Graduate roles plummet as Reeves's job tax bites
Graduate job openings have plummeted by more than 20pc as Rachel Reeves's tax raid prompts businesses to cut back hiring for entry level positions.
New figures from recruitment platform Adzuna show graduate job listings have plunged 22.8 pc in the year to April.
Companies have slashed recruitment in an attempt to make savings following the Chancellor's autumn Budget, which increased employment costs from last month. The rate of employers' National Insurance increased, while the threshold at which it is paid was lowered.
Graduates are bearing the brunt of Ms Reeves's tax raid. On a monthly basis, vacancies for graduate roles fell by 7.6pc in April, following a 17.3pc drop in March.
The sharp decline in entry-level jobs comes amid growing questions over the value of university degrees, particularly as graduate schemes now offer salaries only in line with the minimum wage.
The National Living Wage climbed 6.7pc to £12.21 per hour in April, meaning a full-time worker on the UK's lowest salary now earns the equivalent of £25,500 annually.
Growth in the minimum wage has outpaced average pay across the economy and one in four jobs advertised to graduates on jobs platform Indeed now pays minimum wage or only scarcely higher.
The figures reveal that university leavers are faced with one of the most challenging labour markets in years.
Even the professional services and accounting sector, which has long been one of the biggest graduate employers in the country, has recorded a decline in recruitment.
Earlier this year PwC froze hiring for one of its apprenticeship schemes and abandoned its practice of offering permanent positions to staff who graduated from it. In a bid to reduce headcounts KPMG, Deloitte, EY and PwC have all cut back on hiring graduates, school leavers and apprentices.
Adzuna's figures show that vacancies across the economy declined by 0.95pc in April to 862,876.
Andrew Hunter, co-founder of Adzuna, said: 'After signs of recovery in March, April brought a reminder that this remains a delicate job market. Vacancies dipped and salary growth, while still strong on an annual basis, is starting to show signs of slowing.'
Figures released by the Office for National Statistics earlier this month revealed that the number of jobs advertised across the country fell to 761,000 in the three months to April, down from 804,000 for the previous three-month period.
It marks the worst jobs market since January 2017, excluding the pandemic.
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San Francisco Chronicle
27 minutes ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Kenyan author and dissident who became a giant of modern literature, dies at 87
NEW YORK (AP) — Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, the revered Kenyan man of letters and voice of dissent who in dozens of fiction and nonfiction books traced his country's history from British imperialism to home-ruled tyranny and challenged not only the stories told but the language used to tell them, died Wednesday at 87. Derek Warker, publicist for Ngũgĩ's U.S. publisher The New Press, confirmed the death to The Associated Press. Further details were not immediately available, though Ngũgĩ was receiving kidney dialysis treatments. Whether through novels such as 'The Wizard of the Crow' and 'Petals of Blood,' memoirs such as 'Birth of a Dream Weaver' or the landmark critique 'Decolonizing the Mind,' Ngũgĩ embodied the very heights of the artist's calling — as a truth teller and explorer of myth, as a breaker of rules and steward of culture. He was a perennial candidate for the Nobel literature prize and a long-term artist in exile, imprisoned for a year in the 1970s and harassed for decades after. 'Resistance is the best way of keeping alive,' he told the Guardian in 2018. 'It can take even the smallest form of saying no to injustice. If you really think you're right, you stick to your beliefs, and they help you to survive.' He was admired worldwide, by authors ranging from John Updike to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and by former President Barack Obama, who once praised Ngũgĩ's ability to tell 'a compelling story of how the transformative events of history weigh on individual lives and relationships.' Ngũgĩ was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2009, was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle prize in 2012 and, four years later, was the winner of the Pak Kyong-ni Literature Award. Through Ngũgĩ's life, you could dramatize the history of modern Kenya. He grew up on land stolen from his family by British colonists. He was a teenager when the Mau Mau uprising for independence began, in his mid-20s when Britain ceded control in 1963 and in his late 30s when his disillusion with Kenyan authorities led to his arrest and eventual departure. Beyond his own troubles, his mother was held in solitary confinement by the British, one brother was killed and another brother, deaf and mute, was shot dead when he didn't respond to British soldiers' demands that he stop moving. In a given book, Ngũgĩ might summon anything from ancient fables to contemporary popular culture. His widely translated picture story, 'The Upright Revolution,' updates Kenyan folklore in explaining why humans walk on two legs. The short story 'The Ghost of Michael Jackson' features a priest possessed by the spirit of the late entertainer. Ngũgĩ's tone was often satirical, and he mocked the buffoonery and corruption of government leaders in 'The Wizard of the Crow,' in which aides to the tyrant of fictional Aburiria indulge his most tedious fantasies. 