Thatcher instituted a culture of cheating apropos of unemployment figures by putting hundreds of thousands of fit people on incapacity benefit as she ravaged our industrial base. Since the start of the coalition, other trickery has included allowing over a million people to become victims of zero-hours contracts, putting tens of thousands of young people on compulsory floor-sweeping and tea-making duties, aka "apprenticeships," on half the minimum wage and forcing millions of people, many of whom struggle to find enough work, to declare themselves "self-employed" with no holiday, sickness or maternity leave and obliged to pay all their own NI contributions. All this, helped along not a little by draconian trade union laws which ensure that the exploitation can go on untrammelled, goes under the horrid and iniquitous euphemism "the flexible labour market."