Hello, my name's David Rundsenman and this is past, present, future, the History of Ideas

podcast. Today, it's the first episode in a new occasional strand that we're calling now and then with Robert Saunders,

because every now and then we're going to be talking to Robert Saunders about an anniversary,

something that happened this day, this month, this year, in the past,

and what it means for the politics of the present and the future.

Today, the anniversary connects to the history, the idea of unemployment.

And we're going to be talking about the long history of thinking about people in work and

people out of work and the changing understanding of what work means.

Robert, this conversation is inspired, provoked by an anniversary, and the anniversary is from the summer of 1955.

So that's 70 years ago, this month and last month.

That was the lowest recorded unemployment rate in the UK in peacetime. So in war, in the first world war and the second war, and we'll talk a bit about how these things are measured. There are a few months if you look at the historic record. Well, unemployment more or less disappears. I think in October 1916, which is after conscription had come in, unemployment was recorded at being 0.4%, which is effectively zero.

But in peace, the lowest ever recorded unemployment rate was 1%. And that was July, August,

and I think September, 1955. So 70 years ago, July was the lowest

month in terms of the number of people registered. 215,800 people were registered as being

unemployed in July, 1955. At the beginning of Anthony Eden's prime ministership, he inherited, among other things,

an astonishingly low rate of unemployment. And just for comparison, today, the rate is 4.7%.

These things can be measured in so many different ways now, but it's about 1.7 million people,

obviously in a much larger population. The high points in the history of recorded unemployment, and we're going to talk about when it became a way of talking about politics, a number, a figure, a statistic, which goes back to the 19th century.

But the high points are, unsurprisingly, maybe, in the 1930s. January 1933, 23%, is I think the highest

recorded rate in the UK. And that was about 3 million people in a much smaller population.

Devastating levels of unemployment. Numerically, the highest figure of people recorded as being

out of work, again, unsurprisingly, maybe,

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