It would be nice to have a zero-point on that graph.

Can we have that demographically adjusted to working age population too? What’s the baseline we can really expect the numbers to return to, assuming a return to previous output.

[deleted]

@3 – Are you available for speeches?

Our jobs problem is summed up by the galactically out of touch Toffs squatting in numbers 10 and 11 Downing Street.

“Our jobs problem summed up in one chart, albeit inadequately”

If the chart went down to 0′s, would you even be able to see the data properly? What point would it serve?

oh come on people, this isn’t cherry picking – it just shows us that full time employment has been falling since about May 2011 which is hardly what you’d expect in an economy in the midst of a recovery.

[I’m not sure if you need an FT subscription to read this, but there’s a very interesting discussion of labour force participation rates and demographics in the USA – did the UK have a “baby boom” after the war too? might apply here, I don’t know:

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/8995b476-887c-11e1-a727-00144feab49a.html#axzz1sIY0sdo0

So a million less since 2008. That equals a loss of £8000 average per person in tax and NI contributions to the Exchequer. Which I think equals £8 billion. No wonder the government is bust. And Cameron and Osborne want the UK to go on firing people. Bit thick, aren’t they?

“If you plot ‘number of animals abused’ against ‘what makes people cruel’ versus ‘intelligence of either party’, the pattern is so unreadable that you might as well just draw a chain of fox heads on sticks. And if you do that, an interesting thing happens: the word ‘cruel’ starts flashing. So – are we cruel to hunt foxes?”

The graph above is self-explanatory. It’s actually scientific fact. There’s no real evidence for it but it is scientific fact.

Respect to punk science. The sweariest blogger on the net.

@3.

Charming.

The full dataset is here:

http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/lms/labour-market-statistics/april-2012/index.html

Table 3.

Employment grew by 53,000 in the most recent quarter. Full-time employment fell by 27,000, whilst part-time work rose by 80,000.

The number fo people working part-time who say they want a full-time job grew by 89,000.

The point i was trying to make was = this isn’t what one would normally expect in a ‘recovery’.

For fuck’s sake. That graph is a fucking abortion. Do you want to cherry pick your ranges any further?

I feel sorry for right-wingers – these are the people they have for company.

Funny what you can do by adusting the axis range on a graph, eh?

This chart appears to show that whereas under Labour the number of full-time jobs was falling, since the election, when the Coalition came to power, the number of fll-time jobs has risen. Of course, with a better scale on the y-axis we’d have never have no about the wonders the Coalition have done to improve full-time job prospects in the country. Was this the point the writer was trying to make?

@12 – Why delete a comment only to quote it. You’ll also find arseholes everywhere

We’re certainly in a double-dip as far as full time employment numbers are concerned.

Well done George Osborne.

Idiot.

I can’t read a graph therefore you’re a cunt.

Duncan, pity there’s no sectoral information on that chart. I’d guess some business sectors are much harder hit than others. In particular, how much of the fall in FT employment since Jan 2008 is caused by the collapse of investment banking? Whenever a trader or manager loses his job, so do a lot of support staff – but the loss of their jobs goes unreported.

@ Luis Enrique
“did the UK have a “baby boom” after the war too?”
Rolls eyes. “baby boom” was invented to describe the jump in the *UK* birthrate after the end of World War II
So you can expect a decline in the numbers in full-time employment some 65 years and 9 months after demob – but demob was actually a gradual process and took up to two years for soldiers who had to get back from the Far East, so there will be a gradual decline from early 2011 to end 2013. Employment will not fall off a cliff because quite a few have taken early retirement when offered it by a company that thought that better than making a 40-year-old redundant. You can also expect Duncan Weldon and other members of the Labour Party to attribute this natural demographic trend to the Coalition’s policies, while ignoring the one million fall in those full-time employed, which was not due to people born during the baby boom reaching 65, under the Labour government