Britain’s Lost Generation
Labour warns of the young's permanent detachment from work — but dodges the causes
An interim report released this morning by Britain’s Labour government warns of “a lost generation” of idle youth.
The number of young people (aged 16 to 24 years) not in education, employment or training (NEET) is 975,000, says the report (it’s actually more than 1 million, according to a release from the Office for National Statistics, on the same day). The government expects it to reach 1.25 million in five years – i.e., one in six young people will be classified as Neets. This seems like an under-estimate.
Already, three in five young Neets have never held a job – compared with around two in five two decades ago.
The UK's Neet rate is three times that of the Netherlands and twice that of Ireland.
The review was commissioned by Work and Pensions Secretary Pat McFadden, and is led by the former Labour health secretary Alan Milburn.
The commission is welcome, but Milburn is hardly an inspiring commissionee. He did not reform anything as a minister, never held an employment portfolio, and now looks so surly and wizened as to be ripe for parody by the ageist youths to whom he is appealing.
In partisan fashion, Milburn chose to preview his interim report to the BBC primarily, gave a pre-launch interview to the BBC on Sunday, and launched his interim report on BBC Breakfast television this morning (Thursday), dressed throughout in the same buttoned up black shirt (aping Andy Burnham perhaps).
Turning away from Milburn’s image, Milburn does offer some forthright findings now: “Detachment is no longer temporary, for too many young people it is becoming permanent.”
But he not forthright when he comes to explaining the causes.
Milburn blames the welfare/benefits, education, and health systems.
Fair enough, no surprises there — for the vast majority of us. Big surprise (or big denial) from the traditional leftists who prefer to blame big business, the rich, the class system, white people, the patriarchy, and now Israel, Islamophobia, fossil fuels, fascism, and Donald Trump.
Less welcome, but still no surprise, is Milburn’s use of the stupid phrase “no longer fit for purpose,” which Tony Blair’s administration invented to blame its own failures on non-administrative parts of government. Conveniently, it never defined the phrase, and never specified how any department or agency was unfit, what its purpose was, or how to make it fit. So the merry-go-round went on. Indeed, the Blair administration accelerated the outsourcing of governance to QUANGOs, whose purpose is even less defined (“arms length”; “independent public body”), and which are never fit for anything except frustrating complaints and investigations.
The root problem of Britain’s malaise is unaccountability. Government, the health service, and welfare are bottomless pits of taxes and debts because their requirements and their performance are unaccountable. And Britons can easily choose a life without work, without much accountability.
That’s why Reform UK, Restore, Advance, and even the Conservative Party to some extent want to make the civil service, judiciary, health service, and welfare recipients more accountable.
This will involve cutting QUANGOs, repealing the independence of the civil service, appointing more public servants from outside government, making agencies answer to ministers and Parliament for their own performance (the horror), and employing more public servants to investigate, audit, and rule on welfare claims, asylum claims, jurisprudence, patient waiting lists, etc.
Few politicians are prepared to go public with how invasive these changes must be. Danny Kruger of Reform did so last week, and was predictably smeared and avoided by the mainstream media.
Tinkering isn’t going to cut it. You either go all out or don’t bother. Minor changes are just cosmetic.
