Unemployment
It's August, and the Sunday Telegraph has clearly run out of news, so it runs this story:The number of unemployed would almost double if people on incapacity benefit were included, new figures show. The statistical fudge is particularly common in Tony Blair's own constituency, as Rajeev Syal reports.
It's not that this is not an important story, it's just not news. The academics the piece refers to have released this report every year for about a decade, and the Guardian (among others) covered it in May.
To summarise -- the unemployment figures, at least as measured by the number of claimants of benefit, have been kept low by a massive transfer of people from being unemployed to on invalidity or sickness benefit. The reasearchers estimate about 1m of the 2.5m people on the latter benefits are actually looking for work.
This is a serious issue, and if you read the report (it goes into ward-by-ward detail -- the old industrial areas and cities might have up to 11% of the workforce wrongly categorised) it's hard to deny there's a problem. But the Telegraph's attempts to blame Labour are comic - it was under Thatcher's premiership that the vast bulk of the extra invalidity claims arised.
posted by Matthew @ 8/16/2004 09:18:00 AM
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