'Rumor has it that the Ruler talked nonstop for seven nights and days, seven hours, seven minutes, and seven seconds. By then the ministers had clapped so hard, they felt numb and drowsy,' he wrote. 'When they became too tired to stand, they started kneeling down before the ruler, until the whole scene looked like an assembly in prayer before the eyes of the Lord. But soon they found that even holding their bodies erect while on their knees was equally tiring, and some assumed the cross-legged posture of the Buddhist.' Ngũgĩ sided with the oppressed, but his imagination extended to all sides of his country's divides — a British officer who justifies the suffering he inflicts on local activists, or a young Kenyan idealist willing to lose all for his country's liberation. He parsed the conflicts between oral and written culture, between the city and the village, the educated and the illiterate, the foreigner and the native. One of five children born to the third of his father's four wives. Ngũgĩ grew up north of Nairobi, in Kamiriithu village. He received an elite, colonial education and his name at the time was James Thiong'o. A gifted listener, he once shaped the stories he heard from family members and neighbors into a class assignment about an imagined elder council meeting, so impressing one of his teachers that the work was read before a school assembly. His formal writing career began through an act of invention. While a student at Makerere University College in Kampala, Uganda, he encountered the editor of a campus magazine and told him he had some stories to contribute, even though he had not yet written a word. 'It is a classic case of bluffing oneself into one's destiny,' Nigerian author Ben Okri later wrote. 'Ngũgĩ wrote a story, it was published.' He grew ever bolder. At the African Writers Conference, held in Uganda in 1962, he met one of the authors who had made his work possible, Nigeria's Chinua Achebe, who, following the acclaim of his novel 'Things Fall Apart,' had become an advisory editor to the newly launched African Writer Series publishing imprint. Ngũgĩ approached Achebe and urged him to consider two novels he had completed, 'Weep Not, Child' and 'The River Between,' both of which were released in the next three years. Ngũgĩ was praised as a new talent, but would later say he had not quite found his voice. His real breakthrough came, ironically, in Britain, while he was a graduate student in the mid-1960s at Leeds University. For the first time, he read such Caribbean authors as Derek Walcott and V.S. Naipaul and was especially drawn to the Barbadian novelist George Lamming, who wrote often of colonialism and displacement. 'He evoked for me, an unforgettable picture of a peasant revolt in a white-dominated world,' Ngũgĩ later wrote. 'And suddenly I knew that a novel could be made to speak to me, could, with a compelling urgency, touch cords deep down in me. His world was not as strange to me as that of Fielding, Defoe, Smollett, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Dickens, D.H. Lawrence.' By the late 1960s, he had embraced Marxism, dropped his Anglicized first name and broadened his fiction, starting with 'A Grain of Wheat.' Over the following decade, he became increasingly estranged from the reign of Kenyan President Jomo Kenyatta. He had been teaching at Nairobi University since 1967, but resigned at one point in protest of government interference. Upon returning, in 1973, he advocated for a restructuring of the literary curriculum. 'Why can't African literature be at the centre so that we can view other cultures in relationship to it?' Ngũgĩ and colleagues Taban Lo Liyong and Awuor Anyumba wrote. In 1977, a play he co-authored with Ngũgĩ wa Mirii, 'I Will Marry When I Want,' was staged in Limuru, using local workers and peasants as actors. Like a novel he published the same year, 'Petals of Blood,' the play attacked the greed and corruption of the Kenyan government. It led to his arrest and imprisonment for a year, before Amnesty International and others helped pressure authorities to release him. 'The act of imprisoning democrats, progressive intellectuals, and militant workers reveals many things,' he wrote in 'Wrestling With the Devil,' a memoir published in 2018. 'It is first an admission by the authorities that they know they have been seen. By signing the detention orders, they acknowledge that the people have seen through their official lies labeled as a new philosophy, their pretensions wrapped in three-piece suits and gold chains, their propaganda packaged as religious truth, their plastic smiles ordered from above.' He didn't only rebel against laws and customs. As a child, he had learned his ancestral tongue Gikuyu, only to have the British overseers of his primary school mock anyone speaking it, making them wear a sign around their necks that read 'I am stupid' or 'I am a donkey.' Starting with 'Devil On the Cross,' written on toilet paper while he was in prison, he reclaimed the language of his past. Along with Achebe and others, he had helped shatter the Western monopoly on African stories and reveal to the world how those on the continent saw themselves. But unlike Achebe, he insisted that Africans should express themselves in an African language. In 'Decolonizing the Mind,' published in 1986, Ngũgĩ contended that it was impossible to liberate oneself while using the language of oppressors. 