We have a coalition givernment, not a Conservative or LibDem one, and therefore their policies in government involve compromise. Coalition government is all about compromise, which means it is impossible for both parties to fulfil their manifesto promises. Move on Mr. Blanchflower.

We need a 5 year radical plan for the north - something which labour should have addressed.

I would start with providing a special 5 year TAX-FREE zone for all foreign businesses setting up in the north looking to recruit and employee. This will give the north an obvious and significant tax advantage over the rest of the UK but will help increase private sector employment and is necessary. This should be followed-up with a longer-term lower rate of taxation than the rest of the UK.

We should also accelerate high-speed rail 2 and improve infrastructure projects for the north.

What the north does not need is an increase in government spending of the administrative sort or other types of non-jobs - which will only be a short-term strategy - which was followed by previous administration.

Foreign wars? mmmmmmmmmmm Falkland Islands, Kuwait.

Strange Luddite has never considered VAT as a tax. VAT was introduced in 1973 by Ted Heath, Thatcher's government increased it to 15% and John Major's Government raised it to 17.5% and extended it to Electricity & Gas.

Gordon Brown reduced VAT on Electricity and Gas.

I wish people would stop taxing the truth.

The first thing is to bring Britain back from the abyss. The coalition must confront the bills from previous governments decade of debt, setting out a clear plan to put our public services and welfare state on a sustainable footing for the long term. The new government need to put an end to Labour year's of ever-rising borrowing. So we'll be paying less money to foreign creditors, and have more money to spend improving our country.

Talk about the government's broken promises,eight months in.How about the MPC's abject failure on its SOLE mandate, inflation,over 9 years.You were utterly clueless with the economic data.

If you are correct about demographic change causing the higher unemployment from 2002 onwards that begs two questions:

1) Why did we not experience medium/long-term (e.g. at least 5 years) mass unemployment after the second world war when hundreds of thousands returned home from war?

2) Should we not have reduced or removed the minimum wage so that those young people could be employed at a lower wage? Employment at a lower wage is surely better than unemployment?

So the government are introducing policies which drive up inflation - VAT up for example.

The government's actions are preventing the MPC from achieving their goals of stabilising inflation at 2%.

Mission impossible.

What better excuse will the Tory led government need to scrap the MPC and bring interest rate control back to itself as another of Gordon Brown's bad ideas unwinding?

How the hell was society ‘broken’ by Thatcher? When she came into power, we were in a mess. Inflation was as 27%, unemployment was at a post-War high and we needed IMF help to repay the obscene Government debt accumulated by Labour.

Her policies resulted in a decrease in deflation, which in return led to economic recovery. We unfortunately paid the price of high unemployment, but what alternative did Labour offer? If we’d left a Socialist Government in power, we’d have become a third-world slum.

Thatcher and the Conservatives, for all their faults, saved the country. Labour’s Socialist ideologies might look good on paper, but in reality they’d have driven the UK into the gutter.

Stuart
The country had to rebuild from the devastation from WW2 and move from wartime to peacetime production. And then there was the establishment of the NHS etc. Unemployment in the UK was low for the next twenty years.

There is actually little evidence that the minimum wage has had much of any effect on youth employment. In some work i did it does appear that the influx of a million workers from eastern europe did have an effect.

It isn't so much the level of the wage as how productive workers are for that wage. Many of the workers from Poland were highly qualified, spoke English, were motivated and showed up every day.

Danny Blanchflower

Come on, cuts are over due from1997 to 2010, the public sector payroll grew by 0.9m, or 17%. Now, 0.2m of that comprised the staff of our newly nationalised banks, and arguably we should omit them (on the grounds that it is a "temporary" nationalisation). But even when we do that, the growth in public sector employment still comes to around 13%. So where has this growth been? Well over half of it (excluding the banks) has been in the NHS. Since 1997, the NHS has increased its staff numbers by an astonishing 35% – from 1.2m up to 1.6m. A further 300,000 have joined the education payroll. Education staff have increased from 1.1m up to 1.4m, a rise of 27%.The police – the ones screaming at the coalition. Their payroll increased by a cool 28%, from 230,000 up to nearly 300,000. In fact, the only identified areas where there was a decline over the period were construction – which was largely accounted for by outsourcing (including staff transfers) - and HM Forces. Yes, that's right – the bit of the public services which by common consent has shouldered the biggest burden over the last 13 years with New Labour's endless foreign wars, is one of the few bits that has been cut. So like all business in the good times you expand and in the bad times you contract. You can't keep spending what you no longer have and you can't borrow your way out of debt. So what is the alternative keep borrowing and spending regardless or simply tax the economy to death?

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Very interesting final table. In poorer areas the public sector is paid significantly more than the private sector. When you factor in much longer holidays, much better pensions and benefits it becomes a no-brainer for talented people to work in the public sector in poorer regions, crowding out the private sector who cannot compete in terms of pay and conditions. So the private sector remains weak and the regions only survive due to subsidies from the South-East. Surely it would be much better to raise taxes more locally, so public sector wages and benefits would be lower in poorer regions and allow the private sector to compete.

@Luddite

Still unfamiliar with VAT ? Don't Conservatives pay VAT ?

I don't know why you brought up the issue of Income Tax, I didn't, but nothing surprise me with you.

With record youth unemployment of 951,000 and projected to hit in excess of 1,000,000 ( that is a million Mike555 ), I would say the odds are firmly stacked against " youngsters "

Just for the record, youth unemployment covers those between the ages of 18-24.

Referring to these individuals as
" youngsters " comes across as very condescending.

You could also argue that the quality of Public Sector jobs is better than Private Sector in some areas, in other words the Private sector give us Mac-jobs flipping burgers, stacking shelves in supermarkets. In my chosen profession of IT Security and information Governance (with over ten years experience and a record of getting organisations through ISO certifications) I can earn silly money in the Private Sector between 3and 4 times what I am earning in the Public Sector, but I like living among my family and friends in my community (or big society if you will) and have no desire to move to London.
 
What we really need is for the Private Sector to put it's money where it's mouth is and create regional centres with high skill high quality jobs in the post industrial cities of the North rather than insisting that everything must centre around London and the South East. So while it appears that the public Sector distorts the labour market in the post Thatcher wildness of the North, what is really happening is those who have high skills and a strong love for our home towns move to the public Sector as this is the only real opportunity to advance our careers and stay put. I would think that the government would be happy with this as it makes for stable contented communities with a mix of skills, classes and professions rather than allowing the once (and still) great Victorian cites of the north to deteriorate even further and allow this country to become more divided.

matthew fox
20 January 2011 at 19:47
Foreign wars? mmmmmmmmmmm Falkland Islands, Kuwait.. There's a colossal difference between two just wars and Labour's illegal wars of aggression.
Income tax was brought in to pay for the napoleonic wars no government left or right replied that one, and let's not forget council tax, one of the most unfair taxes of all rocketed under Labour and Mr Brown..

Anand
This of course was not any government's fault it's just demographics. The problem comes when a recession arrives when the young are typically hardest hit and this time around the cohort is huge. It just means governments need to tackle the problem and not walk away from it as this government is doing. The benefit is that you only need to do this temporarily as the numbers of young people starts to fall rapidly over the next decade.

Let me get this straight. youth unemployment has been on an increasing trend since 2003 and peaked around 2009 (from your own graph) and yet its now the Coalitions fault? You are having a laugh mr Blanchflower. Although from your jibe about skiing and the chancellor, its pretty clear everything you say is heavily rose tinted! (and I dont mean optimistic)