Today's major news is the shock increase in unemployment, despite the best efforts of the Prime Minister to divert our attention from this by announcing a date when our armed forces will leave Iraq. The number of people out of work rose by 137,000 to 1.83 million in the 3 months to October. These figures will have surprised none of us who have been talking to businesses over recent weeks. But it seems that they have come as a great surprise to the Government. I listened to Government Minister, Tony McNulty on Newsnight tonight. For much of the time, he didn't seem to know what he was talking about - and not for the first time..
Mr McNulty said that he'd been expecting an increase of around 35,000 to 50,00. Then he was asked why the Government has announced that it intends to raise taxes on business, which is where new jobs will eventually come from. His answer was so meaningless that I cannot remember it. He also told us that the Government is going to look at all those people on Incapacity Benefit, and force around one million of them to find a job. He didn't tell us where these jobs were coming from - because it was obvious Mr McNulty had no idea. However he was very keen to make political points against the Conservatives. Mr McNulty has a reputation for being very good at this.
And then we had a businessman on to ask questions of him. What he wanted was for people from a programme called Dragon's Den and himself to be asked to guide the Government. He also wanted the Conservatives to abandon opposition and give uncritical support to the Government. In particular there should be an end to bickering. All this was supposed to inform viewers of what today's figures mean. Ah well.
6 comments:
All this worry about the economy - LISTEN UP, I have some good news
... and some bad news
.... very bad news, actually ...
too awful to contemplate
... but it's Christmas ...
This dark matter that Glyn alludes to has got me thinking.
Scientists say (say a lot of things actually), but some scientists say there's a lot of dark matter that's missing in the universe - what they mean is that it is not missing in the true sense, but that we haven't seen it. So what they mean is that there is dark matter missing from the known universe (i.e. the bit that we know). Since we don't know much of the universe this isn't saying very much.
But there is a postulation by a Welsh scientist who has a theory about where the dark matter 'all is'. He says if you take a quantity of known matter ('stuff' that we can see) and for sake of argument we call it white matter. Now, for every bit of white matter there is supposed to be a bit of dark matter.
But what no one has worked out is that if you take half a bowl of white matter and combined it with half a bowl of dark matter. Allow to settle for about 30 minutes, then pop it in the microwave for 5 minutes, and then mix it with a food mixer and "Bob's your Uncle", well not quite, but what you have is a bowl full of grey matter.
What to do with this grey matter?
Well God thought put it into a box and call it grey matter. Since there is so much white and dark matter in God's universe (which is infinitely larger than man's universe - i.e., 'the known universe'), there's buckets of grey matter to go round. So let's put some in craniums and call them Mankind. Put just a tad bit inside things that crawl on the ground, cockroaches ... 'yes, that's it', and put even less inside large heads, and call them DJs.
Serious as serious can be. Where are we going? What's our plan of attack? Do we have an actionable destination?
So man unanswered questions.
But what I do know, for sure, is that jobs are a major issue and for Wales high GVA jobs (more accurately, lack thereof) have been a major issue for some time now.
Status Quo put it like this:
Is there a better way
Is there a better way
Is there a better way ahead
Or just another day
I heard McNulty being interviewed on the radio, and couldn't understand what he was saying then either. Just a load of waffle.
Most high school kids got to hear a few things about "an Ideal gas". It seems in Mr. McNulty's case he prefers to talk about 'the ideal world' as opposed to the one we live in.
McNulty is in an impossible position. The Government have been trying put the blame for everything on the Americans, but now they want to turn it onto the Conservatives, perhaps because there are plans for an election. Who knows. Anyway, it made him look spiteful and more interested in Partisanship than dealing with the utterly awful consequences of the mess we're in.
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