With an election looming that will be fought on the economy, today’s better-than-expected unemployment figures could not have come at a better time for Labour.
The data, which shows the first fall in the number of unemployed for eighteen months, provide Alistair Darling with new ammunition to show voters and the Tories that the Government’s box of bail-out tricks is paying off.
This time last year, when Britain was still in the depths of the worst recession since 1921, some of the City’s gloomier economists reckoned that unemployment would hit 3 million this year. Such forecasts now appear ludicrous.
It does not matter that the real reason unemployment is falling is probably as much to do with foreign workers going home rather than the success of Labour’s jobs policy.
What does matter is that Brown and Darling can go to the ballot box claiming that it was Government intervention which has steered the economy out of the recession, that interest rates will be much lower than 1 per cent (they are currently at 0.5 per cent) and that unemployment is falling.