Steven Murphy / Earthism / Earth Tax
The Government Says Unemployment Is 4.9%.
What Would You Say If I Told You It Was 17% And Climbing?
Today the government reports unemployment at 4.9%. That figure is presented as evidence of a relatively healthy labour market and a stable economy. Ministers repeat it. Headlines carry it. And most people accept it at face value.
But that number only tells a small part of the story.
I am not saying the politicians are lying. I am not saying the statisticians are making things up. What I am saying is that with a little administrative wizardry — with the careful choice of what to count and what to quietly leave out — numbers can be made to look considerably better than the reality on the ground. Not false. Not fabricated. Just conveniently incomplete.
And in the gap between the number they give us and the reality we live in, the true scale of Britain’s labour market problem quietly sits. Unacknowledged. Unaddressed. And growing.
The first layer of wizardry starts before we even get to who is counted as unemployed. It starts with the definition of working age itself.
The ONS defines working age as 16 to 64. That boundary was set decades ago when the state pension age was 65. But the state pension age is now 66 and rising to 67 between 2026 and 2028. Everyone aged 65 and 66 who has not yet reached state pension age — people who could be working, who are not yet entitled to retire — is simply removed from the working age population calculation entirely. They are not counted as working age and they are not counted as inactive. They disappear from the picture.
So the very foundation of the calculation is built on an outdated definition that nobody has bothered to update. The retirement age has moved. The definition has not. And that gap — quietly, invisibly — makes the participation numbers look slightly better than they actually are.
That is the wizardry before we have even started counting.
The official unemployment rate then applies a second and more significant layer. It counts only people who are not working, who are actively looking for work, and who are available to start. That is it. Everyone else who is not working gets quietly placed into other categories. And those categories are never mentioned when ministers stand up and talk about low unemployment.
The result is a headline figure that is technically correct and economically misleading at the same time.
To understand the real picture you have to look at the groups the official rate excludes. These are working age adults who are not working and not counted as unemployed because they fall into administrative categories that remove them from the labour force altogether. No students. No early retirees. Just working age people who are not working and who are receiving welfare support with no requirement to seek employment.
The first and largest group is those on long term sickness and disability. The government’s own Keep Britain Working review, published in March 2026, confirms that 2.8 million working age adults are economically inactive due to ill health. These individuals receive support through Universal Credit’s health and disability provisions. They are not required to seek work. And because they are not required to seek work they do not appear in the unemployment rate. Yet they are out of the labour market and their absence has real and measurable economic consequences.
But the more revealing number comes directly from the Department for Work and Pensions itself. Of the 8.4 million people currently claiming Universal Credit, 4.2 million sit in what the DWP calls the no work requirements conditionality group. These are people who have been officially assessed as not required to seek employment at all. The group includes the long term sick, unpaid carers, and others on long term welfare with no work obligation. It is not a fringe category. It has now overtaken the searching for work group to become the largest single conditionality group in the entire Universal Credit system. And it is still growing.
None of these 4.2 million people appear in the official unemployment figure. They are not counted because they are not required to look for work. But they are not working. They are receiving welfare. And their economic absence is as real as anyone else who is out of the labour market.
Add the 1.76 million people who are officially counted as unemployed and the real number of working age adults who are either officially unemployed or receiving welfare with no work requirement rises to just under 6 million.
That is not 4.9% of the working age population. It is approximately 17.5%.
And if you think 17.5% is bad, consider this. The ONS still defines working age as 16 to 64. The state pension age is now 66 and rising to 67. Everyone aged 65 and 66 who is not yet entitled to their pension and is not working is simply invisible in these figures. They fall outside the working age definition so they are not counted as inactive. They are not counted at all. The true picture is therefore even worse than 17.5%. We just cannot say by exactly how much because the wizardry extends to the definition of working age itself. The boundary has not moved even though the retirement age has.
Now I want to be clear about something. I am not blaming the individuals in these groups. Long term sickness is real. Caring responsibilities are real. The people in these categories are not making lifestyle choices. They are in difficult circumstances and many of them need genuine support.
But the structural problem they represent is also real. And it cannot be understood, debated, or addressed through a headline figure that hides the vast majority of it. When the government tells you unemployment is 4.9% it is not lying to you. It is giving you a number that is true within its own narrow definition. What it is not doing is giving you the full picture. And in the difference between the narrow definition and the full picture sits a labour market problem of enormous scale that our economic policy, our welfare reform agenda, and our public spending decisions are barely beginning to confront.
This is the wizardry I am talking about. Not deception. Definition. Choose what to count carefully enough and the number looks manageable. Use an outdated definition of working age and remove a whole age group from the calculation. Place millions of non-workers into administrative categories that sit outside the unemployment measure. And the headline looks fine while the reality keeps getting worse.
