Salt of the earth

Good morning, you glorious beasts.

Scroll to the bottom for our new ‘letters to the editor’ feature.

Because Bunce, as we’ve always maintained, is a democratic dictatorship.

— Ed & Joe

MEDIA
Even your nan watches YouTube

According to Ofcom, people over the age of 55 have doubled the amount of time they stream on YouTube since 2023. All of which means:

YouTube is second only to the BBC

(the British Broadcasting Service, for the avoidance of doubt).

This means YouTube is more popular than ITV. You can see why the ailing broadcaster had to axe hundreds of jobs and slash its programming budget this year. 

Because YouTube is basically a broadcaster now

With half of the platform’s best-performing content resembling traditional telly (long-form, high production value stuff).

Brits now spend an average of 39 minutes per day on YouTube, 16 minutes of which is on a household’s TV set. 

Legacy channels like ITV and Channel 4 are panicking, streaming their shows live on YouTube in a life-or-death bid to stay relevant.

BBC binges are going digital

Sure, the number of Brits watching broadcast TV declined 4% in 2024, to a sad 2 hours and 24 minutes a day. 

But, for the first time since the dawn of creation, more Brits are watching BBC programs online than on the telly.

SPORT
Women’s football is starting to make serious bunce

And it’s all because of the powerful, handsome Englishwomen who gloriously vanquished cowardly Spain 3-1 this Sunday at the Euros. Huzzah! 

Euro 2025 brought in record crowds

More than 657,000 came to watch the group stages and knockout matches, up from the 574,875 in 2022. 

29 out of the 31 matches were sold out, and 16 million people watched the final on TV. 

This isn’t an anomaly, though. Match attendances are rising across the board for women’s football, even for second-tier matches.

You know what this means:

More crowds, more money

Broadcasting income for the women’s game has increased a lot in recent years, with the Women’s Super League striking a deal with Sky Sports and the BBC, doubling what it was before. 

Experts reckon the Lionesses will get their wages doubled after the win (and the record crowds). 

This comes after bigger valuations for women’s clubs. Just look at Chelsea FC’s women’s team, which just sold an 8% stake to the co-founder of Reddit for $26 million, which would value the lady lions at $333 million.

TECH
AI has made your degree (sort of) worthless

According to a Microsoft study, that is. After analysing 200,000 anonymised chats with Microsoft Copilot, the researchers found jobs requiring a Bachelor’s degree will be first against the wall in the blood-soaked AI revolution.

The knowledge economy is most affected

Historians, translators, writers and authors - even radio DJs - are the jobs that most overlap with AI. 

But this comes with a caveat: theoretically, at least, the jobs won’t disappear; they will just change. 

Historians are already using AI to sift through thousands of ancient inscriptions and digitally “unwrap” burnt ancient scrolls.

Lots of manual work is automation-proof

Good, honest, salt-of-the-earth blue-collar workers are the least affected by technological change, perhaps for the first time in human history. 

The lucky fellows deserve nothing less: they won us the war, after all. 

Logging operators, motorboat drivers, dredge operators and the men who lay railway tracks won’t have their jobs taken from them. 

So forget your dreams and buy a motorboat, you glorious beasts.

NEWS BITES
This just in…

• 🤖 🏥 Robots are cutting NHS waiting times. An NHS trust just piloted an AI-run physiotherapy clinic for over 2,500 patients with back pain, cutting waiting lists by 55% and saving clinicians 856 hours a month. The patients were given same-day video appointments with a ‘digital physiotherapist’ via an app, which responds to patients live. Now they’re rolling out Flok across other NHS trusts. You'd better give a Flok.

• 🤐 🌐 Kids aren’t studying languages anymore. According to the Higher Education Policy Institute, there are more A-levels in PE than in French, German and Latin combined. Which is bad, considering we’re already a nation of monolingual savages. It might be because of a language teacher shortage, with recruitment just 43% of its original target. Not helped by the decline of language graduates at university. 

• 🇬🇧 🤑 Three in five Brits have a side hustle, according to a recent study. Most side-hustlers are re-selling clothes (27%), selling handcrafted goods (24%), pet-walking (17%), tutoring (17%) and content creation (15%). A measly amount are engaged in dropshipping (8%), which means all those bloody internet snake oil salesmen have not defeated us. Brummies and Bristolians are Britain’s biggest hustlers by the way, which figures. 

• ✈️ 🇺🇸 The London Stock Exchange (LSE) has been mercilessly ravaged by North American capital, yet again. A FTSE 250-listed pension insurer, Just Group, was just acquired by a Canadian asset manager for £2.4 billion. Another slap in the face for the poor LSE, still on its knees after Wise shareholders just voted to list in the USA. A clutch of arrant traitors, the lot of ‘em. 

• ♿️ 👕 Primark has rolled out a wheelchair-bound mannequin. It’s Disability Pride Month, after all. The paraplegic mannequin is being used to promote the high street retailer’s new “adaptive clothing” range. All wonderful. Just forget about all those silly allegations of Primark’s use of child labour. Just. Forget. About. It.

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

RE: Young Brits snub insurance careers

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