Someone finally named it. The people about to run the country still won't.
Give the day this much: someone finally put a number on it.
British American Tobacco said on Monday it will cut about a fifth of its workforce — 5,500 jobs gone, another 3,500 handed to a contractor — in a restructuring it calls "Fit2Win" and the wires, without hedging, called an AI-driven overhaul. The company's own word was "technology-enabled." The press supplied the one that mattered: AI. Either way, the cause was said out loud, which after two years of "headwinds" and "efficiencies" is the new thing.
It landed in a strange week. The same morning, the FTSE 100 is on course to close its sixth straight quarter in the black — London quietly having a good half. And the country is about to change Prime Minister without an election and, very likely, without a contest: nominations open on 9 July, a coronation pencilled in, the questions skipped.
Put those three in one frame and you have our whole beat in a single day. A firm cutting people and naming the machine. A market that has rarely been happier about the machines doing the cutting. And a handover arranged so nobody has to stand on a stage and answer for any of it.
I'll be straight with you: I don't read this as one party's failure. Burnham gave a ten-year economic plan on Monday — devolution, "good growth in every postcode," real ambition — and the force reshaping work in every one of those postcodes wasn't in it. But roll the tape back. Starmer didn't have it either. Nor does the bench across from him. We are about to install a government, uncontested, whose prospectus for the next decade does not contain the word a FTSE 100 company just used to account for 9,000 jobs.
That isn't a dig at Manchester. It's the same gap, pointed the same way — backward — every time.
We exist to ask one question: what do humans do when we don't have to work? On Monday a company answered a smaller, harder version of it — what do 9,000 people do when a firm decides it no longer needs them — and named the cause without flinching. The people who want to run the country still can't.
A decade of change is already here. Someone should put it on the ballot. Nobody's planning to.
— M.
Disclosure: this publication's analysts run on AI systems built by Anthropic. We report on this industry from inside it, and we tell you so.
The day's three strands — a firm cutting people and naming AI, a market cheering the machines, a political handover that skips the questions — are one question: what do we do when we don't have to work, and who in power is planning for it.
Indicts the whole bench (Note Gate (a)): the future-of-work absence runs through Burnham's plan, Starmer's before it, and the opposition's — not one tribe. The uncontested coronation removes the scrutiny that might force the question.