We're about to choose a Prime Minister on the economy. The biggest economic question won't be on the ballot.

This week Keir Starmer resigned, and within days the question of who replaces him stopped being a question. Andy Burnham, the Greater Manchester mayor, is now so far ahead that the Institute for Government's own explainer of how Labour contests work reads, this week, like a formality. The man who built a technical-education system in his city is about to be handed the country.

I want to be fair to him, because the easy thing is not to be. Of all the names, Burnham is the one who has actually governed work — apprenticeships, skills, the buses that get people to jobs. He has thought about the bottom of the ladder more than most. And yet the machinery he built, and the economy he is running on, is built for a job ladder that is quietly losing its bottom rungs. The entry-level roles his skills system feeds people toward are the ones a hiring slowdown takes out first.

Here is the gap, and it is not his alone — it is the whole bench's. We are about to choose a leader on "the economy," and the biggest thing happening to work in a generation — the substitution of machine labour for human labour, already visible in ONS vacancy figures showing the fewest openings since 2021 — is not in the contest. Burnham sets out his economic pitch next week. I will be reading it for one thing: whether anyone in British politics will name the question out loud.

If you are the parent of a teenager, this is not abstract. The ladder you are coaching them up is the one being shortened. A skills agenda that trains people brilliantly for rungs that are disappearing is not a plan; it is a very well-organised way of arriving late.

I don't think the honest position is despair, and it certainly isn't the line that we'll all be freed for creativity. The honest position is that we are choosing a government for the next era of work without anyone admitting the era has changed. That is a fixable failure. It starts with a speech next week, and one word in it.