It’s official: smaller state and welfare reform leads to jobs record

The British jobs miracle continues, with unemployment now down below 7 per cent and employment at an all-time high of 30.4 million. This is the level that Bank of England Governor Mark Carney said he’d consider raising interest rates – a milestone chosen because, only recently, it seemed as if we’d take years to reach this point. Now we’re past it.

It’s a reminder: economics is a very blunt art, and economists are often no better than the Met Office. They can be surprised when the economy goes right, as well as it goes wrong. It was the failed, Keynesian, stimlus-worshiping economic model that led Ed Balls to declare accuse George Osborne of entertaining a ‘fantasy’ when the Chancellor said total jobs would rise even after he’d cut 300,000 public sector jobs.

As it turns out, Osborne was underestimating. The below graph shows how Osborne kept getting his forecasts wrong on jobs – each Budget, he underestimated just how well the British economy was doing.