Tagged with Full employment

Full employment must be at the top of Labour’s 2015 agenda

create jobs buttonAusterity continues to ruin economies across Europe; the EU’s unemployment rate has hit a record high of 11%, France has been plunged back into recession and Britain has narrowly avoided a similar fate.

Even Germany’s economy only grew by 0.1% in the last quarter. 

Despite the OECD’s recent downgrade of its growth forecast for the UK economy this year and next,Osborne is ploughing ahead with a new tranche of £11.5 billion spending cuts. It is becoming increasingly clear that by 2015, Tory austerity will have delivered a flatling economy for five years. Continue reading →

On “tough decisions” (aka “austerity”)

Last week’s YouGov poll, commissioned and published by Progress, showed that, while Labour was accepted as the “nice” party, the Tories were seen as more ready to take the “tough” decisions.  The result was interpreted as an endorsement of the need for such “tough” decisions and therefore as bad news for Ed Miliband and an implicit warning to Labour that their chances of election victory might depend on at least matching the Tories in the willingness to inflict pain as the price of economic recovery. Continue reading →