Bataan groups hold candle vigil to mourn felled trees
By Saghir Hussain ·
You don't hold a candlelight vigil for a spreadsheet. But maybe we should.
In Limay, Bataan, they lit candles last week for trees — acacia, narra, mahogany — cut down to widen a national road. Young Bataeños for Environmental Advocacy Network and the Nuclear-Free Bataan Movement stood in the dark, mourning shade they'll never sit under. It's a powerful image. But swap the trees for jobs, the road for an algorithm, and the vigil for a Jobcentre queue in Norris Green, and the picture looks uncomfortably familiar.
The retraining myth
We're told automation creates new roles. "Upskill," they say. "Reskill." As if a 52-year-old warehouse picker in Wolverhampton can just nip onto a Python bootcamp between shifts and emerge a prompt engineer. The numbers don't lie: UK labour market data shows job churn accelerating, but adult participation in training has flatlined since 2017. The government's "Lifelong Learning Entitlement" — due 2025, now pushed back — won't cover a forklift ticket, let alone a data science conversion course.
Small businesses know this. A mates' fabrication firm in the Black Country lost two CNC operators to retirement last year. Couldn't replace them. The local college's engineering course was full — with 18-year-olds. No evening classes. No modular options. He's now looking at a cobot arm costing £40k because he can't find a human. That's not innovation. That's surrender.
The Norris Green test
Read the Liverpool Echo this week: kids in Norris Green blistering their hands on playground equipment because the metal's been baking in sun the council knew was coming. No shade sails. No maintenance budget. "It'll affect them for the rest of their lives," the paper said. Same with skills. You strip the support structures — careers advisers, union learning reps, FE college funding — and you wonder why the next generation gets burned.
The Bataan protesters know power when they see it. Roads get widened because Manila decides. Here, the decisions come from San Francisco boardrooms and Whitehall strategy units that have never set foot in a distribution centre in Doncaster. The tree vigil was futile, maybe. But at least they named what was being lost.
We don't even do that. We call it "efficiency." We call it "growth."
When the next AI white paper lands — and it will — ask yourself: where's the vigil for the call centre in Sunderland? The admin pool in Swansea? The lorry drivers on the M62 watching autonomous trials on the hard shoulder?
We're felling the forest. Nobody's lighting a candle.