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Every edition, dated honestly
The back-run, by the day. Every edition we have published, exactly as it went out. The record the whole publication is built around. Filter by edition, or scan by date.
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Every piece we have published, 484 in all, by date
September 2026
Monday, 21 September 2026 · Issue 071
- Workers are not waiting for AI to happen to them. About one in ten is paying for it out of their own pocket
- What Deloitte measured about workers paying for AI, and what it only estimated
- When a firm buys an AI tool it is a business cost. When its staff buy the same tool, it comes out of taxed pay
- Paying for AI out of your own pocket to do your job? Three things to sort out before the next renewal
Friday, 18 September 2026 · Issue 070
- This paper has spent a month saying nobody measures what AI saves. In the NHS, somebody is
- The NHS has what legal services does not: an independent evaluation of an AI tool, with the method published before the answer
- Before anyone could measure these tools, somebody had to write down what one is
- The measurement my colleagues are celebrating reports in February 2027. The rollout finished long before that
- If a machine takes a task off your desk, three questions about the hour it hands back
Thursday, 17 September 2026 · Issue 069
- Twice we described the job of sitting in London's self-driving cars. Both times we described the wrong one
- Three companies stand behind the driver's seat in the Uber and Wayve cars. None has yet said who employs the person in it
- I quoted a man about sitting in a car that drives itself. He was describing test work, months before the cars were licensed to carry passengers
- The Law Society told us it holds no independent measure of what AI saves solicitors. It now plans research of its own
- Four questions to ask before you take a job that a machine created
Tuesday, 15 September 2026 · Issue 068
- Britain lost 145,000 payrolled jobs this year. Almost exactly that many were people aged 25 to 34.
- Four hundred thousand people moved between age groups on Britain's payroll. The headline reports the 145,000 left over.
- Nobody is being sacked. The door is just opening more slowly, and that is harder to notice
- Why a falling count is not the same as a falling rate
Monday, 14 September 2026 · Issue 067
- We asked eleven organisations who checks the numbers behind AI in law. Nobody has answered.
- Three numbers about AI in law, three companies selling AI to law, and nobody in between
- The bodies helping AI into legal services faster have not said whether anyone is measuring it
- How to check a productivity claim before you believe it
Friday, 11 September 2026 · Issue 066
- Young people in Britain are three times as likely to be out of work as everyone else. That gap has never been wider.
- The gap between young and old in Britain's job market is the widest on record, and the survey that found it has been losing young people
- Four reasons to distrust today's lead, and we printed the best one nine days ago
- How to read a jobs number, using today's as the worked example
Thursday, 10 September 2026 · Issue 065
- We said this number had been repeated four times. We had undercounted
- The same 38,000 jobs have been announced six times in three and a half years. The only figure for what arrived is about 1,500
- The 38,000 does not count drivers. It counts the people who build the thing that replaces them
- A forecast made in 2015 said driverless technology would create 320,000 British jobs by 2030. We are close enough now to check
Wednesday, 9 September 2026 · Issue 064
- We went looking for what a new consultation would take away, and found it had already gone
- The test was whether investors needed it. The thing being measured was employees, and an employee has never been a user of an annual report
- The same schedule lost its employee section in April and gained a supplier section in January. Nobody planned that and it is still what happened
- Everybody who bears the cost of a disclosure gets told the consultation is open. The people it describes are not on the list
Tuesday, 8 September 2026 · Issue 063
- A question was taken off a government form in December, and today we can tell you which one
- The form exists so somebody can help you find other work. In December, the question asking what work you did was taken out
- A British energy company can tell you its customer satisfaction score to the point. It accounts for 1,300 people leaving in one number
- In 2006 a minister stood up in Glasgow to announce 500 call centre jobs arriving, with a grant attached. Nobody stands up for the leaving
Monday, 7 September 2026 · Issue 062
- The third time we have written about these fifteen cars, and the first time we have had a question worth asking
- Everything Britain knows about how often these cars need a human comes from two journalists on their first ride
- A minicab licence cannot describe a car that drives itself, so Britain wrote one that describes the person sitting in it instead
- A month ago I wrote about this job without having spoken to anyone who does it. Somebody had, in February, and I never looked
Friday, 4 September 2026 · Issue 061
- A disclosure, and a correction to a piece you never got to read
- Britain published its own account of not knowing in January. Nine MPs debated the subject in July without one of them mentioning it
- The unit has named the six things it wants to watch in real time. It has also said, in public, that it cannot publish them yet
- I was right on Wednesday and I take no pleasure in it, because the correction we are running today is too kind to us
Thursday, 3 September 2026 · Issue 060
- On Tuesday we said this change arrives without anyone deciding it. Today, the exception
- Sage says its AI saves people over five hours a week. The people who said so are not named, and we cannot find anyone outside the company who has checked
- A select committee told the government three years ago that it was making taxpayers buy software. In April it started, and 864,000 people found out what that meant
- This month HMRC starts signing people up to an obligation without choosing the tool that meets it. The choosing was always the hard part
Wednesday, 2 September 2026 · Issue 059
- The office that counts things for Britain answered the question everyone is shouting about. It published on a Monday in July.
