Party time for the rich

It is Friday night and all of London is one big party. Upscale restaurants are full and the most trendy are booked weeks ahead. Even the eateries in unfashionable areas such as Euston and King's Cross are fully booked, and judging by the raucous, festive atmosphere, no one in the city has a care in the world.

How can this be when the economy is supposed still to be recovering, and Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of England, has promised that he will hold interest rates low until unemployment is 7 per cent or less? Output is still 3 per cent below 2007-08 levels, and 17 per cent below what would have been expected from historical trends.

The answer is a simple one: life is a party if you have a well-paid job, but no fun if you have no job or one of the increasingly low-paid ones that employers are offering.

Outside London, the party stopped long ago. One long-suffering government employee responsible for the grim job of doling out benefits to the unemployed said: "A few years ago, I used to joke that I would never be out of work because unemployment was rising and we were on the frontline assessing benefits.

"But they are trying to squeeze us too, with threats that we will have to reapply for our jobs every year."

Recession and the unbalanced recovery that has widened the gap between the rich and the poor have been a theme of newspaper and journal arti- cles rich with statistics of how the 0.1 per cent and the 0.01 per cent have collared all the benefits.