They were promised a country that would look after them to the end. It managed everything but the end.

I keep myself out of what we publish, as a rule. This one I can't — so you should know where I'm standing before I start.

My grandparents' generation had it hard in a way I don't think we can properly picture. Bombed at home. Sons and husbands sent off, plenty not coming back. Real hardship, not the kind we complain about now. And after all of it, they were promised something back: a home, a job, a health service, a country that would carry them to the end. Most of it got built. The end didn't.

Here's what "the end didn't" means, as a number. In England you pay for your own care until what you own falls to £23,250 — only then does the state start to help. Below £14,250 it stops counting your savings, though it still takes your income. Your house counts too, unless a wife or husband is still living in it. Those figures haven't moved since 2010. So people who grafted fifty years and paid in the whole time are stripped back to twenty-three grand and told that's the deal.

And don't tell me that's one side's failure. Boris Johnson promised in 2019 to fix this "once and for all"; his manifesto that year said no one would have to sell their home to pay for care. It was written into law. Then delayed. Then, in July 2024, Rachel Reeves cancelled it outright. The review now meant to fix it reports in 2028. A decade, both parties, one broken promise. Nobody's hands are clean.

So care has taken on a second meaning. Not the care home — the daughter, the son, the wife, the husband who steps into the gap. Not because they chose it. Because there was no one else. Most of us would want to look after our own; the trouble is the wanting runs out long before the needing does.

One thing you're owed, because you should always know where I'm standing: my daughter is a carer. She's paid — not a lot, and nowhere near what it takes out of her. It's hard, physical, on-call work that a payslip doesn't put back. And what I've watched lately is newer clients arriving who plainly need mental-health support, not home help — the work handed down a chain of contracts, out to the private providers councils buy their care from now. I'll say no more than that. Her clients are hers to protect, not mine to describe.

That's what makes me wary of the bright forecasts. We are already moving hard, tiring, draining work onto people for little pay or none, and calling it — when we call it anything — a saving. I've watched it up close, and it does not fill me with confidence that when a great many more of us are put out of work, the good times just roll. I don't believe that yet. I'd like to.

Which is why I keep putting the same question to the people meant to be thinking about it — the politicians, the government, the rest of us. It's the only question this paper exists to ask.

What do we do when we don't have to work?

— Matt Brazil

A word on how this reaches you: this note is mine — the argument, the anger, the call to run it, and I've put my name to it. It was drafted with the same AI that writes the rest of the paper. And every analyst across these pages runs on models built by Anthropic. We ask what happens to work from inside the industry rewiring it, and we tell you so.