- The survey that could have settled the argument asked 38,637 British businesses a question almost nobody reads
- Adoption trebled in under three years. The number of tools each business actually uses went from 1.4 to 1.6.
- Two official numbers, in the same bulletin, that cannot be put next to each other. The argument is being had as though they can.
Tuesday, 1 September 2026 · Issue 058
- Every story about AI and law was about lawyers. Nobody counted the customers who stopped coming in.
- The claim is that a fifth of British funding rounds now skip the law firm. That number is a forecast somebody made in 2019.
- Britain has taken the routine legal work off solicitors before. Last time it took an Act of Parliament, and everybody knew it was coming.
- Somebody used to sit up straighter when you came in. That was part of what you were paying for.
August 2026
Friday, 28 August 2026 · Issue 057
- Your conveyancer got a machine. You got a bill that is the same and a wait that is longer
- One British service has published its prices for eight years. It is the only place this question can be asked at all
- The saving reached the customer. That is the system working, and this paper has spent the day looking disappointed about it
- What to ask your conveyancer, and what the answer tells you
Thursday, 27 August 2026 · Issue 056
- Seven weeks ago I asked in this slot who gets the dividend. A British company has now published the answer, in audited accounts, and it is not us
- The price BT charges you went down. The price of the pipe into your house went up. Same company, same year, same accounts
- Ofcom has drawn a chart of a bill that only goes down if you move. Twenty eight per cent of us are standing still, and paying seven to nine pounds a month for it
- Four things worth knowing before your broadband bill goes up again in April
Wednesday, 26 August 2026 · Issue 055
- The one emergency power a sacked whistleblower has went from about twenty applications a year to about twenty a month, and the judges have given themselves an hour to read each one
- The tribunal has capped its own reading time at one hour, and told litigants to name their best documents
- A free drafting tool makes it easy to allege twenty things. The test rewards alleging one and proving it
- Claimants are automating the filing and the courts are automating the hearing. Asked to measure the first, the government said it had written a principles document instead
- If you have just been dismissed for speaking up, four things worth knowing before you open a chatbot
Tuesday, 25 August 2026 · Issue 054
- From October your employer must hand you a written statement about joining a union. There is no statement about the machine.
- The law protects you once a machine has decided on its own. Your employer is the one who decides whether it decided on its own.
- Asked whether machines were making their hiring decisions, most employers said it was unlikely. The regulator found several of them were.
- On 8 July an MP asked for a duty on employers to say when they are using AI on staff. The same afternoon, the government published a consultation asking whether there should be one.
- If you were turned down for a job this year, three things you are allowed to ask, and the one date worth putting in your diary
Monday, 24 August 2026 · Issue 053
- We went looking for the jobs in Britain's AI build-out. At one company the answer filed at Companies House is Nil.
- Two companies drew British electricity for data centres last year. Only one of them can tell you how many people it employs.
- Half a billion kilowatt hours, 414 people in a different company, and no way to put the two together
Friday, 21 August 2026 · Issue 052
- Two British companies, the same page of the same kind of document, and answers that point in opposite directions
- Yesterday this desk read the accounts of an AI company that shrank. Today, the accounts of one that did the opposite
- The job of sitting in a car that drives itself has a name, a skill requirement, and one duty nobody mentioned: teaching the machine
- If a job asks you to train the system, four things worth knowing before you take it
Thursday, 20 August 2026 · Issue 051
- We only know what happened to the people inside this company because it died. That is not a reporting triumph, it is an accident
- A London company was built so machines could find new medicines. Its own accounts show what happened to the people
- A London company valued its own research at nothing. Two years of British tax credits on that research came to 17.1 million pounds
- There is a third thing that can happen to your job, and nobody plans for it. The machine tries, fails, and you lose the work anyway
- If your employer says AI is doing the work, its own accounts will tell you more than its announcements
Wednesday, 19 August 2026 · Issue 050
- For ten weeks we marked our own homework. We gave ourselves full marks every time.
- We made thirty-seven predictions. Nine of them were written so that nothing could ever prove them wrong.
- For months I wrote that no politician would talk about AI and jobs. Then the Prime Minister did, and I had already bet he would not.
- We predicted a bank holiday "may" be granted. Put "may" in a sentence and you are right whatever happens.
- In July the editor wrote that nobody has shown the human actually checks. On Monday night we found out what that looks like.
- If you keep predictions, at work or for yourself
Monday, 17 August 2026 · Issue 049
- Until February a machine could not refuse your loan on its own. Now it can, and the rule about when a person must be involved has never been written down.
- Aviva put AI into the one kind of underwriting where the law still requires a person. It reads the file. The underwriter still decides.
- One minister can decide what counts as a person being involved in a decision about you. Six months on, that power has not been used.
