Though Cowards Flinch

Oh, for mercy’s sake, though another word instead of mercy might be more appropriate…..Dale’s at it again. 

Faced with a Tory campaign that’s going nowhere fast other than down the toilet, all he can do is repeat the usual utter bollox about Labour and unemployment.  

So here, reprinted, is my rebuttal from a couple of  months ago, which even regular commenter Barney (no Labour lover, he) thought was a decent riposte to Dale’s abject nonsense.  It would have been called Rebuttal Yawn 2 , but I already did one of those about something else. (If you’re keen, there also this post, done after the rebuttal one, setting out the relevant Tory record on post-recession unemployment.)

Update 1710hrs:  Giles at Freethinking Economist has, quite independent of my post (we both deny a Lib-Lab pact), done his own rebuttal which makes many of the same points.  His version does not do the pre-war bit, which is in many ways a bit of an irrelevance anyway, but it does benefit from a very clear graph of the type I’d love to provide but am incapable of concocting, and is altogether more readable. 

Rebuttal yawn (the original)

I really, really don’t want to spend my allocated TCF time over the next three months rebutting Tory bollox in the cause of Labour upsetting odds in the election. 

But heh ho, duty calls, and as it is quite likely that this utter, utter nonsense from Iain Dale will start to be used by the Tories quite a lot over the next few weeks, I feel bound to spend a few minutes rebutting it.

Daley’s claim is, in keeping with his general being, quite simple:

Every Labour government in history has left office with unemployment higher than when it took office. Fact.

Oh gawd, I’m bored already, but I must press on……

Post-war statistics are taken from the ONS tables available here. Estimates for pre-war are as per the links, though data are a bit patchy for early in the century. 

To keep it simple and consistent I’ll focus on claimant data, where that data is available, rather than the more appropriate International Labour Organization method of unemployment calculation that the Tories under Thatcher and Major refused to bring in because it would have revealed much higher levels of ‘real’ unemployment.  (My technical post on this is here if you can be arsed.  The key point is that times of low unemployment these two measure tend to diverge, and come together at times of high unemployment.  Tom has a good post on it.)

Let’s start by looking at each of the Labour governments. 

1924 Only formed a coalition government with the liberals because the Tories refused to form a government despite having most seats.  Coalition fell apart after nine months.  This graph (page 4) suggests unemployment down in from 1923, but we won’t quibble.

1929-31 Yup, unemployment up.  Labour came to power in June 1929.   Little thing called the Wall Street Crash, October 1929, followed by major depression in the world economy.

1945 -51 Yup, unemployment up slightly perhaps, with 1951 figure at 281,000, though a 1945 comparative figure not readily available.  In 1945 there was, as you might have guessed, a war economy with pretty damn low unemployment

1964 – 70 Unemployment up from 413,000 to 640,000.

1974 – 1979 Unemployment up from 487,000 to 1,077,000.

1997 – now  Unemployment up on where it started and won’t get back to 1997 levels in time for general election.  Small thing called massive worldwide financial crisis and biggest recession since 1930s made it happen, but unemployment now coming down at same time as GDP starts to grow.

Now let’s have a look at the Conservative record, shall we?

 1900 – 06 Records (from union membership) too patchy for accurate record, but probably up slightly according to this graph (p.25)

1922 -23 Unemployment down from around 1,900,000 to 1,600,000 according to this (p.4)

1924 -29 Unemployment up from around 1,300,000 to 1,500,000 according to this (p.4)

1931-45 Unemployment up steadily in 1930s after Wall Street Crash, exacerbated by double dip in 1937.  High unemployment stopped by external incident called World War II, which many people consider to have been worse than unemployment.

1951-64 Unemployment up from 261,000 in 1951 to 413,000 in 1964, despite MacMillan saying ‘we’ve never had it so good’.

1970-74 Unemployment down from 640,000 in 1970 to 487,000 in February 1974.

1979-97 Unemployment up from 1,077,000 in May 1979 to 1,620,000 in May 1997, with a peak of 3,300,000 in 1986.

And that’s the substance of Dale’s argument.  Technically he may be correct (save the lack of data for 1924 and comparative data for 1945), but it is utterly meaningless because since the war unemployment grew fairly steadily under both parties from a very low post-war base, and the pre-war period is largely dominated by the Wall Street crash and an inadequate policy response in a pre-Keynes era.

Since the war the two main periods of Conservative government have been marked by growing unemployment overall, and unemployment grew massively and remained high for years after what was a milder recession than the 2008-09 one.  Along the way major de-industrialisation took place and consequent long-term unemployment patterns were established. 

The only time unemployment went down under the Tories post-war, it did so from a very low base in the first place, and by less than 200,000. 

This is massively outweighed by the millions of extra people on the dole, quite needlessly and long term, under the subsequent Tory government.

A much better measure of success around unemployment is how well governments have been at getting the rate down after recession.  The tables I set out here tell that story of two poor Conservative responses, and one more effective Labour one. It’s a story Dale and his ilk would prefer not to hear.