Ludo
With this government’s vast array of taxes engineered to make employing anyone under thirty a form of fiscal self-harm, taxing entrepreneurs so they pack up and leave and AI hoovering up every graduate trainee role going, the outlook for Britain’s young is bleak. The traditional first rung of the ladder — filing, photocopying, fetching coffee, learning to dread Mondays — has been quietly automated out of existence. There is, increasingly, nowhere for the young to start.
Into this wasteland strides the Dame’s nephew Ludo, a young man whose only demonstrated talent to date is an unerring instinct for other people’s money. Ludo has had An Idea, and — as is always the case with Ludo — it is an idea entirely uncontaminated by shame.
If there is no work, Ludo reasons, then the only growth industry left in Britain is Benefits. And if there’s one thing the state does brilliantly, it’s handing out money to people who ask nicely and fill in the right forms. So why not — Ludo announces this with the pride of a man who believes he has just spliced the atom — teach young people how to do it properly?
Thus was born Public Money Transfer (working title: Benefits Exploitation), a fully accredited three-year online degree, designed by Ludo to equip an entire generation with the one employable skill left to them: extracting maximum value from a welfare system currently supporting some 50 million claimants of one kind or another.
The course prospectus, which the Dame was shown over lunch and read with mounting horror, promises modules including “Advanced Form-Filling,” “PIP Assessments: A Practical Workshop,” “Sanctions and How to Avoid Them,” and a capstone dissertation modestly titled “Maximising Household Income Without Ever Meeting an Employer.” Guest lecturers will include a rotating cast of recently retired civil servants from the DWP, several of whom, Ludo notes approvingly, “know literally where every lever is, because they built the levers.”
Ludo’s pitch to prospective students is disarmingly direct: most young people, he says, have absolutely no idea how the gravy train works, or indeed that it exists at all. They assume that they must get a job. Ludo’s degree will disabuse them of this notion entirely, replacing it with a rigorous, examinable understanding of how to become — his words, delivered without a flicker of irony — “sustainably state-dependent.”
And here is the flourish Ludo is proudest of: he is already lobbying for government grants to fund the course itself, on the grounds that a nation so committed to supporting people who don’t work really ought to extend that largesse to a degree that trains people how not to. He has, apparently, drafted a funding bid describing the venture as “upskilling the next generation for the realities of the modern economy” — a phrase the Dame found almost admirable in its shamelessness, rather in the way one admires a really committed con artist.
The Dame’s only question, posed to Ludo over the cheese course, was whether the government had considered that a country subsidising a degree in claiming its own benefits might, eventually, notice something had gone badly wrong with the incentives somewhere upstream. Ludo looked at her blankly and asked whether that meant she wasn’t investing.
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