About a year ago I wrote about Vibe Coding, Fireworks and the Mortar of Government, back when I was first getting excited by the new art of the possible. Since then I’ve had a lot of fun with these toys, at home and at work, while learning a lot along the way.
This post finds its origins somewhere else: in a throwaway comment someone made that, by making those arguments, I seemed to be excited for the most pessimistic future of the labour market.
I’d rather think of it as being optimistic about being pessimistic. And hopefully by the end of this you’ll see what I mean.
Because this is a post that asks what follows if the argument is even half right.
I’m not here to make any kind of prediction that all office jobs will disappear by Christmas. I am not trying to join the queue of people announcing that everything has already changed.
But I think we should sit with a possibility.
What if AI doesn’t destroy work, but shrinks, thins or rearranges it enough to expose how much our social fabric relies on a particular framing of work in order for it to function?
It is arresting stuff. Not only because of the scale of the crisis being described, though the scale is staggering, and not only because of the policy detail, though there is plenty there worth wrestling with. But what especially struck me today was the moral seriousness with which Alan spoke about young people who are quietly disappearing from participation in the life of the country.
Over the last phase of my time at DWP, I shared my time between the team supporting this review and the jobs and careers service. Mine was a small contribution in the scheme of things, but enough to see at close quarters the seriousness, care and determination Alan and his team have brought to it. It also means I am not a wholly impartial observer. I want this report, and the final report coming later in the year, to be read carefully, argued with seriously, and met with a level of response that matches the gravity of what it describes.
Because this is a report that asks important questions:
What happens to a society when more than one million young people are outside education, employment or training?
What happens when the pathways into adulthood no longer reliably function?
What happens when institutions each hold fragments of a person’s story, but nobody holds the whole?
And perhaps most importantly: what kind of country are we becoming if we learn to normalise this?
The review’s argument is not that this requires a temporary focus or a short-term policy tweak around the edges. We’ve been here before, oscillating between panic and amnesia. We briefly notice a crisis, announce something, fund something, brand something, and then move on before anything has changed.
No, the argument is that there has been a structural break in how young people move into work, confidence, belonging and adult life, and therefore structural change has to be the response. And that means harder questions to answer about institutions, relationships, participation, and the kind of social fabric that is required for young people to flourish.
This should arrest government.
But that is the minimum we should expect from a report like this.
Not very sorry, obviously. But sorry enough to acknowledge that “one weird trick” belongs more naturally beside adverts for miraculous belly-fat solutions, obscure pension loopholes, and things dentists apparently hate. And that it is not usually the hook into a conversation about democratic renewal.
Still, I think there is this weird trick available to Keir Starmer.
It is this: govern.
Govern with the majority he has to begin fixing one of the things that is most obviously, repeatedly, structurally broken in British politics. Not by avoiding disagreement. Not by finding the correct grid of announceables. Not by setting up the right combination of technocratic delivery boards. Not by locating the mythical median voter hiding somewhere between a focus group in Nuneaton and a laminated pledge card.
Govern with the majority he has to fix British politics by making votes mean something closer to what voters intend them to mean.
In other words: electoral reform.
I know. I know. Nothing says “urgent political response to last week’s electoral earthquake and this week’s leadership crisis” like constitutional reform. I know you and everyone else is crying out: at last, regional deliberative democracy methodologies.
And yet. It kind of feels like precisely the moment when you swing for the fences and you say the bigger thing.
Because the noise now is all about Starmer. Whether he can survive. Whether he should survive. Whether the speech worked. Whether the cabinet is wobbling, marching, whispering, briefing, plotting, or merely standing near a door with an unusually thoughtful expression.
This is Westminster’s favourite kind of drama, because it can be reported almost entirely through human weather. Who is up. Who is down. Who is loyal. Who is “loyal”. Who is thinking of the party. Who is thinking of the country. Who is thinking of the country in a way that it just so happens involves them becoming prime minister instead.
And some of that matters. Of course it does. Leadership matters. Judgment matters. Political authority matters. If a prime minister cannot command confidence, that is not a trivial problem.
But the problem runs deeper.
The danger is that the Labour party convinces itself that this is fundamentally a personnel issue. Change the leader, change the mood, change the story. A new face, a new operation, a new grid, a new solemn promise that lessons have been learned and listening has occurred.
Perhaps that would help. Perhaps it would not. But I reckon the forces now swirling around Starmer would swirl around whoever succeeded him.
Because I don’t think last week’s elections were really simply a verdict on one man.
I think we’ve been getting closer to this sort of outcome for years.
The electoral map was wobbling. Now it has toppled.
Reform is no longer merely an irritation on the right of the Conservative Party. The Greens are no longer merely a place for protest votes in seats where everyone already owns a bicycle. The Liberal Democrats continue to possess their strange and enduring ability to appear locally inevitable while nationally implausible. Independents, local parties, national parties and post-party moods are all tugging at the fabric.
