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Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation

I would rather have written a bad joke in public than a bad Budget in public. Now we know—and now the Secretary of State has been forced to admit—that unemployment is not going to fall below 2 million. He will remember, just as we remember, the last time that happened. For those with long memories, what has happened is all too familiar. The last time the Tory party was in office, it took a couple of years to get unemployment above 2 million, but after that it did not fall below 2 million for 18 years, until the Labour party was elected in 1997. Now the Government have decided that that record of the 1980s is worth a rerun, or something of a repeat, because there is one thing that has not changed: the Conservative party still believes that unemployment is a price worth paying.