But the shift is also a function of increases in productivity in manufacturing. One of the huge increases in employment has been in call centres. Ten years ago a large manufacturing company might have had its own call centre sorting out queries about its products; now it would probably outsource that. (If there were no job losses it would not be possible to staff the expanding industries.)It is also partly the result of the unions, which can still command headlines by warning of redundancies. That is partly the result of the way the media, particularly the broadcast media, report job losses as some kind of disaster, whereas they are a necessary and inevitable part of a vibrant economy. To anyone reading the reports of factory closures and job losses this huge growth in employment will seem a bit odd.

Without trying to downplay the efforts of the Government, strong overall job growth will, it seems, suck in the long-term jobless as well as workers in transition from one type of employment to another. This pattern seems almost independent of political change; while the present government has sought to tackle this problem, the downward trend was well established beforehand. The big change over the past decade has been the fall in the size of this group (middle graph). Add in the people in the cash economy and the total would surely be higher.One of the great social advances that has come from this strong job market has been the decline in the ranks of the long-term unemployed. Remember, too, that these are the official statistics for the number of people in work. As you can see from the left-hand graph the growth in jobs has hardly slowed since the world economic downturn began towards the end of 2000. Add in the self-employed and there were, in the August/September period, 27,843,000 people in employment in Britain That is the highest number ever.

We have added nearly a quarter of a million jobs during the past year. Looking at the other side of the picture, at employment, you can see why. For example, in much of the Thames valley unemployment is below 1 per cent. While serious pockets of unemployment remain in large parts of the country, in particular the South-east (the highest unemployment is in London), there is effectively no unemployment. On the old claimant count measure it is now 3.1 per cent, while on the wider labour force survey it is 5.2 per cent.