The Independent: "David Blanchflower: Unravelling puzzle of jobless 'fall' that isn't"

Link to The Independent

"To give my readers a clue what life is like in my neck of the New England woods, our local paper shared the front page between the following two headlines: 'US Sends Elite Forces to Libya' and 'Fire in Hanover, Destroys Sheds, 12 Chickens Perish'. 

"The next day news of the Fed's announcement of QE3 was relegated to a single paragraph on the second page, bottom left.
... ...

"That leads me to the jobs data in the UK, which was published by the Office for National Statistics this week and showed a decline in unemployment of 7,000 and an increase in employment of 236,000 on the quarter. Well actually it didn't. These estimates arise from the bizarre way the ONS reports the jobs data – which compares a three-month average with the next three-month average.

"No other country in the world does it this way, as it covers up the true underlying picture of what is going on. It turns out that figures by single month are available, and I report them in the graph in a comparable way to the US. 

"So according to the ONS, unemployment fell from 2,599,000 to 2,592,000. But quite to the contrary it rose between June and July by 113,000."