The country is not behaving like a two-party country.
It has not done for some time. But last week made the point harder to avoid. Voters are moving in different directions at once. They are not simply swinging neatly from red to blue or blue to red, like a polite constitutional pendulum maintained by a retired civil servant in a cardigan. They are fragmenting, protesting, experimenting, hedging, punishing, searching.
And Westminster is still trying to cram that into a machine built for a different political world.
I didn’t rush it. I did use ChatGPT though, not because I didn’t know what I thought, but because the free-text boxes are capped at 200 words, and I needed help saying the thing plainly, without my usual meandering. Whether you get to the end of this post or not probably determines whether you think I should be capped at 200 words more often.
Because, I’m afraid this is a long one. But it’s about something that more than likely will, in my eyes, come to define the 2024 Labour government and its oversight of our nation.
What unsettled me most wasn’t really any single proposal (many have been trailed since the new Home Secretary took up her position), but what the exercise has to say about the UK’s default setting – what we’re becoming comfortable with, what we stand for and believe in. What exactly are those “British values” some people are getting so angry about defending and proud about conveying with a flag?
Because this wasn’t a consultation that began by asking what it might mean for people to feel at home here. It didn’t start from the simple, obvious good news: that of all the countries in the world, some people choose this one to build their lives – to work, to raise children, to contribute, to belong.
No, it began somewhere else entirely.
From the very start, settlement is framed less as recognition that the UK is going to gain because someone is making their life here, and more that our welcome must be earned through a sustained demonstration of worthiness.
Character: a decade long trial dressed up as suitability
It opens with character. Not character as formation, repair, or the slow work of becoming dependable. Character as a filter of suitability. Something you can fail; something that can add years; something that cannot be weighed against time, contribution, or changed behaviour.
And it’s worth naming the irony: character is something we are all either developing or degrading in ourselves. We’re all on a journey. We all have chapters we wish didn’t define us. So when the state chooses to make “character” into a decade-long review, it isn’t just shaping their behaviour — it is training ours. It is teaching us what we are allowed to believe about people, and how long we are allowed to withhold trust.
The test for me is quite simple: would I accept this logic if it were applied to someone I know and love, someone I’d invite to my Christmas dinner table? Not because they’re exceptional, but because they are ordinary. They’re capable of mistakes, misunderstandings, instability, bad seasons, and regret.
The system the government is imagining has little room for ordinary lives. Failure is sticky. Redemption is slow, if not forever out of reach. “Earned settlement” is less like a destination you’re looking forward to celebrating and more like the relief-filled end of a very long and exhausting trial.
This image isn’t neighbours and good friends, it’s guests and strangers. Allowed to stay but never invited to belong.
And that matters, not just morally, but socially. A society that keeps people permanently on the edge makes its own fabric brittle. If you never quite belong, how do you feel at home? And if you never feel at home, why would you invest in the place you live — emotionally, relationally, civically? The proposals fear a lack of integration, but aren’t they a recipe for exactly the detachment they claim to be preventing?
Andy and I tried to write our take on what it looks like to think Christianly about asylum under the phrase Welcoming Well. And our conclusion is that welcome is the gospel-shaped starting point; that our approach to asylum can be firm without being cruel; that borders can exist without contempt. That got written in the lead up to 2024’s general election where the previous government’s time in office had had many immigration related low points: Windrush, the hostile environment, distorted statements about migration in pursuit of Brexit, “citizens of nowhere”, the immigration health surcharge, and so on.
I had hoped a change of government might bring a change in moral imagination too. That we might step back from where we seemed to be heading.
One of the first headlines I saw after Friday’s reshuffle came with a familiar and unsurprising tone. Starmer signals plan to slash benefits with tough new welfare chief. It’s probably pretty accurate. The size of the welfare budget is a serious question for any Chancellor, and it’s one that will always be a priority for the Secretary of State.
But I’m not sure the bill is what the caricature suggests. Every time it is mentioned, the same assumptions surface: that it is about idleness, about people who could work but won’t. In truth, it is much more complicated. Large numbers are still poorly after the pandemic (either because of COVID or other difficulties or delays in accessing the healthcare they need, especially that associated with mental health). Young people are struggling to enter the labour market. Carers, students, and the early retired are all folded into the same “economic inactivity” bucket. A welfare system where health-related benefits are more generous than unemployment benefits. And beneath it all, an economy that has been stagnant for years, with R&D investment consistently behind our peers.
The cost of welfare is not a story of moral weakness. It is a story about the condition of the country.
