Chris Carter is a 2nd Year Politics Student and Labour Councillor for Loughborough Ashby. His regular column for Label Magazine will be republished Online once a fortnight.
In today’s economic climate, a new year means new struggles and a bleak future. After the release of new unemployment figures, we once again see an ailing economy administrated over by a failing coalition government.
Unemployment has reached a mind-boggling number – 2.68 million. Yes that’s right, very near the total population of Wales is unemployed across the whole of Britain, with economists now predicting by the end of year this could very easily rise to three million (the actual population of Wales).
67,000 public sector jobs were lost in the last quarter, with only 5,000 private sector jobs actually being created. You don’t need to be an economist to work out just how terrible that ratio of employment to unemployment is.
When a rising number of people are approaching the dole queues, the number of claimants for unemployment benefit will begin to rise. As these people are unemployed and won’t be paying tax, government expenditure will rise and so, therefore will the deficit.
Yet without serious government intervention to prevent unemployment from rising, such as retraining for new private sector jobs, in order to rebalance the British economy, we could be paying far more money in the form of unemployment benefit that could otherwise be avoided.
Without considering pre-emptive measures to keep unemployment, and thus the deficit, down, Britain could simply end up as it was in the 1980’s, a slow moving economy, a depressed population and a spiralling deficit.
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