The shock rise in UK unemployment in October cannot be dismissed by the usual warnings about not going by one month’s figures. The size of the jump may be exceptionally large, but it marks an accentuation of a trend that has been evident since April. Previously surprise had been expressed at how modest an effect the sluggishness of the economy had had on unemployment. That surprise is rapidly disappearing.

If there is an erratic estimate it is of national output as whole. UK gross domestic product on the latest estimate is said to have risen by 0.5 per cent in the third quarter of 2011. As the Bank of England Inflation Report explains, this quarter was “boosted by the unwinding of various one-off factors”. The Bank interprets business surveys as indicating that output will turn out to have been “broadly flat” in the fourth and final quarter of this year.

Between the peak of the last cycle in the first quarter of 2008 and the bottom of the recession in the second quarter of 2009 national output fell by a cumulative 7 per cent. Since then there has been a very modest and fitful “recovery” that has failed to take us back to the earlier peak.