ABSTRACT
UK unemployment reached a cyclical peak in winter 1992/3, and in the ensuing months the issue moved sharply up the political agenda, with John Smith, then leader of the Labour Party, committing the party when in government to a return to full employment – ableit as a quid pro quo to the trade unions for their support for his OMOV (one member, one vote) reform of party democracy. During the course of 1994, unemployment remained at the forefront of political debate, partly through the efforts of John Prescott who, both as Opposition employment spokesperson and during his campaign for the Labour Party leadership, articulated widespread public disquiet about the UK’s headline unemployment count: the official claimant count (CC) of those unemployed and receiving unemployment-related benefit. 1 Public confidence had been undermined by the frequent changes – totalling 35 to date, virtually all serving to reduce the count – arising from alterations/reductions in eligibility for benefit as well as technical statistical changes. Prescott quite courageously, given the strength of official disapproval, insisted that unemployment, properly measured, was at least one million higher than the CC, which stood at that time at just below three million. He thereby endorsed the long-held position of the Unemployment Unit, 2 who have argued that unemployment as measured on the previous ‘registrant’ basis, 3 would have been one million higher (see also Gregg 1994), as well as the position of other researchers (Wells 1995a, 1995b) who pointed to the one million identified by the household Labour Force Survey as being unemployed (according to the ‘search’ and ‘availability’ criteria used by the ILO/OECD) but who were not claiming benefit.
