Jobs

Reading the papers today, you could be forgiven for thinking that MigrationWatch’s new report was a smoking gun against immigration. Here we have a study that links immigration to unemployment, in the face of nearly all previous research that has found no such link. However, looking at the MigrationWatch piece itself, it quickly becomes clear how implausible these claims are. The MigrationWatch report centres on a comparison of rising youth unemployment and rising immigration from the ‘A8’ countries – the Eastern European states that joined the EU in 2004. The correlation between the two is remarkably weak. During the initial rise in immigration between 2004 and the end of 2008,

Despite – or perhaps because of – the recession, pensioner employment has increased dramtically over the past few years. In his Telegraph column today, Fraser remarks on this important but largely ignored trend in Britain’s workforce. ‘A million jobs have been lost since the Great Recession began’, he says, ‘but the number of pension-aged people in work has increased by 200,000.’ Here’s that phenomenom in graph form: Why has this happened? Fraser puts his finger on one important factor: ‘Crucially, they pay less tax. A pensioner manning the tills in Tesco will take home 12 per cent more than a working-age colleague on the same salary.’ You see, employees over 65 don’t

CoffeeHousers may remember an odd New York Times editorial recently where they tried to blame the evaporation of British economic growth on austerity. Perhaps the newspapers’s famed fact-checkers had taken the day off, because the slightest piece of research would have exposed the premises of the piece as bunkum. This morning, the ONS has produced monthly public finance figures, showing current spending is still rising in Britain. But first, let’s get to the New York Times editorial: “Greece, which has been forced into induced recession by misguided European Union creditors, Britain has inflicted this harmful quack cure on itself… Austerity was a deliberate ideological choice by Prime Minister David Cameron’s