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All UK readers no doubt remember the couple of weeks they spent in year 11 (fifth form) doing 'work experience', whereby they spent a blissful two weeks off school, making coffee for the superiors in a variety of local employment scenarios.

You were supposed to arrange something that, at least vaguely, matched your future career ambitions, so I acquired myself a position at the Sale and Altrincham Messenger, a nearby local newspaper. However, I ended up not going, because I tore the ligament in my knee the weekend before and was remanded to crutches, leaving me unable to negotiate the office building's many stairs. I like to think this was divine intervention, saving me from a possible MSM career (rather than the consequence of inveigling my way into a local pub, having too much to drink, and slipping over on the sticky dance floor...).

A quick Google confirms school work experience schemes are still alive and well, with official blurb stating:

"The Government’s work experience ambition is an equitable approach that will facilitate a variety of experiences for learners starting early, connecting education and young people with industry and unlocking the skills and opportunities of the future workforce. 

From September 2026, all schools should be reforming their work experience programmes providing a minimum of two weeks’ worth of work experience by Year 11 (during Key Stages 3 and 4), made up of:

• At least one week of work experience activities in Years 7–9
• At least one week of placements in Years 10–11

This ambition will ensure access for all young people, enable flexibility for schools, learners, and employers to design experiences that meet local and individual needs."

What actual use this "work experience" is to anyone remains a highly questionable subject (explored rather astutely in this episode of the often excruciatingly accurate British comedy, The Inbetweeners), but the point is: we have it. We have always had it and nobody leaves school without it (unless they have a doctored Young Person's Railcard with a fake birthday enabling them to get into dingy pubs the weekend before and injure their knee...).

Hence, the elaborate media fawning that cartoon Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, is receiving today for announcing that he will provide 10,000+ young people with 'work experience', when they already get this at school, is rather incongruous... until one realises what Mr Burnham is actually proposing to provide them with, or rather, to provide wealthy employers with.

An army of 10,000 unpaid slave labourers.

The retail giant Sainsbury's, which reported a post-tax profit of £242 million in the 2024-2025 financial year (up roughly 77% from the previous year), has announced it will take on a workforce of 10,000 young people that it will not pay in order to give them 'work experience'.

Simon Roberts, Sainsbury’s chief executive, said: “Like so many of us, I started my working life at 16 and know first-hand how much getting that first job really matters. Few things matter more to us at Sainsbury’s than helping young people get on that first rung on the career ladder. With a quarter of our colleagues under 25, we see every day how much a first job can change lives."

When Mr Roberts says he began his "working" life at 16, and talks of getting a "first job", we can be sure he is not talking about an (in)voluntary position foisted on him by the state for which he was not paid.

To therefore conflate acquiring a paid role which offers real opportunities to progress and earn more money, to what is now being offered to young people instead, is a particularly sinister form of social engineering, and to use marketing-speak, "managing expectations".

Namely, the expectation that after 12 years of full-time education, a person might reasonably expect to get a paying job.

Now, something very different will be on offer to school-leavers, in the shape of this new initiative, disingenuously entitled 'KickStarter' (a starting kick whilst they're down, though, I suppose).

The scheme will be specifically active in deprived areas with high unemployment rates and high levels of free school meal eligibility, because, Andy Burnham claimed:

"Access to opportunity and work experience shouldn’t depend on who you know, it should be within reach for every young person wherever they live."

I can categorically state that the "opportunity" to work for free in a supermarket is not dependent at all on "where you live" or "who you know" (supermarkets already try to cajole out of work people into this, as I detailed in a previous article).

Hence, Mr Burnham is deviously attempting to use the rhetoric that excludes less privileged people from genuinely prestigious opportunities, such as acquiring training contracts at a law firm or coveted internships at top media houses, and applying it to working for free at Tesco's.

Sorry, Sainsbury's (I suppose it is a bit more upmarket, after all).

To get a foot in the door in aspirational, lucrative industries is indeed dependent on connections and location. To stack baked beans in aisle 3 followed by mopping up some child sick is not.

Nevertheless, gaining a paid position stacking beans and mopping sick is now so hotly competitive (entry-level retail vacancies can receive over 500 applications) that we are now in the ridiculous position where the country's premier can frame being an indentured slave for an enormously wealthy corporate giant as a privilege that he is gallantly extending to the disadvantaged.

