DOWN again goes the unemployment rate - but if, with it, the feel-good factor goes up, then it is at a barely-perceptible creep.

Why is that, when so many other apparently-positive influences on our sense of well-being are also in place?

Negative equity, the curse of the Nineties is on the wane. House prices are rising and homes are selling once again. Mortgages are at their cheapest since the Sixties.

One component in this paradox which must frustrate the government enormously is that good news on the jobs front, even as an established trend, has a tough psychological barrier to penetrate.

To begin with, there is much cynicism about the falling joblessness figures. People know they are much manipulated. Ask, for instance, the numerous families with jobless school-leavers in them who don't count as being unemployed because they are on training schemes that do not equate with the prospects of a real job eventually.

Ask, too, the legions of people in part-time work, many of whom have been forced into it, or those in temporary employment, which Labour claims today has risen by 50 per cent since the last election.

Do they feel they have real, secure jobs?

And of those in "real" work, there are many who have been close to redundancy and have previously experienced it as industries and businesses have downsized and embraced job-reducing new technology to survive.

The experience has unnerved them.

And so the feel-good factor will remain fragile for a long time yet.

For the despite what the employment figures show, the era of the "safe" job, they believe, is over - and who can be content with that?

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