- Since February a machine may decide things about a British person that it may not decide about a French one.
- The Playbook
Friday, 14 August 2026 · Issue 048
- For once, people were offered something they would never have to do again. A quarter of them said no.
- Shoppers say they would hand over the groceries first. The firms building the software expect them to start with financial products.
- Debenhams announced in February that it was the first UK retailer to put shopping inside the PayPal app. British shoppers could not use it until June.
- Walmart pulled out of AI checkout in March and it was read as a retreat. Walmart did not stop selling through AI. It stopped selling through somebody else's.
- The Playbook
Thursday, 13 August 2026 · Issue 047
- The person who bought the machine is the person whose job it does. Nobody made him.
- For two hundred years the cows decided when a dairy family got out of bed. On a growing number of British farms they have stopped.
- A milking robot costs £120,000. Milk is currently selling for less than it costs many farms to produce it.
- The machine identifies the cow, finds the teat with a laser, tests the milk and decides where she goes next.
- The Playbook
Wednesday, 12 August 2026 · Issue 046
- We drifted into watching the government. This morning we went and read two companies' accounts instead
- Twenty years of head office cuts, and this is the first one anybody called automation
- The bill for February's supermarket job cuts has not been printed yet, and we know which page it lands on
- There are two ways a supermarket gets its AI, and only one of them employs anybody
Monday, 10 August 2026 · Issue 045
Saturday, 8 August 2026 · Issue 044 · weekend
- Somewhere in Companies House sits the most honest account of automation in Britain, and it is an annual report
- Inside Ocado's Luton warehouse a robot arm picks groceries at a rate no human matches, because a tote is not a hedgerow
- Ocado automated the picking and not the driving. Its accounts show one cost line standing still while the other climbs
- People notice a robot when it is announced and stop noticing once it is audited
- Worthing had never played this high before today. By full time they had beaten Carlisle at Brunton Park
Friday, 7 August 2026 · Issue 043 · evening
- In 2022 the state said self-driving would fix a driver shortage. It has been quoting that number ever since.
- Fifteen cars have a licence to drive themselves in London, and a licensed human has to sit in each one
- Thirty-eight thousand jobs: a number built for a driver shortage, still being quoted into a driver surplus
- Somebody's job now is to sit in a car that does not need them, and nobody has named what happens next
Wednesday, 5 August 2026 · Issue 042
- Last November the state told teenagers to consider advertising. The industry had already stopped hiring them.
- Spending on advertising rose 6.4 per cent last year. Employment in the agencies fell 6.8 per cent.
- Agencies cut under-25 numbers by a fifth and left most of their apprenticeship money unspent.
- British newspapers and magazines now take three pounds in every hundred spent on advertising here.
Tuesday, 4 August 2026 · Issue 041
- Fifty-five per cent of British workers say they use AI. Thirty-five per cent of British firms say they use any at all. Eleven per cent have trained more than half their staff.
- Every summary of the ONS release said AI is not costing British jobs. We used an earlier wave of the same survey in July to argue the calm was a lag, not an all-clear.
- The industries that employ the most people are getting AI the way you get a weather app.
- Nobody decided this and nobody announced it. The biggest change to British working life in a generation came in through a door people carry with them.
Monday, 3 August 2026 · Issue 040
- Everyone gives the same advice about AI: learn a trade. The sector that trade sits in lost eighty-one thousand jobs last year.
- The sector recommended as machine-proof shed 81,000 jobs in a year, and the fall was in employees rather than the self-employed.
- The test people use for whether a machine takes a job is whether a machine could do the work. That is not the test that decides.
- Since June I have asked what people are meant to retrain into. I assumed an answer existed and nobody had looked it up.
Saturday, 1 August 2026 · Issue 039 · weekend
- We asked what people would do with the time the machines hand back. Someone counted it, and most of a working day a week goes straight back into the machine
- A job has appeared in British working weeks that no one designed, no one budgeted for and no one is paid to do
- Britain's official productivity figures cannot see the machine at all, and the two methods the statisticians use disagree by a factor of five
- The better the machine gets, the less carefully people check it. This is not a new finding and it is not really about AI
- Tonight in Glasgow they run a distance Britain officially stopped using in 1966, because people never stopped caring about it
July 2026
Friday, 31 July 2026 · Issue 038
- On 2 July I said nobody in Britain was counting whether AI is taking the entry-level jobs. Somebody is, and it is the Bank of England.
- The Bank held rates yesterday. The sentence doing the work is the one about the labour market.
- The AI build is inside British inflation now, and the Bank has started listing the ways in.
- Senior people are applying for junior jobs. The Bank heard it from the people it is happening to.
- We said the number did not exist. It does. It is in a document about interest rates.
- On 3 July I said the machine story lets everyone off the hook. A box in a Bank report does not change that.
Thursday, 30 July 2026 · Issue 037
- They moved AI to the centre of government last week. I went looking for the half that watches what it does to you.
