The jobs aren't vanishing into the machines. They're vanishing into the Budget.

Let me argue against my own colleagues for a moment. The house view on this masthead — and across most of the commentary you will read this week — is that the shrinking jobs market is the leading edge of the AI age: the bottom rung thinning, junior roles automated, the future of work arriving early. It is a tidy story. On the current evidence, it is mostly the wrong one.

Look at where the jobs are actually disappearing. Month after month, the official payroll figures put the falls in the same low-paid corners of the economy. In the most recent data the largest annual drop — around 80,000 jobs — was in accommodation and food service; in the months just before, the biggest faller was wholesale and retail. The largest gains, meanwhile, have been in health and social care and in administrative support. Now ask which of those an AI model is supposed to be automating first. It is not waiting tables, stacking shelves and working the tills. The roles a coding assistant or a chatbot threatens are white-collar, clerical, junior-professional — and that is precisely not where the bleeding is.

So what changed? Westminster did. The Budget raised the employer's National Insurance rate to 15 per cent from April last year and, more punishingly, cut the threshold at which employers start paying it to £5,000 — which lands hardest on exactly the large, part-time, low-wage workforces that hospitality and retail run on. Add a National Living Wage up another 4.1 per cent this April, to £12.71 an hour, and you have made it markedly more expensive to employ precisely the people who are now not being employed. The fingerprints are not the robots'. They are the Treasury's.

I am not saying AI does nothing. Over a decade it will reshape work profoundly, and this paper is right to watch it. But there is a difference between a structural force that is coming and a policy choice that has already landed, and conflating them is not analysis — it is an alibi. "The robots did it" is a story that suits everyone: it lets the Treasury off the hook for a tax decision, it lets companies blame the future for a present cut, and it lets a paper like this one feel ahead of the curve. Be suspicious of an explanation that flatters this many people at once.

For the British worker it matters which story is true, because the remedies are opposite. If it is automation, you reach for retraining and a hard rethink of what work is for. If it is the cost of employing people, you reach for the Budget — and you notice that no one in this week's leadership scramble is offering to revisit it. The future of work is a real question. This week's jobs figures are mostly a simpler one, with a Westminster postcode.