The government is celebrating today as the figures released by the ONS show that unemployment as at its lowest since 1975 or something.
“It’s a really great achievement for conservatism, and you can’t deny the cold facts. And these facts are colder than Iain Duncan Smith’s social policies!” said Conservative Minister for Fiddling Figures May Kittup, “We’ve managed to completely remove the vast majority of 16-18 year olds by reclassifying shitty apprentice schemes as education and causing a large number of the previously unemployed to either live in the woods eating squirrel shit and grass instead of signing on or to just top themselves rather than be constantly tortured by the Job Centre Kommandants.”
Meanwhile Derek Dibley of the CBI said, “I don’t know why nobody thought of getting the unemployed onto zero hours contracts and shit before, it’s flipping genius!”
The timing of the figures being rehashed and released was said by number 10 to be a complete coincidence.
“Oh, is there an election on?” said a Downing Street spokesmunter, “I’d not noticed.”
It’s thought that Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party will be less than pleased as they are planning to abolish zero hours contracts will rather increase the number of people being registered as unemployed.
“When you’ve been bullied into working for next to nothing with no guaranteed hours you might rather resent being told that you’re not unemployed,” said Mr Corbyn, “I haven’t see a lie as big and obvious as these figures since Tony Blair nicked an A level student’s essay and told us it was proof that Iraq were more dangerous than a bag full of rabid badgers on crack.”
The fact that even allowing for the tinkering that you can’t possibly compare figures from the 70s with figures from now has been overlooked although the BBC did at least mention that 1992 was the earliest you could compare to.
“It’s a bit like comparing the distance an M16 fires with a middle ages trebuchet,” said Alan Honest from the Rochdale Community University’s Statistics department, “There’s lies, damn lies and there’s pretty much anything any government ever tells you using statistics.”