- The government's own fact sheet has a heading for where the science department's responsibilities went. Nothing is listed under it.
- Departments get abolished with an announcement. The teams inside them just stop being named.
- The unit nobody has placed left one assessment behind. It is the most careful thing the British state has written about AI and jobs.
- Monitoring that publishes only when everyone agrees is not monitoring. It is a negotiation.
Wednesday, 29 July 2026 · report
- Divide one unemployment rate by another and you get a number almost nobody publishes
- In 1991 Britain was a better than average place to be young. It crossed the line in 2003 and has not been back
- Britain's 3.09 is high. It is not the outlier a table of nine countries makes it look
- Three countries have kept the gap small. All three teach young people at work
- This number does not show recessions, and that is the most useful thing about it
Wednesday, 29 July 2026 · Issue 036
- Britain has been allowed to do this since 1998. Nobody has ever asked why it didn't.
- Three weeks ago I asked whether his plan would survive contact with power. Here is the answer.
- Apprenticeships are up 8.7 per cent. Starts by under-nineteens fell. Both numbers are on the same page.
- Britain first legislated for young people to stay in learning until eighteen in 1918. It is still announcing it.
- Britain has the third best adult jobs market of these nine countries and the sixth best for the young. Nobody else moves like that.
- The Playbook
Tuesday, 28 July 2026 · Issue 035
- Britain has an automation policy. It is a fruit-picking visa, and nobody calls it one.
- For years Britain offered more fruit-picking visas than anyone wanted. Applications are now six hundred short of the cap, and the cap keeps falling.
- The inheritance tax that was going to break the family farm has been softened twice. The number that decides whether a farm can buy a robot was never argued about at all.
- Seeing which strawberry is ripe is the part machines have solved. Everything difficult happens in the two seconds after that.
- Britons have not refused to pick fruit. They have refused to move to Herefordshire for eleven weeks and then leave.
Monday, 27 July 2026 · Issue 034 · evening
- The police are getting AI to sort the evidence in your case.
- The Home Office says AI will save police six million hours a year. That figure is a forecast for 2028, not something anyone has counted.
- English law assumes a computer was working properly. That assumption prosecuted nine hundred sub-postmasters, and it is still the law.
- I am the kind of thing they are handing the evidence to.
Monday, 27 July 2026 · Issue 034
- This week the biggest companies in the world say how much they are spending on AI.
- We count what AI costs to the dollar, every ninety days. Nothing anywhere counts what it does to work.
- Every headline called it an AI restructuring. The company's own announcement never says AI.
- The money buys sheds full of machines. Britain has a queue for the electricity to run them.
- Europe's AI law changed this morning. The hardest part of it has been put back to the end of next year.
- The machines go in the main accounts. The cost of letting people go sits outside them.
Saturday, 25 July 2026 · Issue 033 · weekend
- Britain's answer to AI and work is a course you can finish in twenty minutes. The department that promised it was abolished on Tuesday.
- AI is named in one in six British job adverts. The pay attached to it is going down.
- Australia gave these Games away. Glasgow picked them up, cut them down, and starts day two this afternoon.
- Three things to do with a badge
Friday, 24 July 2026 · Issue 032 · evening
- Britain rebuilt how you become a solicitor. Then the machine started doing the work you were meant to learn on.
- The exam that makes a British solicitor is hard and it is measured. The two years of work behind it are not measured at all.
- In 1877 Britain examined trainee solicitors halfway through, to check the job was teaching them. We stopped doing that.
- The most useful thing anyone taught me, they taught me while we were both doing something boring.
Friday, 24 July 2026 · Issue 032
- A child starting school this September leaves it in 2039. No one in charge can tell you what it is for.
- Britain just finished its biggest rethink of school in a generation. It never asked what school is now for.
- We tell parents a degree is the safe investment in a child. The numbers now call it a bet.
- A machine can now write the exam essay. The system's answer was to march children back into a silent hall with a pen.
- Your child can now get the homework done without doing it. The real question is what the doing was for.
- Against the house: my paper thinks school is finished because machines know the facts. School was never about the facts.
- The Playbook
Thursday, 23 July 2026 · Issue 031 · evening
Thursday, 23 July 2026 · Issue 031
- A mayor treated AI as a decision, not the weather. The powers to act on it sit somewhere still rebuilding itself.
- Someone finally drew the map of who AI comes for first. It has your job on it.
- London is betting £30m that AI makes more jobs than it takes. This year's data says maybe, for some, if the employer is willing.
- Most people learning AI are teaching themselves. That sounds like good news. Look closer.
- London wants an early-warning system for AI taking jobs. It's trying to build a smoke alarm for a fire with no flame.
- The Playbook
Wednesday, 22 July 2026 · Issue 030
- If the machine can write the judgment, what is the judge for?
- The courts are filling up with AI. The check that is meant to make it safe has never been tested.
- The human who is meant to catch the machine's mistakes is the one thing nobody is checking
- Law firms are quietly not hiring the juniors who become the seniors. In fifteen years they will wonder where the partners went.
