Since 2010 the UK economy has created an average of 800 jobs a day

Despite covid lockdowns, despite the war in Ukraine, despite destructive Bank of England policy creating a big inflation then seeking to create a small recession, unemployment has gone lower over the last 14 years and many jobs have been created.

Remain said Brexit would mean big job losses. It meant the reverse. The UK ran out of workers and turned to inviting in even more people to take all the extra jobs. Today this presents a better opportunity. Instead of inviting in so many to do relatively low paid jobs we need to cut back severely on legal migration. The government has promised to cut 300,000 but more should be the aim. We need a full commitment to a better paid more engaged UK workforce, armed with more investment to support higher productivity. The higher wages need to be earned.

Physical jobs require fuller automation to take the delays and hard work out of the tasks. Clerical tasks need more AI based automation to tackle all the repetitious and tedious parts of the old jobs.

Labour governments of the past have always left office with unemployment higher. Their boom/bust policies in the 1970s, and in the late 2000s threw too many people out of work. It is good unemployment remains low and job creation has been strong, but we need to do better with raising wages and productivity with the right training, machine support and investment. Public  sector productivity has fallen. There should be an immediate ban on external recruitment into the civil service and public administration.