The bit in the speech that got me is he pledged to bring about full employment. Excuse me, but we haven't had full employment in the UK since the end of WWII have we? And to do that we had to have a war that killed off like 10% of the male working age population. Is he planning something?

Cameron - giving new meaning to class war

It depends what level you assume Frictional Unemployment runs at. But there's been a recent trend to redefine "full employment" as that level beneath which wage pressures force an inflation spiral. So that's two sets of numbers to fiddle with, which should be plenty.

I can't see how they can hope to juggle the requirements of a modern knowledge economy, with a glaring skills shortage that could only be fixed by a time-travelling education secretary, while somehow maintaining full employment, and micromanaging immigration all at once (immigration policy being the proof that Tories don't really believe markets fix everything btw).

Unless the actual plan is to say "look, there must be full employment because X number of businesses have had X number of vacancies, for X number of months." Because that number will grow faster than actual employment will.

I expect that the definition of “full employment” requires us to ask what is meant by the “employment” bit first. I remember when we had the 3 million unemployed under Thatcher, and the definition changed - all of a sudden to be “unemployed” you and to be signing on. I remember that change very well, because the BBC (who was in an antagonise the government mood) always qualified unemployment figures using the phrase “unemployed and claiming benefit”. This was the same flavour of BBC which dubbed Jerry Adams’ voice with an Irish actor.

Now, I can’t remember what the criteria for being unemployed was before this change, but I expect it was taking into account those people who were in some kind of get back to work programme who got an allowance, but, significantly, were not receiving Unemployment Benefit and/or Supplementary Benefit/Income Support while signing on. Technically, those people were unemployed, but if you define being unemployed as those who were only signing on, then they suddenly vanish from the statistics. I certainly remember from my time at the DHSS going through case papers to see if anyone who is signing on could be moved to another form of benefit.

The same will apply today - once you’ve moved your person who is signing onto some kind of training scheme, workfare, or the sanction list, etc., they’ll cease to be counted. So I expect a lot more of this kind of activities from the Job Centres to help keep the numbers down. I wonder what the real figure would be if you put those people back in.