Jobs for the Bots

In the great British art of management relations, there are essentially two methods by which a workforce can be made more efficient. One is to make people poorer while demanding more work; the other is to deprive them of their living altogether. Team Starmer's efficiencies in the civil service appear likely to be the latter variety, though not without some pious preliminary finger-wagging about the culture of shirkerdom and unambition that makes it All Their Own Fault. A spokesbeing has now reasserted Team Starmer's commitment to improving skills by firing a few thousand people who have acquired them, and to harnessing new technologies so that the country may better serve the interests of Elon Musk. Besides, at a time of hard choices and tough decisions, it is only to be expected that the party of working people should reduce its own workforce and thus economise as far as possible on the number of people it has to worry about.