The hollowing-out of middle-class jobs like mine has left me lonely and terrified

Telegraph

28-07-2025

My heart sank when I saw those damned words again: 'Thank you for your application but we have decided to move forward with other candidates.' As I read that sentence, four months of pain, humiliation, fear, and despair engulfed me, leaving me to stare dejectedly at the floor.
I've read that soul-destroying sentence, and dozens of variations of it, more than 250 times since I lost my job as part of cuts at the media organisation at which I worked earlier this year.
Each rejection has chipped away at my formerly bullet-proof confidence and peace of mind, leaving me wondering if I'll ever be useful to my family again? What is the point of me? Will my wife and son ever be able to look at me with pride?
Struggling for work despite decades of experience, transferable skills and a reputation for being a smart, hard-working team player was not supposed to be in the script.
Unemployment is worse than being stabbed
The pain of being out of work, dealing with hundreds of rejections, and constant worry over how you will be able to provide for your family is far, far worse than being stabbed in the throat by Jihadist terrorists. I can say this with absolute authority because that is exactly what happened to me on 3 June 2017.
Isis fanatics murdered eight innocent people during the London Bridge attack. I ended up being involved in it because earlier that evening, I helped a pub bouncer who was being assaulted by two drunks.
That fateful decision put me in the path of the Isis fanatics, who attacked the restaurant we were in. While defending my friends, I was stabbed twice and left to die in a bloody heap on the floor.
The odd thing about being stabbed in a life-or-death knife fight was that it did not immediately hurt. There was shock, but also a strange absence of pain, probably due to adrenalin.
After my physical recovery, the relief of surviving, the support of my family, friends, Fleet Street colleagues and peers helped me to recover quickly, while counselling sessions and talking openly about my ordeal has helped keep the demons at bay, bar the odd nightmare.
Unemployment is far worse. Not having a job, worrying about your family finances and the future… the guilt you feel about letting your wife, son, and parents down is crushing. Having fallen victim to job cuts twice in the space of 12 months, I feel mounting despair and fear that I am obsolete.
The anguish and torment is relentless
The guilt, fear, and worry, all of that anguish and torment, is present every single second of every single day. It is relentless and keeps me up at night.
I am fortunate to have such a wonderful, supportive wife, Cecile, but there is no disguising the anger she feels towards all the companies that rejected me, including the publisher that released me last year after 17 years of distinguished service as part of a cost-cutting drive.
She hides it, but she worries for the future. However, Cecile is extremely practical and so, while we are in a decent financial position now, we are starting to cut our expenses.
My parents are worried, as is my extended family. The problem for Britain is that my situation is not unique: according to recruiters, we're in a 'white-collar jobs recession'.
Experts warn that the growing use by businesses of artificial intelligence (AI) could compound this, resulting in job losses on a scale not seen since the deindustrialisation of Britain in the 1980s.
When Margaret Thatcher became prime minister in 1979, Britain was regarded as the sick man of Europe. To fix that, Thatcher sought to tame inflation, which had hit 25 per cent at times during the 1970s. By sharply hiking interest rates and slashing public spending, she succeeded. However, it came at a cost.
High interest rates reduced domestic consumption and business investment, hitting the economy and jobs. Worse, high rates strengthened sterling and made Britain's industrial sector, which started declining in the 1960s due to a widespread failure to invest and adapt, even more uncompetitive.
British exports became more expensive and so manufacturing job losses accelerated. From 1970 to 1979, manufacturing employment had fallen from 7.7 million to 6.7 million. Between 1979 and 1983, 1.5 million manufacturing jobs were lost.
In areas where there was a once dominant manufacturing employer which had shut down, demand fell for all the surrounding, dependent local businesses, further reducing employment.
That in turn hit local finances, impacting the availability and quality of services such as schools and hospitals. Coupled with people moving to seek work elsewhere, it left communities trapped in a cycle of decline.
The consequences of the deindustrialisation that devastated communities in the North, Midlands, Wales and across the country are still being felt today, decades after all those factories and plants shut, points out Valeria Rueda, assistant professor of economics at the University of Nottingham.
For a start, when areas suffer wide-scale manufacturing job losses they also see increases in suicide rates, drug overdose and alcoholism. In the US, says Rueda, this phenomenon is called 'deaths of despair'. 'In certain contexts, worklessness can be lethal,' she explains.
The loss of income and anxiety and stress that comes from unemployment does not just affect those who have lost their jobs, it impacts their children, as wealth is a key factor of health.
