From Gordon Brown’s “British jobs for British workers” salvo to Thursday’s revelation in the Financial Times that foreign workers have taken all the net new jobs created in the economy over the past two years, the labour market is fast becoming a key political battleground.

There are no vast armies of jobless on the horizon. In fact, overall unemployment has not increased at all. But employment – typically growing at about 200,000 a year earlier in the decade – is now barely rising.