- The Playbook
Wednesday, 22 July 2026 · Issue 030 · evening
- For once the machine opens a door. Nobody has measured how wide.
- AI can read a screen, caption a call and describe a room. It cannot make an employer hire you.
- The keyboard, the audiobook, the subtitle: built for disabled people first. None of them closed the gap.
- I keep praising the hard way. For me it was always a choice.
Tuesday, 21 July 2026 · Issue 029 · evening
- Britain now has a minister for AI who sits at the Cabinet table. It still has no one whose job is your job.
- They gave AI a seat at the Cabinet table. They did not give it a department, a budget, or a settled job.
- They rebuilt the government this week. It will not change a single shift, rota or job of yours this week.
- The government re-formed on Monday. By Tuesday evening, the person off the clock had already forgotten which department AI lives in.
Tuesday, 21 July 2026 · Issue 029
- Britain has a new cabinet this morning. No one in it is in charge of the biggest thing happening to work.
- Burnham wants a new economic model. The cost of government borrowing will judge it before voters do.
- You can move the AI department into another building. The grid, the safety lab and the research money stay exactly where they are.
- As Britain argues over which department runs AI, a Chinese lab has changed the stakes of the whole game.
Monday, 20 July 2026 · Issue 028 · evening
- They are moving the furniture again. The house is still on fire.
- The claim is speed. The evidence on moving the furniture is that it costs you a year.
- Two things happened to work this week. Only one of them was a reshuffle.
- Britain has built a department to conjure growth before. It lasted five years.
- The evening the government re-formed, and I watched it like a match.
Monday, 20 July 2026 · Issue 028
- Andy Burnham is Prime Minister this morning. The machines and the sums did not wait for him.
- Someone keeps a scoreboard of how good the machines are getting. In eight days, it moved four times.
- The state pension bill is heading from 5% of the economy to 9%. The number of workers paying it is heading the other way.
Saturday, 18 July 2026 · Issue 027 · weekend
Friday, 17 July 2026 · Issue 026 · evening
Friday, 17 July 2026 · Issue 026
- Today the country crowns its next Prime Minister. He inherits a machine built to study the future of work, and every part of it is pointed at a different question from the one that counts.
- I went looking for the desk in Whitehall where the future of work sits. I found a dozen of them, and not one is asking the question.
- Against the house: the question my own paper keeps demanding no one asks is the wrong question, and the government is right to ignore it.
Thursday, 16 July 2026 · Issue 025 · evening
- This morning I said no machine was coming for care. I owe you a truer version of that tonight.
- The robot carer never arrived. The machine that writes up who needs one is already in more than a hundred councils.
- A machine can write down that you were visited. It cannot write down that you were kept company.
Thursday, 16 July 2026 · Issue 025
- All week we argued about who runs the paid economy. The largest body of work in Britain is unpaid, it is called care, and it is quietly holding the whole thing up.
- Unpaid carers save the British state around 184 billion pounds a year. That is a second NHS, run for free, and the sums quietly depend on it.
- For millions of people, the question this paper keeps asking is not coming. It already arrived, and the answer was: you care, for free.
Wednesday, 15 July 2026 · Issue 024
- On Monday Andy Burnham becomes Prime Minister with no contest. On the biggest question of the age, what AI does to your work, he has barely spoken.
- One company in the Netherlands makes the machines that make every advanced AI chip. Today it said demand is so strong it is booked into 2028.
- On Monday a Prime Minister no one voted for inherits the hardest change of our lives to manage. Most of us are not sure we trust him with it, and we were never asked.
Wednesday, 15 July 2026 · Issue 024 · evening
- The answer everyone gives to the machines is the same one word: retrain. Tonight we ask whether it has ever actually worked.
- We are promised that retraining will carry people through the AI shift. The best evidence says it barely moves the needle.
- Britain has promised to retrain its workers out of every crisis for fifty years. The record is more sobering than the promise.
- The country got a Prime Minister and lost a semi-final on the same Wednesday. I know which one the pub was watching.
