Around the United Kingdom, millions of people will be laughing sardonically today at the news that have reached a 14 year high of 2.44 million unemployed.

Laughing because they know that they aren’t on the proper register themselves but are hidden in the system…on some obscure other benefit or on nothing at all. Most of them will be on long-term sickness benefits, but it boils down to any way to keep them off the official unemployment register.

Today’s Government statistics for the 3 months to June were, as has become traditional, chosen at random from a selection of boxes containing made-up numbers in a gameshow hosted by Noel Edmonds called Job Or No Job?

The box chosen by Lord Mandelson was Box 10 although he denied that there was any significance in that. It contained the number 220,000 which would correspond to 2,50o people a day losing their jobs over those 3 months.

SkyNews says that this news will “put further pressure on the Government to take steps to boost the economy.” It is unclear whether their reporter is thinking of some shallow attention-grabbing headlines which will never be implemented, or a massive fiscal initiative of the sort that dropped us firmly in the crapper in the first place.

We await the news with baited breath (and other oral disorders), as do the estimated 5.4 million who are REALLY unemployed. Maybe they should head off to Eastern Europe to get a job; there are apparently lots of vacancies for barmen and plumbers over there.