In responding to the release today of the latest set of labour market statistics for Scotland, Michael Moore, Secretary of State for Scotland said:

"The further fall in Scottish unemployment is encouraging and another step towards getting our economy back on track. It follows a similar fall last month [my emphasis] and is a positive sign that people are continuing to find work. That is good news for people and families across the country”.

Oh dear, this really is a bit naughty Michael.

Today’s statistics refer to the period January – March 2012 and confirm that ILO unemployment stood at 221,000 over this period. This is indeed a fall of 10,000 from the 231,000 total for the three months October – December 2011. But does it really follow ‘a similar fall last month’?

The last set of statistics for ILO unemployment in Scotland, published on 18 April and covering the period December – February, confirmed a drop of 12,000 on the September – October figure of 231,000. Therefore, Mr Moore is arguing that today’s fall of 10,000 is ‘similar’ to the fall of 12,000 reported last month. This is highly disingenuous to say the least. If we had witnessed 'similar falls' over the past two months then unemployment might reasonably have been assumed to have fallen by around 20,000, no?

Let’s have a look at the figures for ILO unemployment in Scotland reported over the last 5 months:

September – November 231,000

October – December 231,000

November – January 234,000

December – February 219,000 (a fall of 12,000 on Sept - Nov 2011)

January – March 2012 221,000 (a fall of 10,000 on Oct – Dec 2011)

Mr Moore is hoping that his audience doesn’t know that:

1) The ILO headline figure is an average for a rolling 3 month time period. The headline change (the 10,000 drop announced today) is the change since the previous non-overlapping 3 month period (i.e. for today's purposes this means the Oct - Dec 2011 period);

2) There is a significant crossover between the figures published today (for Jan-Mar) and the April release (for Dec- Feb); and,

3) That therefore today’s figures suggest a minor weakening not a strengthening of the labour market over the most recent period under report - on average, more people were unemployed between Jan - Mar (221,000) than between Dec - Feb (219,000).

The Scottish Government also responded to today’s figures with what I believe to be an overly optimistic assessment of current trends. No reference was made to:

Employment growth being driven by part-time work and self-employment as full-time jobs continue to fall (assuming Scotland is roughly following UK trend – we don’t have up to date figures for Scotland);

the rapid increase in involuntary part-time work (same caveat applies); and,

the ongoing decline in real wages.

Nevertheless, the Scottish Government did not repeat the Scotland Office’s erroneous interpretation of the ILO stats. And given the fall in unemployment was attributable only to a decline in male unemployment (from 126,000 to 116,000) – female unemployment was static (at 105,000) – it was good to see Mr Swinney restate the Scottish Government’s commitment to doing all it can to tackle youth and women’s unemployment. Unfortunately, in our current economic circumstances, there is little more the Scottish government can do to reduce either.

It is rare that the substantial amount of information contained in the monthly ONS labour market release for Scotland is uniformly positive or negative. Statistics can usually be cherry picked to tell narratives that are at odds with the totality of the evidence. Labour market releases are therefore something of a politician's dream. But Mr Moore’s intervention today was just misleading – plain and simple.

Postcript Just after drafting this earlier I heard a BBC Newsdrive presenter refer to 'the second consecutive quarterly fall in unemployment'. This is also plain wrong. As the figures above show, there has not been two consecutive quarters of falling unemployment.