1 - INTRODUCTION

Summary

The question I asked myself, in 1985, when work on this book began, was whether Britain had to have three million unemployed ‘for ever’. Prior to the mid-1970s, a figure of one million unemployed had been considered by almost everyone as very high, and this view still prevailed at the time of the 1979 General Election, when 1.2 million was the basis of the famous ‘Labour Isn't Working’ electioneering slogan. But, from then on, unemployment rose in every year, going beyond three million in 1985 and, though output was once more growing quite strongly, there seemed little to suggest that unemployment would fall significantly. Medium-term projections by reputable teams of applied economists had unemployment staying at three million to 1990 and beyond. In the event, after a prolonged period during which the cumulation of person-years of unemployment was one and a quarter times that experienced in the 1930s (see Gregg and Worswick, 1988), unemployment fell fast after the end of 1986, and by the end of 1989 had fallen below 1.7 million. However, by the Spring of 1990, all the indications were that it was not going to go much further down, and might well start to rise again. If this should prove to be the case, this bottom turning point will be higher than the peak figure of the 1970s, and more than a million greater than the highest figure encountered before that.