So much of the current public discourse leaves me with a heavy heart, and Robert Jenrick’s recent interview with The Spectator is another depressing contribution. It might be worth reading the full thing because it provides important context for what follows but in short it tells a harsh story about deportations, “rudimentary prison” camps for asylum seekers, net emigration, and suspending both visas and foreign aid. It is a story of scarcity, suspicion and punishment. It doesn’t sound like justice, mercy, humility, love for neighbour, or hope for renewal. It doesn’t sound like good news.
And yet Jenrick makes a point of mentioning faith: “I do believe in God. But I’m not at church every Sunday. I take my children to church, my wife sometimes takes them to synagogue.” Faith here is less like the pearl of great price that Jesus spoke of, and more like a virtue signalling badge of pseudo-respectability.
What I don’t hear is a man who abides in the love of Christ.
But it left me thinking how extraordinary it might be if he did abide. If he found the treasure hidden in the field, if his politics and his life left people thinking about good news? Not out of some misguided Christian Nationalism and delight at the theocratic imposition of the ‘correct’ policies. No, because it would mean his own personal story would be of life lived to the full.
And why not have some better policy to go with it?
So I was minded to reimagine Jenrick’s words in the spirit of kingdœmocracy. You don’t need to have read the interview first but it might give you a frame of reference for the alternative. What would it sound like if a senior politician spoke not from fear but from faith? If his words reflected the overflow of love from his heart and were humbly shaped by joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control (which is what we mean when we talk about being ‘guided by the Spirit’)?
Perhaps his interview might have sounded more like this:
At church this weekend we sang the worship song Goodness of God
All my life You have been faithful, All my life You have been so, so good… With every breath that I am able, I will sing of the goodness of God
And in the middle of worship I found myself wondering whether anyone could ever sing the same about public institutions.
All my life, the state has been faithful All my life, public administration has been good to me
It may have surfaced because I’d been able to make some progress with PrayReps this week. Or perhaps because of my day job helping the Department for Work and Pensions to design a new approach to providing jobs and careers support for the country. A life-long companion to help people navigate work, whether they’re seeking their first job, having a mid-career reinvention, or easing into a well-earned retirement.
What would it take for one of our future users to say: “All my life, it’s been good to me. It didn’t fail me. It was there”.
In the past week, speeches from Keir Starmer, Pat Mcfadden and Georgia Gould1 have painted a bold vision for the work of government. The Plan for Change is ambitious, rooted in missions designed to tackle the nation’s most pressing issues—from housing and NHS waiting lists to economic inactivity.
It is really good to hear our government talk up a positive, attractive narrative about the future they want for our country. Show me someone dismissing the combined story they’re telling and I suspect you’ve found someone choosing partisan tribalism over good faith engagement although, and perhaps more likely, they may just be someone understandably browbeaten by years of disappointment, frustration and hypocrisy.
Speaking personally I want to be optimistic. I really want to believe that mission-led government can make a dent in these seemingly intractable problems. And because I’m now working in a team directly tied to one of the missions I’m closer than most people to what it means to translate these ideas into practice. But that means I can see a stark challenge: acknowledging the extent of the gulf between rhetoric and reality.
Over the last year Dave and I have been kicking around the idea of “Kingdom Democracy” (or maybe kingdœmocracy) as we try to encourage our fellow Christians to adopt a hope-filled, faith-inspired perspective on democracy and how we’re governed. We haven’t quite managed to write the book yet, but it has been brilliant to take things that we know in our bones and put them into words.
I was hoping PrayReps would be online by now. It’s not there yet, although good progress made with the underlying data. Going back to work has definitely slowed progress. So, no product on the internet but I did repurpose my old locally hosted ChatGPT-assisted code for the US Presidential, Congressional and Gubernatorial elections. Now, with the final result finally being confirmed at the end of last week I can finally publish this blog post.
This is the fifth time I’ve looked at vehicle registration data in UK to see the extent to which private car owners are impacted by the expansion of ULEZ. I’ll probably do it once more to retrospectively see what the situation was at the time of the general election, and the former Prime Minister vowing to reverse one of the most successful policy interventions of recent years.
That last post, looking at the data until the end of December 2023, showed the total numbers of ULEZ affected private cars in London were 305,009 down from 552,198 in March 2022. What has another three months done to those figures?
There are some jobs you leave because the evening has ended. The plates are cleared. The conversation has run its course. Someone is stacking chairs. It was good, perhaps even… Read more: When the first plates leave the pass
I am sorry about the title. Not very sorry, obviously. But sorry enough to acknowledge that “one weird trick” belongs more naturally beside adverts for miraculous belly-fat solutions, obscure pension… Read more: Here’s one weird trick that could save Keir Starmer
Last June I wrote a reflection on how vibe coding had made it possible to create some fireworks that helped bring our vision for the future of public employment support… Read more: Beyond the vibes
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