Today's labour market figures are, it must be said, pretty encouraging. They're not 'great', because having more than two million unemployed scars the lives of those individuals who are out of work, and I'm not one of those who do triumphalism. However, they augur well for continued economic recovery, for closing the budget deficit, and for spreading the benefits of both so that as many of us as possible benefit.
We are particularly lucky here in Mid Suffolk, in that unemployment is half that of the United Kingdom as a whole, 4% as opposed to 7.7% at the end of September, and the number of JSA claimants is down by more than a quarter over the past year (848, as opposed to 1,135 this time last year).
There are those who have condemned the approach of the Coalition in terms of economic policy, and we will never know the truth of that, especially as the nuts and bolts of the alternatives were never really clearly stated. Besides, economic modelling is still really only an art, not a science, so any arguments either way are conjecture.
But it cannot be denied that the worst of the fallout from the financial crisis of 2008 has now passed, and the mission now is to find ways of ensuring that the vulnerable are sustainably supported in the future. I can't help feeling that politicians need to start turning their attention to that aspect of our economy as policies are fleshed out over the next fifteen months.
Sadly, I fear that we'll have rather more of the heat of blame allocation than the light of long-term policy exposition until May 2015...
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