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Hello and welcome to Coffee How Shots,

the Spectators' Daily Politics Podcast.

I'm Cindy Ewan and I'm joined by Fraser Nelson and James Forsyth.

So Fraser, today we saw some new employment figures.

Can you tell us what they say what the headlines figures are?

This is a great mystery.

We have a shrinking workforce in this country.

There were 50,000 fewer workers over the three months to September.

That's twice the drop that people expected.

The funny thing is that there's a national worker shortage in this country.

One point, two million vacancies.

That's twice as many as they were during the last decade and average.

So at a time where employers are crying out for workers,

we've seen the workforce actually shrink.

We also had figures showing that the number of people

not working because they're long-term sick.

That's now increased by 400,000 since the start of the pandemic.

So that is equivalent to losing a city the size of Manchester

...