People often talk as if governments can easily control economic outcomes. Meddling with taxes and regulations can certainly influence GDP, and seismic shifts in the government’s footprint, as seen under Clement Attlee or Margaret Thatcher, can jolt a country’s growth potential. But in a £2.5 trillion economy driven by billions of private transactions and decisions, the interventions of prime ministers and chancellors actually have little bearing on big economic trends.

The Conservatives’ opponents blame them for lacklustre GDP growth since 2010, for example. Certainly, the government could and should have taken greater strides to counter the stagnation. Nevertheless, neither austerity nor Brexit can really explain the size of the productivity slump we’ve experienced post-2008. Other factors more powerful than their new policy decisions were at play.

Consider another example. The Tories have claimed credit for the unemployment rate (3.7 per cent) falling to levels last seen in 1974. This “jobs miracle”, as they once called it, was said to be a vindication of the fiscal policy and welfare reforms that George Osborne and Iain Duncan Smith pioneered. The narrative again was that government drove the outcomes.

Yet there were other forces. Between 2007 and 2020, the share of the population using the internet increased by 20 percentage points, including among the unemployed. Only 8 per cent of us were online in 1997; today it’s 95 per cent.

This trend has transformed the job search. Where once jobseekers dug through classified ads, posted physical CVs to employers, or pounded the streets looking for positions, now they peruse multiple platforms online to find appropriate vacancies. No more anxious waiting for the postman to deliver the company’s verdict; they’re usually notified quickly by email. In cutting the costs of search for businesses and jobseekers, blanket internet coverage affects unemployment.

A plethora of economic research supports this. The latest, a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper on Norway, found that rolling out broadband there in the 2000s both reduced the duration of vacancies (by 9 per cent) and improved jobseekers’ re-employment rates (by 2.4 per cent). With access to the internet, jobseekers found roles which they were better suited to, meaning that they stuck with employers for longer and became unemployed less often. As a result, the economists estimated that the structural rate of unemployment fell by 14 per cent.

The fact that average unemployment rates have fallen across most wealthy countries since the 2000s casts further doubt on the importance of Conservative policies here. OECD-wide unemployment fell from 6.9 per cent in the four years before 2007 to 5.8 per cent in the four before the pandemic (a 16 per cent decline). It fell by slightly more in the United States than here and massively more in Israel and Germany. None of these countries had universal credit or Osborne’s fiscal rules.

Bad government policies can obviously have damaging unemployment consequences. Countries where it is difficult to hire and fire, such as France, have much higher unemployment. The European debt crisis has worsened unemployment in Greece, Spain and Italy. Germany undertook supply side reforms to liberalise its labour market and reduce joblessness. The error, however, is to assume government policies always drive new trends.

Yet we frequently fall into this trap. The issue du jour is the 575,000 extra people in the UK who’ve become economically inactive since the pandemic. These people do not seek work, so flatter the unemployment statistics. And commentators blame the government: “Furlough made people lazy” or “The NHS crisis is driving up hidden sickness” are two common claims.

Perhaps, though, the pandemic made some people reassess their work-life balance, encouraging earlier retirements. Just because something happens on a government’s watch, doesn’t mean it caused it.