Jobs growth: "ConDem fiction" or fact?

In an opinion column for the Mirror this morning, associate editor Kevin Maguire claimed that behind the "jobs miracle" of the current government lay a "giant con".

Behind the two million rise in private sector employment, he said, was a reclassification of what constitutes public and private sector in the statistics - for example, with previous public sector jobs at the Royal Mail now adding to the private sector count.

He's right. But the Office for National Statistics does publish statistics to account for this. From June 2010 to March 2014, the rise was 1.8 million - so just below the government's celebrated two million figure.

He also claimed that two-fifths in of the rise in total employment is "people mainly forced to become self-employed after losing their jobs".

Two-fifths of the rise in the total employment level since last year was made up of the rise in self-employment (337,000 out of 780,000). But, the Office for National Statistics does not produce statistics on the reasons why people become self-employed so we don't know how many did so because they lost their previous job.