…nice kip…

…woah I thought Gordon Brown had ended Boom & Bust…

…I’m going back to bad…

…later guys…

Tim – isn’t your point just a wee bit Panglossian?

And FWIW the average quarterly trend in manufacturing workforce jobs was:

Thatcher 1979-89 -0.7%
Recession 1990-1991 -1.5%
Major 1991-1997 -0.2%
Blair/Brown 1997-2007 -0.9%
Recession 2008-2009 -1.5%

So this far the loss of manufacturing jobs in this Labour recession has occurred at exactly the same rate as it did during the last Conservative one.

In both cases the recession loss was give or take a percentage point running at roughly double the rate of the loss during the previous decade.

However by your logic as Labour shed manufacturing jobs per quarter during the 1997-2007 period at roughly four times the rate that the Tories did during 1991-7 then Blair/Brown must presumably have been vastly better at improving productivity than post-recession Major?

Of course the real reason is that Major and Lamont engineered a complete crash of the pound in their recession – and in such circumstances manufacturing output could hardly fail to expand.

The worry is that by slashing spending and keeping interest rates low Cameron and Osborne will achieve exactly the same effect – but that starting off from such a low base even a big revival in manufacturing could hardly compensate for the catastrophic collapse in public sector output (Giles Wilkes makes a convincing case for this scenario in a new paper called Slash and Grow? published by Centre Forum – possibly LFF should talk to him about doing a guest post?).

Twits. Manufacturing has been shedding jobs for half a century. It’s known as “rising productivity”. You can actually see the point when you state that manufacturing output has been flat for the year.

The interesting number would be how many more job losses in manufacturing have there been than trend?