The complaint that “Britain isn’t working” is a familiar one. It was heard during the 1930s and 1980s when unemployment exceeded three million people, and again during the austere early 2010s when it peaked at 2.7 million.
Today, the situation has superficially improved. Unemployment stands at just 4.4 per cent (1.56 million) – lower than it was throughout the four decades from 1975 to 2015. But as our business editor Will Dunn writes in this week’s cover story, a crisis of joblessness has been replaced by one of worklessness.
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