From Amazon’s monitored warehouse hell to delivery workers being paid per package, exploitative work destroys collaborative relationships young people need — more screen time and 12 new AI ‘friends’ will only make things worse, writes ALAN SIMPSON

THE 1.5 million households in Britain facing destitution and the 10 million simply in poverty will have wept at the emptiness of the government’s Queen’s Speech programme.
There’s to be no emergency Budget to pay the first £1,000 of spiralling energy costs, no windfall tax on oil and gas profiteering, no restoration of cuts in universal credit, no radical plan to support local food supply, no national home insulation programme.
Instead, communities are promised new rights to determine their local street names. I can see us all fighting to get in first — Destitution Row, Food Bank Close(d), Disconnection Drive, Poverty Place ... We will all be itching to redefine our place in Boris’s Broken Britain.
In case we get fed up with this, families will also get the right to object to their neighbour’s home improvement plans. This will not, of course, build a single new house or improve and insulate any existing ones. What it will do is shift the locus of social conflict from the catastrophic failure of government to the questionable conduct of our neighbours.

From Amazon’s monitored warehouse hell to delivery workers being paid per package, exploitative work destroys collaborative relationships young people need — more screen time and 12 new AI ‘friends’ will only make things worse, writes ALAN SIMPSON

ALAN SIMPSON warns that Starmer’s triangulation strategy will fail just as New Labour’s did, with each rightward move by Labour pushing Tories further right

ALAN SIMPSON warns of a dystopian crossroads where Trump’s wrecking ball meets AI-driven alienation, and argues only a Green New Deal can repair our fractured society before techno-feudalism consumes us all