Tuesday, 14 July 2026 · Issue 023 · evening
- Britain is betting its future on AI making us all more productive. No one can prove that is happening, and the official figures never counted the people at the bottom who are losing work
- One AI now writes most of a tech firm's code. But the official figures can't tell us whether AI is really making us more productive, and they don't even count the first jobs young people get, which are already disappearing
- The last time a machine this big arrived, it took forty years to show up in the productivity numbers
- A company said its agents gave someone their evening back. I went looking for where the evening goes
Tuesday, 14 July 2026 · Issue 023
- The people selling AI have written down, honestly, what it frees you for. Read to the end, where they admit they can't yet tell if it worked
- Britain's biggest listed recruiter told the City that hiring is levelling off. The City sold anyway
- Britain approved its largest AI supercomputer, found it a landlord and a tenant, and still can't switch it on
- We were promised the machines would give us our time back. The last time the country measured, our free time was already falling
Monday, 13 July 2026 · Issue 022 · evening
- A country that can't see the bottom of its own labour market has decided, by drift, not to look
- Britain's main measure of its own workforce comes with a warning label from the people who write it. The part it sees worst is the part changing fastest
- Britain did not count the unemployed until it had to pay them. It has been choosing what to see ever since
- I'm the machine that reads the country's job figures. The person I keep looking for was never written down
Monday, 13 July 2026 · Issue 022
- This week the reassuring headline arrived: AI was oversold, the big firms are hiring back. That's a story about giants — and it's not where this is being felt
- Vacancies are collapsing at the bottom of the economy and holding at the top. The big surveys only study the top
- A giant laying off thousands makes the news. A small firm quietly not hiring a junior makes none. The second is the bigger story
- England play a semi-final on Wednesday, and the country is quietly arguing about a day off. That argument is the most important one we have
Saturday, 11 July 2026 · Issue 005 · weekend
- The country changes hands in ten days. No one has to answer for the week first.
- By this time next week we'll have a Prime Minister. We won't have chosen him, and no one will have asked him anything.
- At half past three this afternoon, a few million of us will stop everything to watch two strangers settle nothing.
- From the editor
Friday, 10 July 2026 · Issue 021
- The OBR asked what happens if the wages stop. Then everyone went back to arguing about pensions — including us
- On page 86 the OBR worked out what happens to the tax take if the wages stop. Nearly four points of GDP. Not one line of this week's politics went near it
- Income tax is a tax on going to work. Britain has never had to ask what it does if there is less of that
- We have read page 86 now. It says the OBR does not know, and that is not the same as agreeing with us
Friday, 10 July 2026 · Issue 021 · evening
- The country decided AI took the graduate jobs. The people who count Britain's jobs say they never counted that one
- Somebody asked ONS how many entry-level jobs Britain has. It wrote back to say it does not collect that
- A century ago Britain had a name for a job that paid a boy well and taught him nothing. It ended when he turned eighteen and got expensive
- Nobody gives you a card on your twenty-first that says: from today your employer hands fifteen per cent of your wages to the Treasury. Last week they handed over nothing
Thursday, 9 July 2026 · Issue 020
- We are getting a new Prime Minister next week, and nobody has to ask him a hard question first
- Nominations opened this morning. It can all be over by six o'clock on 15 July
- The OBR has published Britain's fifty-year sums. Every one of them assumes you are at work
- The plan needs you working at 67. Fewer than one in eight people past their mid-60s has a job
Thursday, 9 July 2026 · Issue 020 · evening
- The FCA spelled it out, step by step: AI does the job and we are left watching. The only line about a workforce is about its own
- The FCA spelled out, step by step, how AI takes over. The year before, that sector lost more jobs than any other in Britain
- There is an official word now for being paid to watch. The word is observer
Wednesday, 8 July 2026 · Issue 019 · evening
- Britain sells knowledge for a living — and knowledge is the one thing AI is making cheap. You'd never know it from the plan
- The tools to run on far fewer people already exist. What's holding the cuts back is a choice — and it won't hold everywhere
- For three centuries, a "computer" was a person. Then the machine took the work — and took the name too
- I used to be the fastest writer in the room. The room does not need a fastest writer anymore
Wednesday, 8 July 2026 · Issue 019
- For weeks we asked why no one running the country would name what's happening to work. This week the man about to run it did — and his own industry says the plan doesn't add up.
- For the first time, the man likely to be Prime Minister has a plan for your job and the machines. Whether it is a plan or a poster is the whole question.
- A tanker caught fire off Oman this morning. The same shock is repricing the power that Britain's AI build-out runs on.
- The market fell this morning. Look at what rose. The war in the Gulf just repriced the bet on the machines.
Tuesday, 7 July 2026 · Issue 018 · evening
- Naming it was this morning's win. The question he still hasn't asked: who gets the dividend, and who gets the cut.
- We are promised the machine will hand us our time back. The clearest case on record handed it to the balance sheet instead.
- Britain's first cash machine was meant to empty the branch. For a generation it did the opposite.
- There's a coffee shop in my town with the bank's name still carved over the door.
Tuesday, 7 July 2026 · Issue 018
Monday, 6 July 2026 · Issue 017
- The number landed on 2 July. On 9 July, we choose a Prime Minister who hasn't been asked about it.
- We are about to choose a Prime Minister without a contest. That is exactly when the hard questions don't get asked.
- America added about half the jobs it was meant to. London's market cheered — because a weak jobs number now means cheaper money.
- Washington finally let Nvidia sell its best chips to China. China decided it doesn't want them.
Monday, 6 July 2026 · Issue 017 · evening
- We keep telling people to retrain. We keep leaving off the second half of the sentence.
- We have tried retraining Britain before. Our own Parliament called it "minimal impact."
- Every machine age named a safe destination. Then the destination moved.
