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So the number of people unemployed in Britain has fallen by 7,000, the first fall in this number since May 2008. Wahey! The green shoots of recovery are bursting through and within weeks the economy will be back on a positive trajectory and we can put this depressing couple of years behind us.

Or maybe not. A less superficial reading of today’s employment figures suggests that there are some tell-tell signs that the economic crisis is far from over and is becoming increasingly entrenched. The employment rate (the percentage of the labour force in work) was down 0.1 per cent to 72.4, the lowest since before Labour came to power in 1997. Full time employment fell massively by 113,000, counteracted by a rise in part-time employment of 99,000 to a record high of 7.71 million.

What this tends to reveal is that people are making do with incredibly tough circumstances by going into part-time or self-employed work. In total there were 1.03 million employees and self-employed people working part times because they could not find a full-time job, the highest since records began for this statistic in 1992. This will have a knock on effect as part-time work leaves people will less money to spend on non-essentials.

So when on the weekend Gordon Brown addressed his key-note speech to teachers, taxi driver and plumbers he shouldn’t have stopped there. He should have added to that list the trained lawyer working in a bar, the chemist doing some gardening work and, of course, he should have pointed out that the taxi driver and the plumber were probably self-employed...