Britain’s Sham Unemployment Drop

The British election campaign opened with the sudden appearance everywhere of advertisements extolling the Labour Government’s economic record. The unemployment rate, say the ads, is the lowest in 29 years.

The claim is true, in a sense, but it is a statistical sleight of hand. If to the numbers of the unemployed you add the numbers of those not working due to (alleged) chronic sickness, you get more or less the same figure for the last 20 years: about 3 million. What has changed is only the ratio of unemployed to sick.

Theodore Dalrymple