THE SCALE OF THE PROBLEM

Whereas employment in the United States roughly doubled between 1950 and 1989, employment in Britain stayed much the same. In between, there were ups and downs, the highest figures occurring in 1966 and 1979, and the lowest in 1950–3 and 1983. The story of unemployment was different. The average number of unemployed between 1948 and 1968 was 350,000; in the 1970s it was just short of a million; in the 1980s it was higher in every year than it had been in any year prior to 1979; it exceeded three millions in the middle of the decade and was still 1.7 million at the end. The workforce in employment (which includes, besides employees, the self-employed and HM forces) kept close to the working population until the early 1970s, but thereafter a gap opened up.

The Department of Employment has made projections up to the year 2001 of civilian activity rates for men and women, on the assumption of a constant pressure of demand for labour (roughly speaking, constant unemployment), which imply a small rise in the total labour force of 67,000 a year, most of whom are women, who are expected to make up 45 per cent of the total in 2001. If unemployment were to come down by one million below the level at the end of 1989, which would still leave it twice the average of the years 1948–68, the increase in the labour force would be higher, but still less than the average increase between 1971 and 1989.