What he is actually doing, by focusing this exploitative initiative on areas where real opportunities are scarce, is creating neo-feudalism, where an ultra-wealthy baron class (corporate CEOs) are able to absorb even more wealth and power by relying on the unpaid labour of a powerless slave class who have no opportunity to acquire real economic (and therefore political) autonomy through fairly remunerated work.

Burnham is capitalising on the fact that, in an increasing number of areas, there are effectively no opportunities for the young (that's why so many go to subpar universities to do Mickey Mouse degrees, because at least it is the opportunity to do something). This is not because the young lack 'experience' (nobody needs experience for entry-level jobs, that's rather the point of them), but because the opportunities simply do not exist. Local businesses aren't hiring, and on the rare occasions they are, are instantly swamped with applications.

So, instead of committing to creating more opportunities, Burnham is instead doing the opposite. Removing incentives from employers to offer paid roles, by offering them unpaid labour subsidised by the taxpayer instead.

Reform announced only a few days ago that they would introduce something very similar, by requiring unemployed people to work for 20 hours a week to receive unemployment benefits. Now, as well as the long-term unemployed, disadvantaged young people will join this new slave class.

All major parties will go lockstep on this initiative (because they are all one and the same entity), as it is an essential stepping stone to the ultimate endgame:

No more autonomy for the masses, whereby they can work towards a self-defined future and freedom by pursuing paid work, but rather, they will subsist on a fixed state stipend that they must qualify for by working for free.

At the moment, that stipend may be called 'unemployment benefit' but before long, it will be called UBI - Universal Basic Income.

That's the ultimate goal for the control-freak ruling classes, because once the populace is completely dependent on them for survival via UBI, and acquiring fairly paid work is no longer an option for millions, it's fait accompli. The overlords can then direct society, and the individuals within it, exactly as they choose.

Note that the U in UBI stands for universal - available to everyone - rather than unconditional - available with no conditions attached. So we can be absolutely sure that there will be conditions.

For those people who retain paid employment and simply receive UBI as an additional bonus, this won't necessarily be a huge problem. If they don't like the conditions set to receive it, they can simply exempt themselves from receipt.

Yet those people who are unable to access paid work and are wholly dependent on UBI will be in a terrible and entrenched trap.

Corporations want an army of free workers to increase their shareholders' profits? No problem, just tell the UBI class they're now required to work 20 hours a week for free or lose their UBI

A "pandemic" sweeps the nation that can only be ended by a lucrative "vaccine"? Easily solved, make UBI receipt conditional on vaccine status.

During covid, some employers threatened workers with a similar ultimatum - take the vaccine or lose your job - but there remained another option to those confronted with such a choice: get another job. Whilst paid work exists, that option is always open to people and so they can never be entirely controlled by the state.

Yet once the opportunity to access paid work is, for millions, lost, and the only way of acquiring the money necessary to live is to depend on the government, then all bargaining power and autonomy the people have against nefarious power structures disintegrates.

This is precisely why the WEF's Yuval Noah Harari has cautioned (or rather, perhaps, gloated) that the masses face a new and much more dangerous predicament than they have ever faced before: for many centuries, the primary risk of being working class was being exploited by wealthier and more powerful people.

Now, the primary risk of being working class is being redundant to those powerful people.

At least when someone is being exploited they have a form of bargaining power, because the exploiter wants something from them. Once that is no longer the case, and the person is considered surplus to requirements, any such power is lost.

When industry requires workers, and there aren't a huge surplus of them available, workers can negotiate directly in terms of pay and conditions with their employers, with the option to withdraw their labour if conditions became too intolerable and seek alternate employment. Yet if there is no direct financial relationship between worker and employee, and therefore no compulsion to produce the kind of conditions that will retain workers, the worker loses all power.

I have vigorously campaigned against the culture of working for free for years for precisely this reason. With some very limited exceptions, working unpaid is not noble, virtuous, or something people should be expected to do to be considered for the great privilege of being compensated fairly for their own labour. In fact, it is a sinister and exploitative trap which only benefits the most wealthy and powerful whilst systematically stripping power and autonomy from everyone else.

That goes for more cushy "internships" in media and creative industries, certainly - companies should pay their interns or they necessarily exclude everyone who can't afford to work for free, plus working for free typically sets up a terrible dynamic between the employer and worker, as people inevitably don't respect what, or who, they get for free.

But it most definitely goes for entry-level, low-skilled work which nobody should ever be told is a wonderful "privilege" to do for free, whilst fat cat CEOs rake in the dosh on the back of literal slave labour.

