My fool of an Economics teacher came in this morning and wasted an hour and twenty minutes of my life with a sermon on an old article he had downloaded from The Independent: “AI job cuts hitting UK hardest, research finds” (26^th January 2026). We were all supposed to tremble at the news that artificial intelligence is shedding British jobs faster than elsewhere, that “graduate roles” are disappearing, and that respectable service-sector professions are under threat. We were all expected to sympathise. The tubby dross sprawled about me looked worried, which was, I suppose, the next best response. I did not sympathise, and I did not go through the motions of looking worried.

For decades, Britain has sustained a bloated middle layer of clerks, consultants, coordinators, analysts, diversity officers, media apparatchiks, policy advisers, and other occupational ephemera whose principal economic function has been to talk to one another and justify their own existence. They have not produced food, energy, machines, housing, or anything else that keeps a civilisation alive. What they have produced, in abundance, are legitimising ideologies: reports explaining why borders do not matter, curricula explaining why the nation’s past is wicked, HR policies explaining why competence is oppressive, regulatory frameworks explaining why nothing useful may be built without years of consultation and delay.

This class has been the favoured client of the British ruling order. In exchange for comfortable salaries, followed by defined-benefit pensions, it has acted as the regime’s priesthood. It wrote the scripts. It marked the essays. It staffed the quangos. It explained to the rest of us why our instincts were wrong and their abstractions were right. It was sheltered from competition and protected from technological change by institutional inertia and credentialism. It mistook this protection for merit. Now the protection is failing.

AI does not care about degrees in “creative industries management” or “applied social policy.” It does not need meetings or safeguarding briefings. It can summarise, draft, analyse, translate, and predict faster and more cheaply than the median white-collar worker whose job consists largely of manipulating text and numbers inside closed systems. That is not a bug. It is a correction.

The panic is therefore understandable. A class that has spent a generation telling coal miners, factory workers, and shop assistants that “the future is services” is discovering that services are uniquely vulnerable to improvements in information technology. Physical production is constrained by materials, energy, transport, and geography. Services float on symbols. Symbols are easy to automate.

This brings us to the alternative, and more interesting, reading of the data. Britain’s losses are not simply the result of AI adoption. They are the result of a long-term structural error. We dismantled production and replaced it with paperwork. We replaced engineers with compliance officers, mechanics with consultants, craftsmen with “stakeholder engagement leads.” We allowed ourselves to believe that a country could live indefinitely by selling each other financial products and marketing strategies. But an economy built on services is brittle. It scales badly. It is prone to fashion and sudden obsolescence. Above all, it depends on the continued plausibility of its own narratives. Once a machine can do the talking faster and better, the talkers are exposed.

The most revealing detail in the reporting is not the job losses themselves, but who is complaining. We hear from mayors, think-tankers, and tech executives proposing universal basic income. We do not hear from welders, plumbers, electricians, or machinists demanding protection from AI. The reason is obvious. Their work is anchored in the physical world. The threatened jobs are not.

There is, of course, a moral objection that will be raised. What happens to the displaced? What about dignity and fairness? And what about them? These are the same people who had no such concerns when entire regions were deindustrialised in the name of efficiency and globalisation. They told others to retrain, to move, to adapt. Now the advice is being returned, and they do not like the taste.

Nor should we ignore the political dimension. Much of the class now facing redundancy has been actively hostile to national cohesion and democratic accountability. It has enforced censorship regimes. It has invented ever more intrusive compliance requirements. It has treated dissent as pathology. If AI quietly removes myriads of these people from positions of cultural influence, that is not a social catastrophe. It is a strategic gain.

None of this is to say that AI will produce a utopia. It will not. Nor is it to say that technological change is painless. It never is. But there is something comic about watching a class that believed itself immune to material reality discover that it, too, is subject to economic law.

A country that wishes to survive will have to relearn how to make things: energy, machinery, infrastructure, and food. It will have to value competence over credentials and production over narrative management. AI will not do that work for us. But it may, by clearing out the ideological undergrowth, make it possible again.

If that means mass unemployment among the useless and parasitic wing of the middle classes, so be it. They were never indispensable. They were merely protected. Now the protection is gone. That, in itself, is progress.

Because it was raining again this morning, I was too dispirited to say this in class. But I have now, and I feel better for it.