Rachel Reeves has killed the UK jobs market. Now she’s twisting the knife.
Chancellor Rachel Reeves is creating havoc in the jobs market (Image: Getty)
Labour isn’t working. The unemployment rate has climbed every month since the chancellor’s maiden Budget in October 2024. It’s jumped from 4.1% to 5% on Reeves’s watch, with forecasters warning of 200,000 job losses this year. Youth unemployment has soared to a 12-year high of 14.7%. A generation of school-leavers and graduates can’t find jobs, sinking their prospects for life. That’s on Reeves.
Her first act of madness was to hike employers’ National Insurance bills by a staggering £25billion. She also slashed the threshold at which employers pay NI to just £5,000. For good measure, she piled on two inflation-busting minimum wage increases. Employers responded exactly as anybody with a basic grasp of economics would expect. They stopped hiring young people. Too expensive. Angela Rayner‘s employment reforms only added to the cost and worry of taking on newbies. Together, they’ve created a jobs bloodbath.
The number of 16 to 24-year-olds not in education, employment or training, known as Neets, is now on course to hit 1.25million. The government’s own jobs czar Alan Milburn called it our worst worklessness crisis for a quarter of a century. Now Reeves is adding insult to injury.
Tax rises aren’t the only issue here. Immigration plays a role too. Research by the Centre for Social Justice found employers are hiring 27 young workers from outside the EU for every British youngster taken on.
HMRC figures show the number of non-EU foreign nationals under 25 in employment jumped from 81,500 in January 2020 to 370,900 by December 2025. That’s almost 300,000 more. Much of that happened under the disastrous ‘Boriswave’ unleashed by those useless Tories. Now Reeves is giving the trend another push.
The Government is ow subsidising visa costs for overseas recruits, handing them £5,000 per worker, while fast-tracking applications. Businesses in technology, life sciences and clean energy will benefit. Even Labour man Milburn has warned employers are using cheap foreign labour instead of hiring British talent. Now Reeves is subsidising them to the tune of £5k each.
Last year, Reeves unveiled a Youth Guarantee scheme promising work, training or education to the unemployed. But she’s the one who destroyed those jobs in the first place. Now she’s tapping up taxpayers to fund schemes to replace opportunities that she’s personally destroyed.
The private sector creates real jobs when politicians allow it to. Those jobs generate growth, prosperity and tax revenues. State-run employment schemes burn money and flop. If they ever get off the ground.
So the chancellor has driven up youth unemployment, launched a taxpayer-funded rescue operation and simultaneously made it cheaper for firms to bring in workers from overseas. There really is no end to the madness of Rachel Reeves.