The Telegraph has reported this morning that:
Labour is struggling to get people off benefits and back into work after the number of welfare claimants securing employment fell to a seven-year low.
Just one in 14 people (6.9pc) on benefits moved from welfare into the workforce each month on average from January to September in 2025, according to official statistics. This is the lowest level since 2019.
It really is time the Reform-backing, Labour-bashing Telegraph understood a few basic things about the world out there. Let me list a few:
- Neoliberalism is all about reducing employment prospects.
- The whole goal of achieving higher productivity is based on succeeding at this.
- AI is primarily being developed to help businesses get rid of people.
- We know they are getting rid of people because of AI, and at higher rates in the UK than in other countries.
- Almost no funding is being provided to help unemployed people and those on benefits acquire new skills to navigate a post-AI world.
- As we all know, this is especially true for young people, trained by an education system that never saw this coming and which went out of its way to equip them with rote learning when critical thinking skills were required.
Then let me note:
- The government backs all these plans because it is deeply "pro-business", as the Telegraph would wish, but does not acknowledge.
- The failure to find work for people is the inevitable consequence of all this.
So then let me ask the obvious question:
- Where does the Telegraph think jobs are going to come from in an economy where all the goals, whether of profit maximisation, productivity gains, AI adoption, and market appeasement, make it clear that none are going to be forthcoming?
- What do they want to do for those left with the misfortune of unemployment as a result of those deliberate policies that they enforce?
I would be interested to know their answers.
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Does the Telegraph employ anyone for their ability in critical thinking? Dream on.
🙂
I took out a digital subscription to the Telegraph during the first covid lockdown to see what the other side were thinking. My initial suspicions were confirmed; they didn’t then and they still don’t.
under the same circumstance I learned that the same applies to many who comment under articles in the FT.
No wonder things are they way they are, if those who are supposed to lead think(?) in such a fashion.
I have subs to both
I need to know what they are saying.
Their unwritten expectation, is probably some rehash of the Victorian workhouses. But no doubt with a sanitized branding, e.g. “Family redeployment centres”.
And how do these businesses expect to get customers with money to spend, if those customers are their current workers they have just made unemployed for a robot…
Let’s say Musk succeeds with his dreams of Optimus (his humanoid robot), and it can physically do everything a human can, but for more hours a day with no fatigue and a license cost less than a salary. With no one working, who will have the money to buy things the robots make? Is this how neocapitalism will eat itsef?
Henry Ford understood that unless he paid his factory workers a decent enough salary to be able to afford the cars they were making, he would not have a business. It is not rocket science is it Mr Musk!
This article has an interesting observation in that the real economy is tanking due to many more things than just AI but AI is being used as an excuse because it makes management look like innovators to their investors:
https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/01/29/the-job-losses-are-real-but-the-ai-excuse-is-fake/
Accepted. It’s not just AI. We might be screwed by neoliberal logic anyway. But AI is not helping, and just continues the trend.
There is an obvious huge investment opportunity for any firm offering expensive consultancy services to organisations suffering AI-induced skills shortages.
For a freebie introductory offer you get an AI Based virtual consultant. After 30 seconds this expires. The AI Consultant will offer one recommendation – a human consultant who, for a humungous fee, will “write” an expensive report. An actual face to face visit with a long powerpoint presentation, and a Ted-type motivational talk will be available for an extra fee by MSTeams Link (subject to connectivity constraints).
Consultants will be certified by the newly established Royal Academy of Chartered Rip-Off Merchants (RACROM).
This is GROWTH!! 😉
🙂
It’s very strange. Labour simultaneously says it wants to get people off disability/health-related social security and into work, but it seems to have little ability to get the 1.6M people currently on job-seekers’ allowance into work in an economy where there are at any time only about 0.8M vacancies. So what are people rejoining the work-economy from PIP/Health-related UC going to do?
In addition to that, there are estimates – which do vary – that AI could dispense with at least 1.5M jobs in the UK. 1.5M is the lowest number out there, but some estimates have an extraordinary 5-6M jobs disappearing. Without wishing to pigeonhole people with disabilities, one might imagine the jobs to go are going to be the routine, white-collar rols which demand the least physical effort in the economy. Yet the government is rushing headlong into backing AI without plans for its regulation, or mitigation of its effects on the economy which – presumably – it takes to be beneficial. It makes little sense.
In addition to that, there seems little appreciation that the government’s longed-for economic growth appears very difficult to find. Perhaps we – in the West – really are in what some economists are calling a “post-growth world”. But where is the philosophical discussion as to what the very concept of work might come to mean in such a world? One looks in vain for it from the current government, who prefer instead rather vacuous slogans such as Get Britain Working, as if work was simply a puzzle waiting to be solved or a workforce was something to be unleashed. Most DWP benefits are claimed by those already in work. Timms’ intentions seem at least to be less brutish than last-year’s attempted PIP reform (read:cuts), which is something at least, but there’s very little depth there. We shall see what happens.
So much of work has become hostile to its employees, Torygraph reflects this.
Recent example people working flat out in rush times in a well known artisan bakery, then put on part time schedules when not,
As an employee you can’t live like this, all costs remain constant, not keeping up results in homelessness.