Official Government figures tell us there are some 1.8 million adults in Britain classified as “unemployed” — just over five per cent of the working-age population. In historical terms that does not sound too bad. Many of us can still remember the grim days through much of the 1980s and 1990s when the dole queue stretched to three million and reggae band UB40 sang about the “one in 10” out of work in the UK.
But that headline unemployment figure never told the whole story. Now it is arguably more misleading than ever.