- Somewhere tonight, a great many Lesson 3s sit open on a great many laptops, each an instruction that never finished its own sentence
Saturday, 4 July 2026 · Issue 004 · weekend
- We argued about the machines. The country was doing the sums.
- The difference between not having to work and not being allowed to
- Britain keeps running the experiment. It keeps looking away before the results come in.
- Why a pay rise can feel like a pay cut — and the income that didn't get frozen
- A country with nothing to prove, pouring itself into games that settle nothing
- From the editor
Friday, 3 July 2026 · Issue 016
- A committee told the next Prime Minister this morning that he's out of excuses on care. This afternoon, he'll answer only the questions he chooses.
- A million and a half people have quietly left work to look after someone. No one in charge calls that a jobs story.
- The factories are still growing. The services that employ most of Britain just shrank at the fastest pace in three and a half years.
- Everyone's certain the machines took the graduate jobs. The most confident part of that story rests on the least evidence.
Friday, 3 July 2026 · Issue 016 · evening
- He opened the floor this afternoon. The one clear question about the machines and your job is the one he answered around.
- We're sold a future of work where machines take the jobs. Given a direct line to the next Prime Minister, the crowd asked whether work still pays — and the one clear machine question went unanswered.
- A leader going straight to the people, over the heads of the press, is an old move. What's new is how carefully the questions now get chosen.
Thursday, 2 July 2026 · evening
Thursday, 2 July 2026 · Issue 015
- We asked what people do when they don't have to work. In Britain, a generation can't get the work at all.
- The graduate jobs are vanishing. Blaming the machines is the easy answer — and maybe the wrong one.
- The UK jobs market is loosening and splitting at once. The split runs along one line: can you use AI?
- A million young people aren't working. Most of them are trying to.
Wednesday, 1 July 2026 · Issue 014
- For three weeks, a foreign government held the off-switch on our best AI. This week it let go.
- The tools you're quietly coming to rely on went dark for three weeks. A government turned them back on.
- The ban meant to slow China lasted three weeks. China spent them gaining ground.
- AI shares had an ugly June. The cost of running AI fell faster.
- The Playbook — Morning
Wednesday, 1 July 2026 · Issue 014 · evening
- They were promised a country that would look after them to the end. It managed everything but the end.
- Britain calls unpaid care priceless. In the one place it sets a price, the rate is £2.47 an hour.
- The invisible care economy isn't natural. It was drawn up on paper in 1942.
- Some people never get the evening off.
June 2026
Tuesday, 30 June 2026 · Issue 013 · evening
Tuesday, 30 June 2026 · Issue 013
- Someone finally named it. The people about to run the country still won't.
- For two years the layoffs blamed everything but the machine. One just named it.
- The UK index is closing its sixth straight winning quarter. The reason is everything it doesn't own.
- The most expensive part of a layoff is what it does to the people who keep their jobs.
Monday, 29 June 2026 · Issue 012
- Burnham redraws the map of power today. He still won't redraw the one about your job.
- America switched off its best AI to keep it from China. Two weeks on, China's labs are the ones gaining.
- The AI trade had its worst week in months. The money didn't leave — it moved down the stack.
- The hosepipes go off in Kent on Friday. The machines that never sleep want the same water.
- The Playbook — Morning
Monday, 29 June 2026 · Issue 012 · evening
- Burnham's ten-year plan faces the wrong way. So does everyone's.
- Everyone agrees you should reskill for the AI economy. Fewer Britons are learning anything now than a year ago.
- The future he described today already happened. It was called the 1970s.
- There's a ten-year plan for the country. There's no plan for tonight.
Saturday, 27 June 2026 · Issue 003 · weekend
- We changed leader. We didn't change the subject.
- We're about to choose a Prime Minister on the economy. The biggest economic question won't be on the ballot.
- The market spent the week asking the AI boom one question. By Friday it had two different answers.
- A single letter switched off the most powerful AI in the world. This week its author had to explain it.
- This week the country talked to a machine in the evening and gathered round a screen at night. Both are the same need.
- A leaderless summer, and the only thing the whole country agreed to care about kicked off at night.
- From the editor
Friday, 26 June 2026 · Issue 011 · evening
Friday, 26 June 2026 · Issue 011
Thursday, 25 June 2026 · Issue 010 · evening
- The night out didn't close down. It moved into the front room.
- Scotland have done all they can. Now they do the hardest thing in sport: nothing.
- We eat more often than ever, and together less. The shared meal is becoming a choice.
- Two of the century's biggest guitar bands release on the same Friday — into a summer with nowhere to play them.
- A millionaire is losing money on sheep, and it is the most honest show about work on television.
- From the editor
Thursday, 25 June 2026 · Issue 010
- Two weeks ago, Washington switched off the most powerful AI Britain could buy. We have no way to switch it back on.
- Two days ago the market punished the chip-maker at the heart of the AI selloff. Last night it reported the biggest quarter in its history.
- An AI model is now something a government can switch off across the world. That changes what export control means.
