Conservative Party set out their economic policy

Conservative Party set out their economic policy; Osborne speech SOT - Second, employment growth. Gordon Brown likes to repeat the claim that he created three million new jobs. It's made in a way that suggests that a dynamic, private sector-led economy was taking people off unemployment rolls and into work. But if you look more closely, you'll see that's not what happened. Of these jobs, nearly four in ten were created in the public sector and just under two-thirds went to migrant workers from abroad. Indeed, if you look just at people of working-age, all in all, 1997 and 2009, the number of employees born in the UK and employed in the private sector actually fell. Let me say that again: not the proportion, but the number - the number of working age British people employed in the private sector actually fell. That's why you got the economic law-defying situation in which during a decade of economic growth, nearly five million people remained on out-of-work benefits. Third, the balance of our economy. In his first ever Budget as Chancellor in 1997, Gordon Brown cautioned against "the imbalance between strong growth in the consumer and service sector and weak growth in the manufacturing and exporting sector" and said his aim was to put Britain "back on course for a more balanced and more lasting recovery." Yet over the decade that followed, manufacturing declined at its fastest rate ever. Labour dispute this, but here are the figures. Between 1980 and 1997, manufacturing's share of the economy fell by 6.1 percent. Between 1997 and 2009, it fell by 9.3 percent. What's more, almost 1.7 million manufacturing jobs have been lost under this Government and more than a fifth of manufacturing firms have disappeared. Fourth, skills, let's look at the record. The number of people taking Level Three apprenticeships, that is the Advanced Level apprenticeships, the level that even the Government says is the most important, that has fallen. ...