Do you remember Rachel Reeves and issues as mundane as how badly she is managing the UK economy? I almost look on moaning about such things with a slight sense of nostalgia. If only that were all we had to worry about now.
Except we have, of course, to still worry about such things. This is from The Guardian this morning, based on the latest announcement on employment data from the Office for National Statistics, out this morning:
The number of employed people in the UK has fallen again, particularly in shops, restaurants and hotels, reflecting weak hiring, while private sector wages grew at the slowest rate in five years, official figures show.
Figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) showed the number of employees on payrolls fell by 184,000 in December compared with a year earlier, to 30.2 million.
Three thoughts.
First, the economy is very clearly weakening.
Second, there is no reason to think this is going to change.
Third, no wonder Labout has the poll ratings it has. This unemployment is the deliberate consequence of a combination of both fiscal and monetary policy that is intended to keep unemployment high so that inflation can, supposedly, be kept low, as if there is an obvious relationship between the two when, as a matter of fact, there is not.
We can, and should, condemn Trump and all he is doing. But let's not pretend there is benevolent government going on here in the UK, because there is not. We still have people running this country who think that having one in twenty people unemployed (and one in ten young people) unemployed is a price worth paying for low inflation, when it is glaringly obvious that they have not the slightest idea what is causing the inflation they are supposedly tackling.
We are a long way from being out of a mess of our own creation, in other words. The only reason we are not noticing it so much right now is that so much else is going on, but we should not ignore that Reeves, Bailey & Co are still furiously furrowing the fields for fascism to grow in right here, right now, and nor should we stop worrying about that.
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We plough the fields and scatter the bad seed on the land…..