Steve Loftus has a useful Critic piece on the way Labour is giving employers more and more reasons to replace humans with AI.
Britain is not ready for the AI revolution
Labour are making it more difficult to employ people even as AI threatens jobs
The future of work is arriving faster than Westminster imagined, and Britain is sleepwalking into a jobs crisis of its own making. While artificial intelligence and humanoid robotics advance rapidly, the Government has chosen this precise moment to make employing humans more expensive than ever before. It’s a policy collision that threatens to accelerate job displacement just when the economy needs breathing room to adapt...
From April 2025, employer National Insurance contributions have jumped from 13.8 per cent to 15 per cent, while the threshold from which employers pay NICs for each employee has dropped from £9,100 to £5,000 per year. This means employers will pay an additional £900 for each employee on median average earnings. Simultaneously, the national living wage has risen by 4 per cent in real terms for 2025, while the Employment Rights Bill promises to further increase the cost and complexity of hiring. The message to British businesses could hardly be clearer: humans are expensive, risky, and getting more so by the month.
The whole piece goes over familiar ground but is well worth reading, because the situation is moving so rapidly and our political class isn't.
Labour are making it more difficult to employ people even as AI threatens jobs
The future of work is arriving faster than Westminster imagined, and Britain is sleepwalking into a jobs crisis of its own making. While artificial intelligence and humanoid robotics advance rapidly, the Government has chosen this precise moment to make employing humans more expensive than ever before. It’s a policy collision that threatens to accelerate job displacement just when the economy needs breathing room to adapt...
From April 2025, employer National Insurance contributions have jumped from 13.8 per cent to 15 per cent, while the threshold from which employers pay NICs for each employee has dropped from £9,100 to £5,000 per year. This means employers will pay an additional £900 for each employee on median average earnings. Simultaneously, the national living wage has risen by 4 per cent in real terms for 2025, while the Employment Rights Bill promises to further increase the cost and complexity of hiring. The message to British businesses could hardly be clearer: humans are expensive, risky, and getting more so by the month.
The whole piece goes over familiar ground but is well worth reading, because the situation is moving so rapidly and our political class isn't.
Steve Loftus describes it as 'a perfect storm of policy incoherence' and he is obviously right, as if this is the real tipping point - political policy incoherence has suddenly accelerated.
The solutions are neither simple nor painless, but they exist. Instead, we’re witnessing a perfect storm of policy incoherence. At the moment when technological change demands maximum flexibility and support for human employment, the Government has chosen to make hiring more expensive, firing more difficult, and automation more attractive. The result will be a jobs crisis that seems to have appeared overnight but was actually telegraphed years in advance.
The solutions are neither simple nor painless, but they exist. Instead, we’re witnessing a perfect storm of policy incoherence. At the moment when technological change demands maximum flexibility and support for human employment, the Government has chosen to make hiring more expensive, firing more difficult, and automation more attractive. The result will be a jobs crisis that seems to have appeared overnight but was actually telegraphed years in advance.
7 comments:
The issue now is the old one ... are they incompetent and oblivious ... or are they following a policy script?
Dear Sir Chocolate Teapot, KC, PM.
The English football fans' assessment of your performance is spot on. Begone!
And hurry up about it.
My thoughts are that Labour assumed their last General Election win gave them authority to rollout their 'soak the rich' ideas as some form of political revenge. Unfortunately their policies were not thought through and have weakened and wavered in the light of reality.
Their religious supporters are splitting off. The LBQTBBQ are no longer the poor victimised souls. The very rich are leaving the country. Extra taxes are supressing investment and employment, and Net Zero is looking very silly indeed. The shallowness of their policies has been revealed, and now they do not know what to do.
During my life I have made many mistakes. The small ones,( that plate is hot ,next time use oven gloves),, teach you to be more careful. The big life changing ones, come as a result of not carefully considering all aspects of the problem.
It seems to me that none of the political giants infesting the corridors of power whether in Westminster or your local Council offices have any concept of consequences and how much they may impact on the lives of those they are supposed to be serving. Ed Moribund and his pursuit of Net Zero is a classic example.
James - incompetent, insanely ambitious script-followers I reckon.
dearieme - they are hard on losers, good at spotting them too.
DJ - that's it, they do not know what to do. Ambitious mediocrities without a decent guru and they wouldn't recognise one anyway. It's as poor as it looks, possibly worse.
John - I agree, they don't understand how consequences will ignore their superficial notions and threadbare ideologies. They clearly don't understand how to make life easier for themselves without resorting to lies.
Perhaps Newton's Third Law of Motion, and
"For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction",
with an added codicil of
"Remember that this reaction may not be the one you expect", should be prominently displayed in the offices of every politician. Possibly under the heading,
"The Law of Unintended Consequences".
Penseivat
Penseivat - good idea, they ought to know about The Law of Unintended Consequences because it affects all political schemes in one way or another. They must assume they can lie their way through it all.
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