Lord Elpers wrote:
Well you might not like what I say and I may make an odd mistake but I do not make things up. Because I disagree with much of the left wing whinging comments on here does not make me right wing. You can disagree with an extremist without being one yourself.
It would be nice to hear some facts from you on the good news of the recovery
I was questioning the made up facts from one of your right wing friends on here. But sadly he seems to have done a runner. Just like you will do soon.
There is little good news in the economy so far. Of course growth is preferable to contraction but they're still relatively low figures and we have a huge amount of ground to make up.
The unemployment figures have fallen. Yet there is plenty of evidence to suggest people have been forced to take very low hour/zero hour contract jobs when not suitable or forced off JSA altogether by jobcentre sanctions. The Unemployment figures don't take into account the underemployed. Also the employment figures include all unpaid family workers (up 9%) and all those on apprenticeships, work experience and government training & employment programmes. Not to mention the employment figures don't take into account population increases, whilst the unemployment rate does but doesn't factor in foreign, short stay workers. And the claimant count doesn't include those now on Universal Credit.
Median real wages have fallen since 2009 and continue to fall. Now at a level similar to a decade ago.
Redundancies have stayed roughly similar, but are still only at the level they were 2 years ago.
The number of underemployed workers has risen by 300,000 since 2010 and continues to rise with a large number simply classed as "unknown".
The long term unemployment rate has increased and continues to.
GDP per capita has fallen since 2010 and shows no sign of increasing.
This is, of course, all a national picture and we know some areas are particularly suffering. Which hasn't been helped by the abolition of the regional development agencies and a huge cut to government investment under the Coalition, down to negative net figures.
As for your (and George's) assertion that the post election economic dip was due to the Eurozone? That's just guff.
The UK dip started end of Q3/start of Q4 2010. As the graph you've used shows the Eurozone didn't go into recession until 2012. Plus during that period exports increased, they didn't take a hit. Both business and consumer confidence were both positive and increasing in the period prior to the election. As was consumer spending, retail sales, housing production, industrial production, capacity utilisation and manufacturing production. Whilst the number of unemployed, the youth unemployment rate, government bond yields, inflation and bankruptcies were falling.
It was the UK government not the Eurozone that so affected the UK economy.
