" these "zero hours contracts" have been a by product of EU policy"

Rubbish. Zero-hours contracts took off big-time only under the 2010 Cameron regime, rising from near-zilch to almost a million in five years. As did fake apprenticeships that pay less than half of the minimum wage, £2.79 per hour last I heard. As did the explosion of "self-employment," basically a ploy to get employees off the backs of employers so that they wouldn't have to pay NI and pension contributions for them and so that the poor sods were kept off the unemployment register. And we won't even mention the hundreds of thousands on temporary, seasonal or part-time contracts that don't pay enough to live on. This is what the bloody Tories always do. Anything to keep the numbers down on the headline unemployment register. Ally that with making it next to impossible to get Jobseekers, and we get the monthly crowing about how there are "more people in jobs than ever before." In the past they did it by putting two and a half million people, mostly thrown out of their jobs by Thatcherite revenge, on "incapacity benefit" instead of doing the honest thing and calling them what they actually were, unemployed. Well tell me this then: how come productivity in this country so stubbornly flatlines year after year, and how come we have such a massive trade deficit? Tory Britain is a shaky edifice constructed entirely on a bunch of lies, but my, don't they look so good?