Unemployment has risen as rapidly in the current recession as in the downturn of the early 1980s, and faster than in the slowdown of the early 1990s, official data published on Thursday revealed.
The unemployment rate has risen by 1.3 percentage points to 7.1 per cent since the third quarter of 2008, the period during which national output began to contract, according to the Office for National Statistics. That rate is roughly equal to that seen in the early 1980s.
