The poster that won the 1979 general election was a fake. The “Labour isn’t working” dole queue was ac tually composed of 20 fully employed Hendon Conservatives, photo graphed by Saatchi & Saatchi. But there was nothing synthetic about the impact that the poster had on the Labour government of James Callaghan. Never again, Labour resolved, could the party afford to go to the country when the country was out of work. Yet that is what Gordon Brown risks doing, if you believe the spin about him delaying the next general election until 2010.
This was a year of financial panic as oil prices spiked, banks collapsed and stock markets tumbled. But it is likely that 2009 will be the year of the dole. Unemployment, already higher than at any time since Labour came to office in 1997, is expected to climb to almost three million by 2010, according to the Confederation of British Industry. The turnaround in the UK employment market has been astonishing. The pace of job losses, led by the shake-out in the banking sector, has astounded analysts: the Centre for Economic and Business Research (CEBR) has forecast that 300,000 private-sector jobs will have been lost in the six months to the end of this year alone. The CBI’s forecast, made only a few days ago, is almost certainly an underestimate, because it is based on Britain’s GDP declining by 1.7 per cent in 2009. The Bank of England is now talking about the economy shrinking by 2 per cent next year, as Britain enters the worst recession since the 1980s. Capital Economics has forecast that unemployment will peak at 3.3 million in 2010.
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