This recession has many victims, but it is in the lengthening lists of ordinary working men and women on the books of job centres and employment agencies that the suffering is most manifest. Their woes are increasing by the hour as mass unemployment returns to Britain, and the consequences are likely to prove far-reaching.rnA few years ago it seemed so different. Memories of the two previous job-shedding recessions, in the early 1980s and the early 1990s, were fading. Unemployment rates had fallen to their lowest since the mid-1970s, thanks to prolonged growth and the newly efficient labour market on which Britain prided itself. In its manifesto for the general election in 2005 the Labour Party pledged full employment in every region by 2010. It did not seem implausible.
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