Unemployment down - Out of work rises

[OwlHoot]

New Labour are masters at making the key headline stats work for them, either by changeing what is being counted (aka reclasify unemployed job seekers) or change how the whole calculation is done

Yep - A couple of months ago someone staying at the same B&B as me did a runner without paying, and when the owner reported this to the police some pipsqueek back-office civilian clerk at the cop shop smugly informed him that this was no longer classed as a crime but was solely a civil matter.

He then phoned a local magistrate, to clarify the legal situation, and upon hearing what the clerk had claimed she roared "Poppycock - of course it's a crime, obtaining goods or services by deception!" He had the clear impression she had encountered this before and wasn't at all pleased.

Having now left the B&B (after finishing my previous contract) I'm not sure how it turned out. But apparently all police stations now have civilians taking details of cases over the phone, and their explicit instructions (with the help of pop-up information boxes on their PCs!) are to fob off as many cases as possible and transfer them to civil courts.

[bfg]

Back of an envelope calculation indeed. The official figure for "out of work" is actually 7.91 million, but nice of you to spin the figure a bit lower. Tony would be proud of you.

That cannot be true, you see Germany has terrible unemployment and their economy is on the verge of collapse, the papers and Saint Tony tell us this.

7.91 million when factored for the size of population makes us much worse than Germany so this is impossible when we have such fantastically low unemployment and our economy is surging ahead under GB's brilliant stewardship.

[Lucifer Box]

Seems fair. Someone who flips burgers by day and stacks shelves by night to make ends meet clearly counts as -2 on the jobless totals. You wait and see, soon we'll have negative unemployment.

[hyperD]

Found it from the ONS

http://www.statistics.gov.uk/downloa...employment.pdf

If you can keep your eyes open long enough, at the end of the doc is a summary. While I was referring to people who could work, the total "economically inactive" total is 9.3m:

Unemployed: 1.4m
Looking after family/home: 2.3m
Long term sick: 2.2m
Students: 1.8m
Other inactive: 1.7m

Total: ~9.4m

That's either a a third of the working population or around 20% of the total population of the UK out of work or economically inactive.