Youth unemployment – no answers

The latest government action on youth unemployment offers few new insights or solutions. The problem is evident and obvious – and isn’t new.

Nearly one million young people are not in work or any sort of education. In response the government appointed former Labour health minster Alan Milburn to “…seek to understand drivers of the increase in the number of young people who are Not in Education Employment or Training (NEET)”.

Depressing

Milburn’s report published on 28 May, Young People and Work, contains much hand wringing about the seemingly permanent level of youth unemployment and a depressing account of its social and economic symptoms.

What Milburn describes will surprise few people. And the use of the demeaning tag “NEETs” is a euphemism attempting to hide the reality of this waste of young people’s lives.

No diagnosis

But the review offers no diagnosis, still less any treatment. As the review points out, youth unemployment has only once fallen below 10 per cent in the past twenty-five years, during the COVID pandemic.

No government has found a solution, but worse, capitalism’s destruction of British jobs and industry, embraced by all parliamentary political parties, is youth unemployment’s direct cause.

As long ago as 2011, the government of the day expressed concern about rising youth unemployment. It’s “solution”, the Youth Contract, has disappeared from memory with little evident impact.

‘The government has learned nothing; it can’t accept the causes of youth unemployment.’

The present government has learned nothing – not surprising as it can’t accept the causes of youth unemployment.

Milburn’s review proposes tinkering at the edges: reforms, yet again, to welfare benefits, schemes badged as apprenticeships that would be unrecognisable to anyone who ever served an industrial apprenticeship, changes to health and social care and education, and a nebulous “whole system reset”.

Remix

The Trades Union Congress in its response to Milburn’s call for evidence offers little more than a remix of the same reform ideas.

But at least the TUC starts with the lack of vacancies and decent, secure job opportunities for young workers, even if it doesn’t look deeper about the underlying cause – in a word, capitalism.

Responsibility

Workers in work must take responsibility for the young. The future need, for industrial independence, for energy, for food, for housing, all documented in Workers, show what we need.

‘A debate about welfare is the last thing we need.’

A debate about welfare, whether for or against, is the last thing we need. Young people’s energy is too precious to be wasted by life on benefits.

The talk must be about employment for young people, not bemoaning their unemployment. And that starts with jobs in British industry, which Milburn barely mentions.

EU damage

At the same time as the Milburn review, the government’s negotiations with the EU for a youth mobility scheme will allow young people from EU countries access to the small pool of jobs intended for British school and college leavers. This can only further damage the prospects of young British workers.

The EU further insists that EU young people should have the same rights to attend university courses as do British applicants, and should only pay the domestic students fees.