George Osborne has committed the Conservatives to targeting “full employment”, saying that tax and welfare changes would help achieve it. Firstly, this is impossible. Secondly, explaining why is … well …

Missed this when it was finished, but Charlie Stross is very good on the notion of employment and the weakening reasoning behind expecting people to have it, and to need it, in an age of ever-increasing automation and efficiency drives by a corporate culture seeking to maximise and concentrate wealth. And on the slow, inexorable failure of the current democratic system to serve the needs of the least well-off as the old paradigm that work = pay = food crumbles as more and more work becomes jobs-for-the-sake-of-jobs, not for what it adds to society.