Everyone seems surprised that net UK employment is falling, by 56,000 in the last quarter. Sure, it breaks a trend:
But let's be clear about why it is happening. It is the Brexit effect. If you tell people not to come to the Uk to work, and they don't, and it is those coming to the UK who have fuelled the rise in the above chart, then of course the number in employment will fall. We need to get used to it. Employment and GDP will both be falling because of Brexit.
And so what, you might ask? This does not matter if in practice real wages are rising, and so is GDP per capita. On the former we have data:
Real wages are falling.
And per capita GDP? It's too early to say, but I expect it will too. People came here because they were useful, after all. Logically that will follow.
Get used to it: this is the new British economic paradigm.
I'd be grateful if the Bank of England took note.
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The minimum wage will be having an effect. In the last couple of years those jobs which are worth between £6.50 and £7.80 an hour ( plus employment taxes and employment costs ) have been made illegal.
This is your first and last comment using that name
Largely because the comment is crass
No job has been made illegal. Low pay has been
“4,780 employers identified as not complying between 2009/10 and 2013/14”
https://fullfact.org/economy/minimum-wage-prosecutions-are-rare/
There is an argument..that if an employer can not afford minimum wage rates, they should not be in business?
of course, some are in business and quite successfully, yet still have problems with complying with minimum pay rates:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2017/12/08/primark-sports-direct-named-shamed-paying-minimum-wage/
Well, I can tell you that in the public sector where I work if anyone leaves they are not being replaced. Those remaining get the work.
And they are leaving for higher wages in the private sector no less.
Total employment is a bit of a useless statistics, due to how population is changing (as you rightly suggest), e.g. population also rose 3 million since 2010, then there is later retirement, and how much of the work is part-time, see e.g. http://uk.businessinsider.com/unemployment-in-the-uk-is-now-so-low-its-in-danger-of-exposing-the-lie-used-to-create-the-numbers-2017-7
As you say the what counts is real (median) incomes and I would like to see the MSM really push on this. Every time we hear a politician say how many jobs they have created, the reply should be “yes, but, are people better off, on average?” Current policy is failing on the only measure that counts!
Agreed, entirely
Walking to work for the last week it is quite clear that although we grit the roads, pavements are far less a priority and yet I have seen people slipping over everywhere and our A&E departments filling up.
I mean this could be a job for people needing work. The extra grit and salt would count as an extra transaction or two for the GDP figures up and down the country.
Everyone seems to be moaning about how badly we deal with snow in this country, yet the answer is in front of us – invest in the jobs, equipment and supplies to deal with it. Duh!
I wish I’d had my camera the other day when the snow was thicker. The pathways outside the Council House had been cleared but stopped short at bus stop where mostly the elderly sheltered. The footpath in the bus shelter and continuing from it was like an ice rink – slippy and dangerous. It was bizarre to see.
My view is that austerity is turning this country into a mean, hard sort of dog eat dog place.
It is also turning us stupid.
Pilgrim Slight Return says:
December 14 2017 at 11:12 am
“…Walking to work for the last week it is quite clear that although we grit the roads, pavements are far less a priority….”
Something else they do better in Scotland still. Maybe a lesser priority, but they do get done. We have special little tractors that go scudding about the pavements in the wee small hours of the morning while I’m still on my coffee and toast.
“My view is that austerity is turning this country into a mean, hard sort of dog eat dog place.”
Hmmmmm….I think South Britain was going that way pretty firmly before I left, and Austerity is a symptom of meanness not its cause – though undoubtedly it has magnified the impact.
This is an old one isn’t it; the pathetic response of what is supposed to be an advanced country to the occassional bit of bad weather. It happens because the austerity obsessed fools controlling the public purse, and the ‘maximise the profit, sod the public interest ‘ Gradgrindian beanounters running the private sector, won’t invest in the necessary equipment because ‘we don’t get bad weather sufficiently often to justify….blah, blah, blah.
Yes, this is incredibly stupid, and like everything else to do with austerity it makes life more and more unpleasant for the vast majority of the problem. I see more and more homeless people round Euston station, and yesterday, all the trains were stopped for hours because yet another poor, desparate soul had thrown themself in front of a train further up the line, something that has been happening with increasing frequency in recent months.
So it took me 2.5 hours on hopelessly overcrowded trains to get home. Not that the Social Darwinists in this government could give a damn of course; if the poor/disabled/distressed are committing suicide in ever greater numbers, they’ll be perfectly content.
But then Andy, as the Brexit debacle has shown, dishonesty and stupidity are now the normal setting in Britain.
sickoftaxdodgers says:
“as the Brexit debacle has shown, dishonesty and stupidity are now the normal setting in Britain.”
‘..in Britain….’ It isn’t as bad in Scotland. Yet. And I hope it won’t be. And there’s a very real possibility that as Brexit unrolls it won’t be a Britain which is exiting. The situation in NI is going to be extremely difficult to resolve and a lot of Scots wanted out of the Union before Brexit. And voted unambiguously to ‘Remain’.
Business people have been complaining about minimum wage rises for a century or so. They all seem to forget that they can’t sell anything to people who haven’t the money to buy.
Hang on a minute …. looking at the second graph, it is clear that the earnings growth declined steadily for three and a half years, between Q4 2010 and Q2 2014, and again, more sharply, from Q2 to Q4 2015. Inflation was also a lot higher than it is today.
And yet Brexit, at both those points, was just a twinkle in Nigel’s eye.
Yes, there was another step decline from Q4 2016 to Q2 2017, post-Brexit vote, but since then it has begun to increase once again.
In fact, if you draw a horizontal line backwards on the graph from the latest point, you will see that earnings growth has only ever been higher than it is now for around 6 or 7 quarters – in the last 8 years!
Of course the future is unknown, but, just in consideration of that graph, things have certainly been worse for the UK in the recent past – and while enjoying the full ‘benefits’ of EU membership.
The point I was making was that we need to get used to declining employment