Richard Exell
It is very hard to predict what tomorrow’s employment and unemployment figures will look like and very risky to pull out one month’s results and announce that we have either turned a corner or that things are worse than ever. These figures shift about a lot and there are plenty of ‘blips’ – odd months when there is a one-off exception to a rising or falling trend.
Against this background, what changes would be significant?
Nigel Stanley
I know that there is little point in taking on the Melanie Phillips leviathan. But I can’t resist quoting this from her column yesterday:
Similarly, the Government seems to have redefined ‘middle income’ to mean people on very modest means who aren’t actually on the breadline – while the actual middle classes have been rebranded as the ‘ privileged’, who can therefore be clobbered.
Surely there are only two possible definitions of middle income - either someone earning around median income – or someone living in a household on median income. And as these two figures are very similar (at around £21,000 or so) there is not very much point in arguing about this. “People on modest means who aren’t on the breadline” is a pretty good definition of the real middle Britain.
Adam Lent
There seems to be a consensus (amazing how these things can emerge in the space of minutes!) that Mervyn King will be weeping with fear at the sight of today’s unexpectedly high inflation figures. I can’t honestly say what the Governor’s immediate reaction will be but if there is any sense of panic on the Monetary Policy Committee, it would be utterly misplaced.
Philip Pearson
What better way to unleash aspirations than growing the green economy? No doubt Alan Milburn is right when he says that, “Too many able children from average income and middle class families are losing out in the race for professional jobs.”
But this isn’t just about the journey from council house to cabinet that Milburn comments on self-referentially in his Introduction to Unleashing Aspiration. As Brendan remarked yesterday, “The Government must also look at where new jobs are being created – such as green manufacturing – and ensure these are not affected by the same elitism that has dogged professions like medicine and law.”
Nicola Smith
Today The Mirror and The Guardian are among those who have covered the call that the TUC – as part of a coalition of labour market experts that includes the Work Foundation, the Resolution Foundation, the Demos Open Left Project (headed up by former Secretary of State for Work and Pensions James Purnell MP) and Professors Paul Gregg and Richard Layard – has made for the introduction of a universal job guarantee, available to all adults who have been unemployed and claiming JSA for more than 12 months. We believe that such a measure would make a real impact on levels of long-term unemployment, providing a promise to all unemployed people – especially to those in the areas devastated by previous recessions – that the Government will not allow a repeat of the years of worklessness these communities experienced in the 80s and 90s.
Owen Tudor
CBI Director General Richard Lambert has a hissy fit in the Financial Times today complaining that Sir David Hare’s theatrical summary of business is unfair, stupid and just plain wrong. All Hare said was that the aim of business was to make money, which seems pretty uncontentious. But Lambert takes umbrage – in a thinly veiled alternative to the recent and widely lampooned “doing God’s work” remark, he complains that business just isn’t that simple (because it’s difficult to make money, see?
Owen Tudor
The announcement by the Obama administration that a bank levy will be introduced to claw back $90 billion of the US bank bailout over the next ten years has added new fuel to the fire over financial sector reform, and has upset the calculations of those who thought that the business was returning to pre-crisis laissez-faire. Banks may well be regretting those bullish bonus announcements of recent weeks, as they realise that politicians are no longer cowed by the power of Wall Street and the City of London – also evidenced by the UK’s one-off bonus tax.
Adam Lent
Given that the team here have been working pretty relentlessly on the crisis in the labour market for the last year, I couldn’t help but feel a small twinge of pride at the fact that 10% of the population seem to subconsciously assume that the boss of Apple must work for the TUC. By this logic, of course, Alan Sugar owns Tate and Lyle and Stuart Rose runs Interflora!
Owen Tudor
Nobel prize winning economist Paul Krugman has written a just fabulous assault on the bankers formerly known as ‘Masters of the Universe’ for the New York Times. Considering the testimony of Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan Chase and Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission this week, he concluded, right on the money, that politicians engaged in deciding how to regulate the financial sector should ignore its leading proponents. Not just because they’re bound to be greedy, rapacious, morally incontinent partisans. But because they don’t actually know what they’re doing.
Are they still ‘Masters of the Universe’? No. But what they are rhymes with bankers.