The youth unemployment crisis is not caused by young people possessing a skills deficit in stacking shelves, mopping floors, or any other basic tasks as constitute supermarket work - and even if it were, these skills can easily be taught in one day's training.

It is caused by a deficit of opportunities, evidenced by the fact that there are not currently 10,000 vacancies at Sainsbury's, so how is the supermarket going to create space to take on all these young workers?

Obviously, they will terminate the paid positions of many staff, thus saving themselves an estimated £2 million per week in wages.

Many other businesses, as I outlined in this article, will follow suit (the Prime Minister is already enthusiastically encouraging them to) - and not always because they want to, but because they have to.

More and more businesses are collapsing because they can no longer meet spiralling staff costs, as imposed by the government. If, then, they are offered the opportunity of free labour, and the choice is to take it, or lose their business permanently, it's obvious what choice most business owners will make.

In other words, this situation is wholly engineered in order to induct us into the next desired stage of the agenda, an agenda that was - to use the government's terminology - 'kickstarted' in the fake pandemic.

Innumerable businesses went under because of the 'covid' episode, therefore severely hampering the ability of millions to be autonomous and self-sufficient through work. These latest plans are the next stage of that same plan, to further entrench joblessness (it's not a job if you're not earning) and powerlessness amongst the working classes - a social demographic that is bigger than ever, as graduate opportunities sharply contract and more and more leave the economic middle classes.

Now, if we wanted to get really conspiratorial (and why wouldn't we, after all), we could start to look at what the ramifications will be for social relationships, gender roles, and family formation once it's become entirely normalised that young people should offer their labour - labour perhaps being the operative word - to the wealthier and more privileged for free.

What's one thing the wealthier and more privileged seem to be especially struggling with at the moment, something that tends to come far more easily to younger and less privileged people?

Fertility.

Wealthy, older people are increasingly making use of the fertility of younger, poorer people, through gamete "donation" and surrogacy, in order to build their families, because they are either unable or unwilling to reproduce in the conventional ways themselves.

It is, therefore, entirely plausible and realistic that we could enter a future scenario where disadvantaged youngsters are compelled to offer their reproductive abilities to wealthier and more powerful people, or go hungry.

I mean, why not? If they can be compelled to use their bodies for unpaid labour such as stacking shelves and cleaning strerts, in order to receive subsistence-level income, why could they not be compelled to use their bodies in other ways, too?

When we consider that Reform, who are the intended next administration in the UK, are explicit about their aims to scrap various human rights legislation, including repealing the Human Rights Act, removing the UK from the European Convention of Human Rights, and abolishing the Equality Act, anything's possible.

This is particularly so when framed within the context of Reform's recent strong push for traditional families, stating they will prioritise housing for married couples with children, de-prioritising single parents, and that marriage and conventional families should be incentivised and rewarded. It is important to note when evaluating who will be most impacted by these policies that marriage has increasingly become a marker of social class, with members of the middle and upper classes far more likely to engage in it than the working classes.

If, then, a well-off married couple is not able to produce their own children - as increasing numbers of married couples are not - could disadvantaged and out of work younger people be obliged to provide a family for them?

In short, could we go full Handmaid's Tale?

This may sound absurd to imagine, but it is in fact the logical conclusion of a society where being unable to acquire paid work is treated as a moral deficit, and those with money and means are automatically treated as morally superior, and thus entitled to the labour of the less privileged. That is the society being created by proposals to have young, disadvantaged people working menial jobs for free, and so we should be fully aware of exactly what this could descend into.

If it's ethically acceptable to further enrich the coffers of vastly wealthy CEOs by compelling young and disadvantaged people to work for them unpaid, why not put this same class of people to work in other ways, enriching the personal and familial lives of the wealthy, too?

Already, struggling university students and other disadvantaged women are targeted with manipulative marketing campaigns, encouraging them to "donate" their eggs, or flat out sell their babies, to richer people.

And the same politicians pushing the importance of marriage, keep telling us we need to boost the birth rate, so what better use of taxpayers money than to pay a subsidy to young, single, unemployed women to produce babies for people who are in the proper position to bring them up?

I know many will scoff and call me a crazy conspiracy theorist for making such ludicrous predictions, but I also got that response when I said the government would fake a pandemic to dupe people into taking bioweapon injections...

As I said at the time I made that prediction, I certainly hope I am a "crazy conspiracy theorist", if that is taken to mean "being wrong".

The problem is, as the last six years have particularly vividly demonstrated to us, the fringe crazies seem to all too often be getting it right...

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