Rachel Reeves's budget will need to be a feast of financial alchemy

Jobs, opportunity and the ongoing rise in the cost of living – the holy trinity, the intertwining parts of the big conundrum. If one of them is nudged to move in the right direction it means the others will follow, or they are already going there. But to nudge one in the right direction is to resolve the gordian knot. 

Every week, we’re bombarded by new figures. There are around 1.67 million people currently registered as unemployed. At the same time, according to the ONS, there are 728,000 open vacancies. This is a drop in the last year. As the number of unemployed rises, it neatly illustrates the problem.  

We know the challenges. To secure a new job, particularly if you’re entering the labour market for the first time, as a graduate or school leaver, it’s like a psychological Squid Game. Many try, but most fail. That’s assuming they get past the AI HR gatekeepers. The fear of not encountering human filters is a recurring motif from some.

If that wasn’t enough, there are any number of reports insisting young people are all staying at home longer than the previous generation. They’re sponging. It’s their fault. Mostly because THEY’RE SPENDING TOO MUCH ON FANCY MATCHA! Though, if they were, at least there’d be more jobs in coffee shops. 

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The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) is trying to get a hold of the stubborn, embedded unemployment numbers. Last week, work and pensions secretary Pat McFadden announced a “redeployment” of 1,000 specialist Jobcentre staff to help people on long-term sick find “pathways to work”. It’s laudable, but the thorny issue of what work they’re on a pathway to remains.

Meanwhile, the government’s decision to increase employers’ national insurance costs is one of the key issues that businesses insist is keeping the jobs market soft. Incidentally, last week as McFadden was rolling the boulder up the hill, he also took to Instagram to wish Bruce Springsteen a happy birthday. Clearly, he was hoping the Boss could help with matters – ahem…  

The other issue with stats and figures is how they land. Legitimate facts compete with numbers plucked from the air. So, if Nigel Farage claims throwing migrants out of Britain by their hundreds of thousands would save the exchequer £234 billion, regardless of that number being widely discredited, the number still takes hold. It heads into the AI ether, to be regurgitated and reused when Russian bot farms want to undermine something in the UK, gaining primacy on social media.

This also serves to make a lot of people feel that their interests are not looked after because some foreigner is being treated better than them. And so the issue of jobs and opportunity is not resolved, but there is more division and much less trust in those in power. Trust in public life has real-world implications. 

How you fix things well enough to kickstart the jobs market is clearly not obvious. Rachel Reeves’s budget is going to have to be a feast of financial alchemy. I really hope she can deliver. So much is riding on her decisions in November, not least for those matcha-loving young homebirds.  

To deal with trust in the public sphere, there might be a straightforward way. Perhaps a start would be avoiding the AI amalgamation that makes no judgement between truth and lies, being simply a dark binary force needing fed. How about a print magazine – print! – that dives deep into the big issues and works to surface truth AND better life opportunities for those who sell it, or who intersect with the services it delivers in the background.

That magazine also happens to have a very trustworthy online news service, fighting for those for whom the system frequently forgets or spits out. 

Paul McNamee is editor of the Big Issue. Read more of his columns here. Follow him on X.

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