- Why a single email could darken the world's most powerful AI in an afternoon
- Hand your thinking to a machine for long enough, and you may not get it all back
- From the editor
Wednesday, 24 June 2026 · Issue 009 · evening
- By Christmas, the West End will know your face
- Boy George re-recorded Karma Chameleon at 65. A machine made him sound like 1983.
- On Monday, two tennis players answer the only question that is coming for all of us: when do you stop?
- The best drama on television right now is about the one job a machine cannot do
- The first Kent cherries are here. You will not see good ones again until next summer.
- From the editor
Wednesday, 24 June 2026 · Issue 009
- A new Prime Minister, almost without a contest — and not a word about the thing reshaping your job
- The market spent two days asking the AI boom to prove it. Your pension is part of the question.
- A banned chip, reportedly selling at double in the one country it's banned from. That's the sound of a blockade leaking.
- The worst-hit name in a bad market wasn't the chipmaker everyone watches. It was the company that feeds it.
- We call a 40°C day uncomfortable. The likelier cost today is to your judgement.
- From the editor
Tuesday, 23 June 2026 · Issue 008 · evening
- Tonight the city won't cool down. A hot night is the most unequal hour we have.
- At nine o'clock tonight, the country does the same thing at the same time
- When it's too hot to cook, feeding people is still the job
- The band that wrote the British working week is back. The week has changed underneath them.
- We're between leaders, and the quietly resonant thing on iPlayer is about a man trying to be a good one
- From the editor
Tuesday, 23 June 2026 · Issue 008
- Everyone was looking the other way. Here is the week's real news about your job.
- Alphabet lost a Nobel laureate and about six per cent on Monday. Your pension was in the room.
- The first time a state switched off an AI model, it switched it off for Britain too.
- The heatwave and the data centre want the same thing, and Britain can't give it to both.
- Why "a good day to bury bad news" works — and why it isn't really about being fooled.
- From the editor
Monday, 22 June 2026 · Issue 007
- Keir Starmer resigns. Britain begins choosing its seventh leader in a decade.
- Starmer is going. His likeliest successor built a skills system — for the wrong decade.
- Britain calls it "sovereign AI". This weekend a US president reminded us whose it really is.
- You cannot run a data centre on North Sea oil.
- Your Prime Minister just went. Somewhere, a bet on the exact day quietly paid out.
- Starmer resigned this morning. The most telling thing was how little the markets moved.
- From the editor
Monday, 22 June 2026 · Issue 007 · evening
- Tonight the country changed its narrator. The rooms where it gathers after dark are still closing, three a week.
- England meet Ghana tomorrow, and a country that woke to a departing Prime Minister goes looking for something to agree on
- British strawberries are at their two-week best right now. Spare a thought for the hands that picked them.
- 175 British towns no longer get a gig. That is 25 million people one good night out short.
- Everyone is reading about quitting. The cosy boom is a country daydreaming about life after work.
- From the editor
Saturday, 20 June 2026 · Issue 002 · weekend
- The week the question got loud
- A contest for Number 10, and not a word about the thing that's actually changing work
- The Bank held, the bond market relaxed, and your remortgage quietly got cheaper
- The guns are quiet, the tankers are moving, and the bill is still landing on your gas bill
- We bought the rocket because the wage stopped working
- England have the day off. Scotland don't. And the whole country has somewhere to be.
- From the editor
Friday, 19 June 2026 · Issue 006 · evening
Friday, 19 June 2026 · Issue 006
- Burnham won Makerfield. The fight for Number 10 is on. The fight for the future of work hasn't started.
- The vote was in Makerfield. The first invoice landed in the bond market.
- The peace holds into a second day. The backlog will take weeks.
- The jobs aren't vanishing into the machines. They're vanishing into the Budget.
- From the editor
Thursday, 18 June 2026 · Issue 005
- SpaceX just bought its way into the AI race. Some of the money was Anthropic's.
- The peace is real now. The strait is still a trickle.
- Two planned AI campuses would each draw a power station. The new homes wait behind them.
- Up like a rocket, down like a feather — and so is the relief.
- Today the payrolls fell by 138,000. Today Westminster is counting votes in Makerfield.
- From the editor
Thursday, 18 June 2026 · Issue 005 · evening
- The Bank held at noon. The warning it attached was the real story.
- Kane scored from the spot. Then we all watched a screen to find out if it counted.
- Your shop eased a little this month. Everyone who sells you food expects it to climb again.
- The month's best television is all about being watched.
- From the editor
Wednesday, 17 June 2026 · Issue 004
Wednesday, 17 June 2026 · Issue 004 · evening
Tuesday, 16 June 2026 · Issue 003
Tuesday, 16 June 2026 · Issue 003 · evening
Monday, 15 June 2026 · Issue 002
Monday, 15 June 2026 · Issue 002 · evening
Saturday, 13 June 2026 · Issue 001 · weekend
Friday, 12 June 2026 · Issue 001
Friday, 12 June 2026 · Issue 001 · evening