We now have the definitive proof Reeves and Rayner are destroying Britain
In yet another triumph for the self-styled 'party of working people', we learnt today that since the start of the year employment is down, unemployment is up, wage growth has stalled and vacancies are falling. Businesses are responding to the October Budget – specifically the Chancellor's decision to hike Employer NICs by £25 billion – exactly as we knew they would. They're freezing recruitment, cutting hours, and bracing for whatever Labour's bright sparks might inflict on them next.
When the Australian CEO Tim Gurner last year suggested that unemployment should jump 50 per cent to shake employees from their post-Covid, work-wherever-you-please lethargy, he was instantly pilloried. The usual suspects sneered about 'unfettered capitalism' and lambasted Gurner's personal wealth. But he had a point. Here in Britain, productivity dropped 0.7 per cent in the last three months of 2024. In the public sector (annual staff bill: £270 billion), it remains well below pre-Covid levels.
Too many employees now seem to believe their boss should work for them, not the other way around. Vested interests appear to view the expectation that people show up and do their jobs as akin to modern slavery. Members of the PCS union, which represents civil servants, have voted to strike over the requirement they be in the office 60 per cent of the time. Staff at HM Land Registry began indefinite action this week on similar grounds.
The organisation may vary but the refrain is always the same: inconsiderate employers – in the case of civil servants, that's us – are failing to acknowledge their childcare duties, commuting time or 'personal wellbeing'. What's fascinating – though often unnoticed – is that the more employers try to boost employee happiness, the more dissatisfied those workers seem to be. We have more 'rights' than ever before, yet a Gallup study has revealed we're more angry, and more sad, than virtually any other workers in the developed world.
Can anyone honestly say they are happier in the knowledge that sending a fellow worker a birthday card could now constitute 'harassment'? Have the watertight procedures implemented by armies of HR staff to protect employees against 'injury to feelings' made us more content, or more atomised?
Rather than address these issues, Labour are doubling down. Egged on by unions, they've embarked on a moral crusade against an imaginary foe, believing their cause so righteous that it cannot possibly have negative effects. Consider the speech our Attorney General Lord Hermer – a near household name after he was embroiled in a hypocrisy row – delivered last Friday. In the manner of a parent patiently talking down to a petulant child, he intoned that the 'right to security is a fundamental human right, recognised in all international treaties' – as though hybrid working was what world leaders had in mind when they signed up to those agreements.
In any case, the 'right to security' is a category error: this Government can no more provide it in the workplace than they can provide sunny weather for Keir Starmer's birthday party. Yet still Angela Rayner's Employment Rights Bill – currently over 50,000 words long and still growing – is making its way through Parliament. Labour contend that more worker entitlements will be good news for business, with more productive, committed workers. There is precious little evidence to support such claims. It's far more likely to further reduce the incentive to hire.
We don't have 'unfettered capitalism', we have the phoney variety, in which individuals do their best to succeed and politicians do all they can to tie their hands. But where, exactly, do Reeves, Rayner and the rest of the gang think all this will end? In 1984, the UK unemployment rate peaked at almost 12 per cent. The social and political fallout was huge. Bustling communities grew quiet, factory gates locked, the workless felt stripped of purpose. We're not back in the 1980s yet, but the idea Labour will deliver on their promise of 80 per cent employment by 2029 is looking increasingly ridiculous.
There are already a mind-boggling 9.25 million economically inactive people, with a further 1.75 million who are unemployed – against a working age population of 43 million. We need more people in work than getting out of it.
Then again, nothing would erode the trust voters begrudgingly put in Labour last year more quickly than a jobs downturn. Nothing would dislodge Starmer, and bring Britain to its senses, more quickly than a surge in unemployment. A shock might do us all some good in the long run.
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