (excluding fuel) – more than they've ever spent before. And sales were up 2.

Did you know that one in six couples in the UK have difficulty conceiving? That’s roughly 3.5 million not very happy people. A healthy diet, not smoking and not being too overweight or too underweight can all improve your chances of having a baby. Here are some other ideas worth a try. Take care with technology. Both mobile phones and laptops have been implicated in reducing sperm quality. Research has found that while using a phone increased testosterone, it also reduced levels of luteinising hormone, important in male fertility. Carrying your phone around in your trouser pocket is not great either and, as for laptops, using one on your lap if you’re a man should be considered a no-no – increasing scrotal temperatures over a long period is bad for your sperm.

When Ed Miliband started speaking at PMQs today you could tell straight away that he had a foul sore throat. Combine that with the promising unemployment figures out today and Miliband forgetting two key chunks of his conference speech, and there was clear potential for the session to get very tricky for him. But Miliband had come to the Chamber armed with a series of hard questions for Cameron to answer about what Lord Freud, one of his welfare ministers had set at a fringe meeting at Tory conference. Freud apparently said that disabled people were not worth the minimum wage and that if they wanted to work for £2 an hour, that should be accommodated. listen to ‘PMQs: What is Cameron's ‘secret plan’ to pay for tax cuts?

Home David Cameron, the Prime Minister, resisted calls for Parliament to be recalled to debate the crisis in Iraq. Philip Hammond, the Foreign Secretary, said that the government was not considering military intervention ‘at the present time’. Mark Simmonds resigned as a Foreign Office minister, but Downing Street hastened to say that his resignation, unlike Lady Warsi’s a week earlier, had nothing to do with government policy on Gaza, since he was complaining he could not afford to rent a flat in London for his family with the £27,000 allowance. A man sought by police investigating the theft of a fish tank from a furniture shop in Leeds hid in a bush and was attacked by a swarm of wasps. Unemployment fell 132,000 to 2.

Today's labour market figures have enough in them for both sides of the political debate to feel they've got something to run with. First, the jobs: the overall unemployment rate fell to 6.4% in the second quarter of this year, the lowest since the end of 2008. There are 820,000 more people in work than a year ago. The number of young people out of work is 200,000 lower than last year, which is the biggest fall since records began 30 years ago. And the Bank of England has just upgraded its growth forecast for the UK this year from 3.4% to 3.5% and from 2.9% to 3% for next year. Good news for the Coalition. But the Labourish piece of bad news is that real wages are shrinking. Today's figures reveal that average weekly earnings excluding bonuses fell 0.

Labour is up in arms because many of the new jobs currently being created are among the self-employed. This seems to them to be cheating. Quite the reverse, ancients would have said. Ancient thinkers knew all about the needs of the poor and were worried about their capacity to cause trouble (as they saw it) by revolution. So in a world where everyone lived off the land (the wealthy by renting it out), Plato thought there should be a law that everyone should have a basic minimum of land to live off, and no one should own property more than five times the size of the smallest allotment; any excess should be surrendered ‘to the city and to the gods’, presumably for redistribution as necessary.

In his blog earlier today, Fraser Nelson argues: 'The UK jobs miracle is happening mainly due to radical welfare reform – the type Labour ducked in office..Under Labour, record numbers of people in work were celebrate as an end in itself – but most of the increase was accounted for by immigration. So more jobs did not mean less poverty – not if a quarter of Glasgow and Liverpool were still languishing on the dole at the peak of a boom. This time, it’s different. The welfare reforms are restoring the see saw link between jobs and dole queues.' I suppose I should by now get over the fact that intelligent, articulate journalists feel able to write with such certainty about data they simply don't understand.