For now, all UK economic data has to be seen through the prism of the looming EU referendum. It is not a question of whether the figures are good or bad in themselves, but whether they are helpful to camp remain or camp leave.
In the past week, the releases have been in favour of the Brexiteers. Industrial production was up, the trade deficit narrowed and inflation was better than the financial markets had expected. The latest report on the labour market continued the trend.
The news from the Office for National Statistics was not unambiguously good. Employment was up by 55,000 but all bar 5,000 of the increase was due to the hiring of part-time workers. The pace of job creation has slowed over the past year.
Even so, the drop in the unemployment rate from 5.1% to 5% allowed the leave side to castigate George Osborne for his “doom-laden” comments on the state of the economy. The chancellor is in the awkward position of not being able to welcome what, in other circumstances, he would be proclaiming as evidence that his “long-term economic plan” is working.
There is, though, another way in which the leave camp can exploit the labour statistics. The ONS breaks down the increase in employment between UK nationals and non-UK nationals, and this split shows that the latter made up more than half of the increase seen between early 2015 and early 2016.
More specifically, the number of UK nationals working in the UK rose by 185,000 to 28.15 million between January to March 2015 and the same months of 2016, while the number of non-UK nationals increased by 229,000 to 3.34 million.
This pick-up in employment among non-UK nationals is the result of workers arriving from other EU countries. That rose by 224,000 over the past year, while employment for non-UK nationals from outside the EU was little changed.
This continues a trend since David Cameron first came to power at the head of the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition in 2010. Tough immigration controls on people from countries outside the EU has meant the number of non-EU nationals working in the UK has barely changed. Over the same period, employment has been boosted by the arrival of about 1 million non-UK nationals from other EU countries.
In large part, that increase can be attributed to the long-running eurozone crisis, which has meant there have been more job opportunities in Britain than elsewhere in the EU. But as the remain camp has found, convincing people in the less well-off parts of Britain that such an increase is a sign of economic success is mightily difficult.