'The question is this: we as African writers have always complained about the neo-colonial economic and political relationship to Euro-America,' he wrote. 'But by our continuing to write in foreign languages, paying homage to them, are we not on the cultural level continuing that neo-colonial slavish and cringing spirit? What is the difference between a politician who says Africa cannot do without imperialism and the writer who says Africa cannot do without European languages?' He would, however, spend much of his latter years in English-speaking countries. Ngũgĩ lived in Britain for much of the 1980s before settling in the U.S. He taught at Yale University, Northwestern University and New York University, and eventually became a professor of English and comparative literature at the University of California, Irvine, where he was founding director of the school's International Center for Writing & Translation. In Irvine, he lived with his second wife, Njeeri wa Ngugi, with whom he had two children. He had several other children from previous relationships. Even after leaving Kenya, Ngũgĩ survived attempts on his life and other forms of violence. Kenyatta's successor, Daniel arap Moi, sent an assassination squad to his hotel while the writer was visiting Zimbabwe in 1986, but local authorities discovered the plot. During a 2004 visit to Kenya, the author was beaten and his wife sexually assaulted. Only in 2015 was he formally welcomed in his home country. 'When, in 2015, the current President, Uhuru Kenyatta, received me at the State House, I made up a line. 'Jomo Kenyatta sent me to prison, guest of the state. Daniel arap Moi forced me into exile, enemy of the state. Uhuru Kenyatta received me at the State House,'' Ngũgĩ later told The Penn Review. 'Writing is that which I have to do. Storytelling. I see life through stories. Life itself is one big, magical story.'
New York Times
an hour ago
- New York Times
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While Football Benchmark believes that Manchester United's enterprise value has grown by 4 per cent over the last 12 months from €4.9bn to €5.1bn, that currently converts to £4.3bn, which is lower than the price Sir Jim Ratcliffe bought in at when he paid £1.25bn for 27.7 per cent of the club in early 2024. Given the club's on-field struggles, the British billionaire may be grateful that his investment has not fallen further. Barcelona and Bayern Munich round out the top five in this year's report, with Liverpool and a resurgent Arsenal close behind, followed by Paris Saint-Germain, with Tottenham Hotspur, the biggest climber over the last decade, and Chelsea completing the top 10. 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Advertisement Overall, the average revenue multiple for the enterprise values in Football Benchmark's reports over the last decade has risen from 3.4 to 4.9, which is impressive but still half the average revenue multiple that is applied to work out the value of NFL franchises. In fact, all teams in the major North American leagues are valued with a higher revenue multiple than the top European football sides, because there are stricter cost controls, longer broadcast deals, newer stadiums and no relegation. The report also explains why some teams that are almost certainly worth more than the £392m valuation given to the 32nd club in the list, Spain's Real Betis, are not included in the rankings — Newcastle United, for example, who are 15th in world football in terms of annual revenue, according to the most recent edition of the Deloitte Money League report. 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Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
How long will Streeting hold out against the most militant union in the land?
Militant trade union action has become far less commonplace than it used to be. But one organisation remains as hard line as ever: the British Medical Association (BMA). It sent out ballot papers this week to junior doctors urging them to back strike action in support of a 25 per cent pay demand. Now known as 'resident' medics, they are threatening months of disruption despite seeing their pay jump by 29 per cent in just three years. During a recent protracted dispute they stopped work 11 times and forced the cancellation of an estimated 1.5 million appointments. It is unconscionable that the BMA is now prepared to inflict further misery on the public, most of whom have not seen anything like the pay rises enjoyed by its members. The doctors profess to cherish the NHS, yet by their actions they cut away at its ability to cope with financial and population pressures. When appointments are cancelled or operations postponed, patients have to go back to square one, often involving another trip to a GP for their treatment to be rescheduled. How many drop out at that point? The backlog of cases remains above seven million with no chance of a significant reduction if there is another dispute. The public, who might have had some sympathy for the doctors in the past, have evidently lost patience judging by recent opinion polls. Labour has made a rod for its own back by giving inflation-busting pay rises to others in the public sector. Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary, made much of the Tory failure to settle this dispute when he was in opposition. Now the boot is on the other foot. How long will he hold out against the most militant union in the land? Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
