FOR a great many years, Jersey took an occasionally complacent pride in having minimal levels of unemployment.

The regular publication of statistics on the subject tended to be an academic formality, combining the recording of a small handful of people out of work with a tacit acknowledgement that they were, for a variety of individual reasons, mainly long-term unemployed with limited prospects of ever finding a job.

The conclusion was that unemployment was something we heard about as a problem in other places, but not here.

The recent economic crisis has changed all that, along with so much else.

The latest monthly figure, published last week, showed 1,250 Islanders out of work, a significant number in itself and 140 up on the previous month’s count.

The public and personal impact of these new stresses is magnified by the smallness of our community, as well as by their unfamiliarity, creating a deeply unwelcome new issue which requires a concerted response by business and government.

Although some signs of economic recovery have been reported, they tend still to be hedged about with warnings of its underlying fragility so, while there is certainly room for hope, there can be no great confidence that higher rates of unemployment are a phenomenon that will quickly pass.

No one can predict how soon, if ever, Jersey will return to the happy position of effectively maintaining full employment. That does not prevent it from being an aspiration towards which various elements of economic planning, from education to immigration, should be tailored.

Important work to that general end is already being done by agencies and organisations such as the Skills Executive, Advance to Work and Highlands College.

The Jersey Enterprise project of the Economic Development department is also a major contributor to future job prospects, although the States still have a long way to go before their creative vision, their unity of purpose and their actions can be said fully to match their fine words about the need for economic diversification.

Meanwhile, the rising unemployment figures will undoubtedly have some bearing on the developing debate on public spending cuts, which can only be achieved through a reduction in the States workforce.

They should have an even greater bearing on the continuing argument over immigration, which is due to reach some kind of landmark with a major debate on the subject some time after the States session resumes.

With 1,250 Islanders already out of work, even the Council of Ministers must surely review their misguided zeal for solving Jersey’s problems by piling in more people.