The Grin Of The Tory Cheshire Cat.

Yesterday the Cameron government was grinning like a collective Cheshire cat when the economic figures suggested that Britain was coming out of recession. However, like that ficticious feline, the grin is the only substantial part of this dire collection of spivs and conmen. The truth is that Britain's economic performance, when the shrinkage of the last two-and-a-half years is taken into account, is doing no better than flatlining. When it comes to pay, the Tories have also been falling over each other to explain why the minimum wage for teenagers is to be frozen yet again. As you might expect it is the usual one of the minimum wage "preventing" companies from employing young people despite the "fact" that business is picking up and, presumably, profits are increasing. Nor does this explain the claim by Cameron at the Tory conference that more than a million people have been recruited by a resurgent private sector. This figure is actually less impressive when the 158,000 who are on Government- sponsored training and employment schemes are taken into account, not to mention the 196,000 workers transferred wholesale from the public to the private sector in the higher education sector or the 300,000 jobs created while Labour was still in power. Cameron's impressive "one million" thus becomes a far less impressive and completely insignificant 346,000 while the loss of 628,000 jobs in the public sector puts it into perspective. "One swallow does not a summer make," the old saying goes any more than a collection of dubious statistics, empty promises and flimsy alibis make a recovery.