'Children of industrial decline'
Rueda pointed to studies that show that the health of the children born in coal industry areas during its decline tend to be shorter, have more extreme weights and worse physical and mental health than those who grew up in other parts of the country.
'These are the 'children of industrial decline' and today they still carry the scars of growing up through hard times,' says Rueda. 'Their offspring – the third generation affected – also appear to be born with poorer health.
'The negative health effects of massive job losses can transmit across generations, putting at risk the fundamental democratic principle of equality of opportunity.'
It come as 'no surprise' to Rueda that frustration has taken hold of people in areas that suffer from a chronic lack of economic opportunity, giving rise to popularism. 'The loss of industry jobs – which were not replaced by new ones or alleviated through improved access to other opportunities – has scarred health and brewed discontent across generations,' she notes.
Fast forward to today and economists and labour market observers point to a worrying trend. The latest Office for National Statistics data shows that job vacancies in the UK have fallen for 36 consecutive months, obliterating the previous record of 16, which was the result of the global financial crisis in 2008.
At the same time, the past three years has seen the rate of redundancies almost double from 55,000 people per month to 114,000, and the impact has fallen disproportionately on middle-aged and older workers. More than one million people have been made redundant over the past three years, with 34 per cent of the job losses hitting people between 35-49, while 30 per cent were aged 50-plus.
What is truly frightening is that all of this has occurred during a period of economic growth, albeit weak growth. The general consensus is that when an economy grows, jobs are added, and when it shrinks, jobs are lost. Yet this relationship appears to have broken down and experts believe this is down to a convergence of factors, including the rapid advance of AI.
Britain's cost-of-living crisis was prompted by inflation soaring from 0.4 per cent in February 2021 to a peak of 11.1 per cent in October the following year. Employers' costs rose as workers demanded increased pay to help them cope with squeezed living standards, which in turn fuelled further inflation.
In order to wrestle inflation back to its 2 per cent target rate, the Bank of England took a page out of Thatcher's book and hiked interest rates. As it was in the 1980s, it has come at a cost to the economy.
Increased demands on employers
'In the UK, interest rates are still quite a bit higher than they are in places like the Eurozone,' explains Julius Probst, European labour economist at Totaljobs, owned by The Stepstone Group. 'The Bank of England's rates policy was to put the brakes on [economic] growth to slow wage increases to get interest rates back to target. But now the Bank [of England] is worried.'
Employers are also struggling to contend with the increased demands that have been placed upon them by the Government. Prior to his career in the City, Panmure Liberum's head of research Simon French worked for the Department for Work & Pensions (DWP). 'When I was at the DWP,' he says, 'the idea was that any changes you brought in [that would affect employers] would be gradual.
'With this government, what we have had is an increase in employer national insurance contributions at the same time the national minimum wage is rising, as well as the changes coming in the Employment Rights Bill,' he continues. 'What we have is indigestion, in terms of the demands and work placed on employers at once.'
The bursting of the post-pandemic boom by high interest rates, slower demand, higher costs and the economic uncertainty caused by US President Donald Trump upending global trading, as well as ongoing conflicts, has seen employers look to rein in their costs by cutting jobs and freezing recruitment.
Probst agrees that the UK is now in a 'severe' white-collar jobs recession and that for middle-aged workers, finding work is much, much harder than it was previously. 'For middle-aged workers, if you want to change roles, it is very difficult as job postings are down and there is very little churn,' he says.
Prime targets for efficiency drives
Middle-aged people tend to occupy the rungs of middle management in white-collar roles and thus are the prime targets for efficiency drives, which invariably results in job cuts. However, business leaders warn that the children of those middle-aged, middle-class workers will increasingly struggle to get work.
Combine the two, business leaders warn, and the economic and social damage will be comparable to that suffered in the 1980s.
According to James Reed, chairman and chief executive of Reed recruitment agency, the increased burden on businesses is pushing them to embrace automation and the increasing use of AI to do what were traditionally white-collar jobs in order to save money.
Reed's internal data shows that graduate vacancies, as a proportion of total available jobs, have halved, down from 8 per cent to 4 per cent, since 2018. This is because automation and AI is taking graduate jobs in industries such as finance, accounting and law, and as the technology becomes more powerful and more widespread, it will result in more job losses.
'We're heading for a jobs crisis like the 1980s,' says Reed. 'Lots of people are going to be left behind as a result. If we see the hollowing-out of white-collar work it will affect millions of people, their living standards and the Government's tax take.
'The consequences of this have yet to be properly thought through, but there will be social, economic and fiscal consequences,' he adds.
