The best gift for our jobless young is a return to Europe

These days the principal economic policy obsession is with growth, or the lack of it.

- William Keegan

In years gone by it was with employment, or, rather, unemployment.Last week, the level of unemployment in the UK reached 5%, with joblessness especially prominent among the young.

This is dreadful news. No wonder the Bank of England felt it necessary to lower interest rates. There was once an economist, Frank Paish of the London School of Economics, who was considered a pariah by many members of the profession for advocating that policymakers should aim at an unemployment rate of 2.5% in order to contain inflationary pressures.

Those were the days, the 1950s and 1960s, when policymakers were more confident about controlling, or at least influencing, the economy than they seem to be now.

Which brings us back to the quest for growth, a revival of which is needed if unemployment is to be brought down to a less socially damaging level. Paish’s 2.5% would these days seem not outrageous but highly desirable.