The no work requirements group alone has more than doubled since 2019. 4.2 million people assessed as having no obligation to work. That number did not appear from nowhere. It grew through a combination of genuine health pressures, an increasingly complex welfare system, and a series of political choices about who should and should not be required to seek employment. Each individual decision was defensible. The cumulative result is a figure that dwarfs the official unemployment count and receives almost no political attention.
A country cannot meaningfully address productivity, growth, or public spending without confronting the real number. It cannot design welfare reform, skills policy, or economic strategy around a figure that excludes 4.2 million people who are receiving benefits with no obligation to contribute. It cannot close a structural deficit while pretending that 17.5% non-participation is actually 4.9%.
The real number is not 4.9%. It is closer to 17.5%. And even that understates it because the definition of working age has not kept pace with a retirement age that keeps moving.
That is not a minor statistical footnote. That is the difference between a country that understands its own labour market and one that has chosen a comfortable number over an honest conversation.
But I want to take this further. Because the fiscal argument — as important as it is — is only part of what is being hidden here.
Every one of these 6 million people exists on this planet. Every one of them consumes food, water, energy, and resources. Every one of them generates waste, creates pollution, and places a cost on the ecosystem that sustains all of us. They pay no income tax. They contribute nothing to the productive economy. But they draw from the natural world in exactly the same way as everyone else who is alive.
I call this the Earth Tax. It is the oldest tax in the history of this planet. It is not a political invention or an economic construct. It is a biological reality. Every living thing on earth pays it. Every species that exists within a functioning ecosystem contributes to that ecosystem in some form — pollinating, decomposing, regulating, sustaining. Contribution is not optional in nature. It is the price of existence within a system that depends on balance to survive.
Every other species on this planet understands this without being taught it. A bee that does not pollinate. A tree that does not photosynthesize. A predator that does not hunt. Nature does not carry them indefinitely. The system has no mechanism for passengers because the system itself depends on contribution for its own survival.
Only human societies have constructed that exemption. And the question that nobody in politics is willing to ask is a simple one.
What is their purpose? What value do they add — to our society and to the planet itself?
That is not a cruel question. It is the most fundamental question a functioning society can ask about its own structure. It is the question that every other species answers automatically through the act of existing within a natural system. It is the question that our political class has decided we are not allowed to ask because asking it threatens the dependency they have spent decades constructing and protecting.
Because here is the truth that sits underneath all of this. The expansion of the no work requirements group was not done for planetary reasons. It was not done because it is good for the ecosystem. It was not done because it creates a more sustainable or more productive society. It was done for political reasons. Pure and simple.
Dependency creates loyalty. Loyalty creates votes. The more people who rely on the state for their survival the more people who will vote to protect the state that sustains them. Politicians have constructed and expanded a system of human exemption from contribution not out of compassion but out of calculation. They have framed dependency as kindness and contribution as cruelty. They have made it politically impossible to ask what these people are for. And they have done all of this while the fiscal cost mounts, the ecological cost mounts, and the burden on those who do contribute gets heavier with every passing year.
We have reached a point where we need to challenge something that most people consider unchallengeable. The idea that humans are special. That human life must be preserved and supported at all costs regardless of contribution, regardless of consequence, regardless of the burden placed on the ecosystem that sustains all life. That assumption is not a law of nature. It is a cultural and political construct. And it is one that the planet itself is now pushing back against.
I am not saying this because I do not value human life. I am saying it because I value the planet that makes human life possible. And those two things are increasingly in conflict. Every environmental indicator on earth — species collapse, soil degradation, ocean acidification, climate disruption, resource depletion — is the ecosystem’s response to a species that decided it was exempt from the rules that govern everything else. That decided it was above the system. That the planet existed to serve it rather than the other way around.
The Earth Tax cannot be avoided indefinitely. Nature does not offer a no work requirements conditionality group. It does not have a DWP. It does not run a deficit. It simply maintains balance — and when a species exceeds the carrying capacity of the system that sustains it the system corrects. Not out of cruelty. Out of necessity.
We have built a political system that exempts millions of people from contribution. That allows them to consume, waste, and pollute at the cost of everyone else. That cannot be questioned without being labelled heartless. And that has been constructed not to save the planet but to save the votes of the political class that benefits from the dependency it has created.
The wizardry works on the unemployment figures. The definition of working age is out of date and nobody has fixed it. The headline looks fine. The real number keeps growing. And the planet keeps paying for a system that was never designed with it in mind.
4.9% unemployment. 17.5% reality. At least 6 million people in the no work requirements economy. A working age definition that has not kept pace with a retirement age that keeps moving. And a political class that built it, protects it, and calls it compassion.
The Earth Tax is the oldest tax in history. Every living thing pays it.
Except us.