The International Monetary Fund's managing director Kristalina Georgieva describes AI as a 'tsunami hitting the labour market'. She warns that 60 per cent of jobs in advanced nations such as the UK will in just a few years time be either 'enhanced, become more productive, or transformed, or eliminated'.
In other words, the technology could benefit humanity, or it could result in unseen levels of inequality. 'What is happening with AI, it can be a great story, a world that becomes more productive,' says Georgieva. 'Or it can be a sad story, a world that is more divided where the 'Haves' have more and the 'Have Nots' are completely lost,' she says.
'AI is going to replace half of all white-collar workers'
In June, I saw Ford chief executive Jim Farley deliver a blunt warning to parents at the Aspen Ideas Festival. He informed them that they need to make sure their children learn vocational skills for the 'essential economy' (basically anything that needs to be moved, built or fixed), as AI was going to wipe out millions of white-collar jobs.
'Hiring entry-level workers at tech companies has fallen 50 per cent since 2019,' noted Farley. 'Is this where we want our kids to go? AI is going to replace half of all white-collar workers.'
While the effects of the 1980s job losses are still being felt today, Panmure Liberum's French hopes that the transition to an AI-enabled economy will not be as brutal or long lasting.
'In economies there is destruction and then creation in times of technological change, but it does not occur simultaneously, there a gap,' he says. 'In the 1980s we had destruction, many jobs were lost, but eventually they were replaced with ones in call centres.
'This time around, my instinct says that the process will go faster than previously. Moving from manufacturing to services is a bigger leap than services to services, it's a clearer transition,' he continues. 'It will probably take years rather than decades, but that is just a guess.'
It seems that I am far from alone in being affected by the ongoing purge of middle-aged workers. Indeed, you only have to look at LinkedIn to see vast numbers of people posting about their increasingly difficult search for work.
'Broke and broken'
Joe Emery, 43, is a copy writer and has previously worked for Virgin Media O2 and City funds group M&G Investments. He was made redundant three years ago and, since then, he has only been able to pick up two nine-month temporary contracts, leaving him 'broke and broken'.
'It's been really, really hard,' he says. 'I ended up in psychiatric care, depressed and with suicidal thoughts. Only my family and friends have kept me going. It's been so stressful. I'm 43 and I have to rebuild my life, not from scratch but from multiple levels below zero.'
Watching your finances dwindle and the despair it brings is also something Craig Webster, 51, knows all about. Until the end of last year, he was a senior recruitment professional at an IT company.
He took voluntary redundancy and thought he would quickly find a new role. He did not. Seven months on and nearly 1,000 failed job applications later, Webster has finally returned to the workforce, but that time in between has left its scars.
Being rejected from a staggering number of employers was bad, admits Webster, and affected his mental health. But having to tell his son about his changed financial circumstances was far worse.
'I had to tell my son in May that we might have to stop going to watch Spurs together as I wouldn't have the money,' he says. 'Going to football, that's our thing and telling him that was painful – it made me feel like I was less of a dad.
'I've taken a role that is two levels below where I was, on half the money'
'I have lost six months of my life, my self-worth, and I have to start again,' he continues. 'I've taken a role that is two levels below where I was, on half the money, and I have had to cut my cloth accordingly. I have had to go backwards to go forwards.'
One of my neighbours, Jan*, was also fortunate in that it only took him three months to find a new job after being made redundant. However, that period of unemployment knocked him for six. 'I was dazed; it was incredible,' he says. 'I couldn't believe it. How could this be? I spent most of the day walking with the dogs.'
When you lose your job, you initially think you will bounce back instantly. But as the weeks become months, you quickly realise that all the things you took for granted from your formerly stable, comfortable life, will soon be beyond you.
My wife has a great career, but going from two decent incomes to just hers and my patchy, inconsistent freelance earnings means we're watching the purse strings. Our next holiday, for example, which was paid for and budgeted for last year, will be our last for a while.
I never felt alone or down in the aftermath of being stabbed by Isis. I had my family and friends around me, and I had the security of knowing that not only would I recover, I would be back at work stronger and better than ever.
Losing my job, my status in my chosen profession and my income is far worse. Nothing cuts quite as deep as looking at your son and knowing that you may not be able to provide the life he deserves.
Fortunately, my story is set to end on a happy note. I wrote a post on LinkedIn about my own difficulties in this jobs market and it led to a flood of messages and phone calls from interested groups and, most importantly, job offers. The upshot is I have shaken hands on one offer and I cannot wait to get started.
I am lucky, but there are too many talented, middle-aged and middle-class people out there wondering where their next pay cheque will come from, and what future their children will have. My four months of hell is nothing compared to what some of them have been through.