And an indication of the underemployed.

not really, no. these stats, whichever you choose show unemployment higher when labour left power than when they arrived. are you suggesting those poor sods who lost their jobs from '08 onwards shouldn't be counted?

I'm not suggesting anything, I'm merely providing a link to stats which you failed to do, how you read them and what logic you read into them is entirely your perrogative.

sorry, here's the link.

[urlhttp://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2007/mar/12/politics.past[/url



i read that labour left more people unemployed than when they came to power. as 2.5m is a bigger number than 1.7m/2.0m.

there's 1 other interesting snippet from that piece from march 2007

If we stick to the Office of Natonal Statistics figures then the claimant count in May 97 was 1.62m from an umployed figure of 2.05m, in Nov 10 it was 1.58m from 2.49m unemployed.



So if you're into plucking figures in order to wave a political flag then the very simplest of comparisons is true, the latest claimant figure is lower then when Labour came to power, or to put it another way the last set of claimant figures that the outgoing Tory party left was higher than the figures that the Tory/LibDem coalition are working with now.



I'm not quite sure what the Guardian correspondants comparison has to do with the Labour Party though being as they wouldn't really be responsible for causing the unemployment in May 97 would they ?





One very pertinent point from the ONS figures is that since mid-2005 the difference between unemployed and claimants has been growing and as all three party's can take responsibility for those figures then then question is, in Nov '12 almost 900,000 people were unemployed but not claiming JSA and as the notes to those stats in my link state that can be caused by the fact that the top line unemployed figures are actually an average over three months and therefore not a definitive snapshot figure whereas the claimant figures are accurate for that month - but mainly because there is a trenche of people who do not qualify for JSA when they are unemployed, mainly the young school leavers, and its they who should be our biggest concern and its they who have been contributing to the widening gulf between "unemployed" and "claimant".

we can stick to whatever figures you like, the simple fact is more people were unemployed when labour left power than when they came to power.

That would be two years into the global financial crisis.



One of the reasons that the deficit was lower under the Labour governments, until the global financial crisis, was that unemployment was lower than under the Conservatives governments of both Margaret Thatcher and John Major.

The Tories could, for the wrong reasons (IMO), maybe get this right. If, as I have previously proposed, they can split the French-German axis that dominates Europe and isolate France in policy terms we could all come out of this well. As I have said before, a Northern European powerhouse with France being isolated, possibly as the champion of the impoverished South would be a good outcome.

Here's a thing: why do we keep responding to someone who has so little respect for the rest of the users of this forum and for their own 'arguments' that they have admitted they cannot be bothered even using basic correct punctuation?

I've been ignoring most of his posts, suggest you do to, you'll miss nothing.

You're probably right.

He (or she) is a good poster. Provides some balance to the utter rubbish that infects most of your posts on the forum, and the fact that you felt it was necessary to abuse him a few weeks ago proves that you don't have the intellectual capacity to respond to his points.