To someone of my generation, there's a curiosity about politics today - that the Tories are not making more of the fact that unemployment is remarkably low.

Two facts make this especially strange.

One is that the government has bugger all else to celebrate. As Henry Hill, a Tory sympathizer, says "the Government's list of achievements is thin." NHS waiting lists are at a record high; real wages have stagnated for 15 years; shit is pouring into our rivers and seas; housing is unaffordable and sometimes uninhabitable; record numbers of people are dependent on food banks; and our poorest citizens are becoming poorer than those of Slovenia or Poland. Given this litany of abject shame, why not highlight the one area where the UK is doing well?

And near-full employment is indeed something to celebrate. Joblessness causes misery and crime (pdf), and can leave lifelong financial and emotional scars. As David Bell and David Blanchflower wrote (pdf):

Increases in the unemployment rate lower the happiness of everyone, not just the unemployed...Unemployment increases susceptibility to malnutrition, illness, mental stress, and loss of self-esteem, leading to depression.

Which was why, for so long, full employment was considered the prime goal of governments. Back when policy-making was influenced by men of intellect William Beveridge wrote (pdf) that being without work was a "personal catastrophe." "Idleness even on an income corrupts; the feeling of not being wanted demoralizes."

This isn't to say that one of Beveridge's "five giants" - idleness - is completely slain. Although the official unemployment rate is close to its lowest level since 1974 - a remarkable achievement given the nasty terms of trade shock that is high gas prices - there are still almost 1.8 million people out of the labour force who would like a job.

Nevertheless, the total out of work, at just under three million, is near a multi-decade low, and lower than anything reached under the New Labour government - although there are still more people under-employed now than there were for much of the 1997-2010 period.

Of course, it's not at all clear how far this is due to actual government policy. But there's no reason why this should stop the Tories claiming credit for it. A party that blamed Labour for the global financial crisis doesn't scruple about attributing economic outcomes.

Hence my puzzle: why are the Tories so quiet about this?

It could be that their silence is another symptom of their intellectual decline: they have lost the ability to think about economics. But I think something else might also be at work.

Of course, there would be an irony in the party of Thatcher - who denied that governments should have full employment as an objective - celebrating our proximity to its achievement. But the Tories have repudiated Thatcherism in other ways - in leaving the single market; in having the highest tax burden in 70 years; and in having a Prime Minister who wanted to "fuck business". So why not break with her in another way?

You might think it's because there is in fact little to celebrate. Many of the jobs created are low-productivity, low-paid and insecure ones.

In theory, however, full employment should be the solution to this problem.

For one thing, it should boost productivity as companies seek to replace scarce labour. Beveridge applauded "the stimulus to technical advance that is given by shortage of labour":

Where men are few, machines are used to save men for what men alone can do. Where labour is cheap it is often wasted in brainless, unassisted toil.

And for another, a sellers' market for labour-power should increase workers' bargaining power and hence, eventually, real wages.

Which brings us to the issue. There's little sign of either of these mechanisms working right now. The volume of business investment is still lower than it was in 2016. And real wages have actually fallen 2.1 per cent in the last 12 months.

This raises two dangers, one for all of us and one for the right.

The danger for all of us is perhaps that decades of abundant labour has caused bosses to lose the ability to replace labour with capital or to improve efficiency by any means other than brute coercion. If so, then it will be even harder than we think to raise productivity growth.

The danger for the Tories, though, is that workers won't always remain quiescent. We see their fear not only in their hostility to striking workers but also in Huw Pill's assertion that workers "need to accept" that they are worse off and stop bidding up wages*. What Beveridge saw as a benefit of full employment is for them a threat. As Kalecki famously wrote (pdf):

It is true that profits would be higher under a regime of full employment than they are on the average under laisser-faire; and even the rise in wage rates resulting from the stronger bargaining power of the workers is less likely to reduce profits than to increase prices, and thus affects adversely only the rentier interests. But "discipline in the factories" and "political stability" are more appreciated by the business leaders than profits. Their class instinct tells them that lasting full employment is unsound from their point of view and that unemployment is an integral part of the " normal " capitalist system.

Yes, unemployment poses challenges for the left. But it's a bigger problem for the right.

* Pedants might point out that Pill is a Bank of England economist and not a Tory. But as Arnaud Amalric said: "Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius."