Labour not working“Don’t vote Conservative because we all know what happened under them - 3 million unemployed!”

I saw the BBC take this government’s unemployment figures to task some time ago, describing how there are ever-increasing numbers of people going onto disability allowance rather than becoming officially unemployed.

Then I posted about the extent of this fiddle - moving the unemployed into the less politically-sensitive category of disabled - in Scotland where 21% of Scotland’s entire workforce is on invalidity benefit.

Now, Thersites has come up with the official figures. Just over 1.1 million people have been diverted from unemployment benefit to sickness benefit - thus depressing headline unemployment figures. He’s added that figure to the headline unemployment figure - 1.42 million - to arrive at a more accurate figure of two and a half million unemployed.

Then Lascivious added the final touch by noting that over half a million jobs have been created in the public sector by Gordon Brown since 1997. Assuming all these jobs were Brown’s version of the YTS scheme and so unnecessary - and if you believe in shrinking the state rather than increasing it it’s an easy enough assumption - we find ourselves hitting the Thatcherite 3 million mark.

I would add that forcing tens of thousands of kids into university places that are often inappropriate to their needs (although entirely appropriate to the government’s needs) is also another expensive and dishonest way of suppressing the true scale of unemployment in this country.

And the adverse effects of all this manipulating and twisting of real life are now starting to come back and, as an American might say, bite our bottoms.

Labour still isn’t working.

UPDATE - this just in from our sloppy blogging department:

The 21% on incapacity benefit is quoted from this piece in The Scotsman: “The number classed as economically inactive, largely those on sickness and incapacity benefits, was 655,000″

(My emphasis).

So they’re not all on benefit after all. I would do well to read my sources a bit better. My apologies for my mistake.