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Hello, welcome to Coffee House Shots. I'm James Hill and I'm joined today by the Spectator's economics editor Michael Simmons and Scarlett Maguire, the founder of Merlin's

strategy. Now, first of all, Michael, the big economic news of the day is that unemployment is up

to 5%. Yep, we've had our labour market stats

out and the headline from that, as you say, is unemployment is now at its highest level since

2021. So we're back to being as bad as things were during the pandemic. But not just that. We've got

our numbers from HMRC for payrolled employees, so payroll jobs. And

those are showing to be down 117,000 jobs compared to a year ago. Now, this is not news that

the Chancellor will obviously be wanting two weeks away from her second budget. And it's kind of even worse than that because I think she is squarely

to blame for what's going on here. We've seen a slowdown in hiring over the past year because of

the 25 billion pound hike on employer national insurance. And I think that's starting to sort of

get a bit worse as we lead

into the budget because businesses are obviously already concerned about that as they have been

for the last 12 months, but they're beginning to worry about what the implications for tax and

different things after the budget are as well. We also had wage growth figures today, which showed them growing at a

whopping 6.6% for public sector workers. However, when you look at wage growth overall, although

...