Office for Budget Responsibility projections do not add up.

Following on from yesterday's post here about the effect of Osbore's Emergency Budget on employment, the respectworthy Larry Elliot has a piece in today's Grauniad analysing the job prospects for UK plc. This is the essence:

The "politically independent" Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR)  aims to cut 601,000 evil public sector jobs in 5 years, but plans to see the good private sector create 2 million jobs in the same period.

This means that the Cleggeron Government is banking on creating 400,000 jobs per year.

How feasible is that?

In the 1990s, the Tories were able to add 143,000 jobs per year.

In the 13 Labour years, 2,500,000 jobs were created. 800,000 of them were in the demonic public sector, so only 1,700,000 were in the saintly private sector, which means that the private sector job creation rate was 131,000 per year. And that was in a time of the Big Brown Boom.


Larry looks for stimuli in the sectors of finance, housing, retail, business and personal spending, and finds all to be sadly lacking in promise.

The economic wind is thick with straws pointing to a second wave of recession, which The Boy George may have helped to bring it on by casting public sector workers into outer darkness. US consumer confidence is down nearly 10 pts in June. Europe, our main trading partner, is sucking its economic thumb.  The banks are looking like they may be demanding $5.8 trillion more money from the despised public sector.

In short, the "non-political" OBR estimates are nothing but a heap of dingoes' kidneys, a figure plucked from the air to cheer up the politicians.   They'll be lucky to get 100,000 jobs a year, 500,000 in 5 years, which is 100,000 less than the jobs they are about to annihilate with such relish.