Ashwin Prashad, the Tesco boss, says Britain is “sleepwalking into a quiet epidemic” of joblessness. That framing is convenient. It suggests drift. It suggests no one is steering. It suggests the country just somehow wandered here.

It did not.

The political and corporate elite built this labour market. Policy by policy, year by year. Weak investment. Hollowed-out industry. Training systems stripped back. Public health left to rot. A housing crisis that locks people in place. And on top of it all, a job market defined by low security, stagnant wages and no progression.

Now business leaders are surprised that millions sit outside it.

There is a ritual to these interventions. Employers warn about “inactivity.” Thinktanks publish alarming figures. Ministers promise schemes. The underlying structure remains untouched. Too many jobs that do not pay enough, do not last long enough, do not lead anywhere.

If work does not provide stability, people withdraw when they can. If illness goes untreated, people cannot return. If childcare costs more than wages, parents step back. If graduates cycle between short-term contracts and debt, they stall. None of this is mysterious.

Retail bosses talk about flexibility. Workers experience precarity. Employers talk about labour shortages. Workers see pay packets that do not cover rent. The gap between those realities is the story.

Profit drives the economy

Blaming regulation or employer taxes is a familiar move. It keeps the focus narrow. It avoids the larger question: what kind of economy produces this outcome? One built on low productivity, regional inequality and the slow cannibalisation of public infrastructure. Where profit is the driver above all else.

Unemployment at 5.1 per cent is not a moral failing. It is a structural one. Economic inactivity is not a cultural shift toward idleness. It is the predictable result of an economic model that produces too few secure, productive jobs and too many that offer neither.

Britain is not sleepwalking. It is following the logic of the system it chose.

You cannot spend a decade cheapening work, weakening the state and financialising everything in sight, then act shocked when millions are not ‘economically active’.

Workers need a political party and movement that can change this economic model. We need to fight for an alternative model where everybody works in jobs that are socially useful and are sustainable with mother earth. There are jobs for us all if we all work less hours. We need to take control.