The culture of useless degrees, entitlement and benefits that has spawned a million Neets
BRUCE NEWSOME
AN interim government report released on Thursday lamented ‘a lost generation’ of idle youth.
The number of young people not in education, employment or training (Neet) is 975,000 which the Government expects to reach 1.25million in five years, when one in six young people will be classified as Neets.
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. Astonishingly 15 per cent of Neets – roughly 150,000 – are graduates currently neither earning nor learning.
The review was commissioned by Work and Pensions Secretary Pat McFadden, and led by the former Labour Health Secretary Alan Milburn, the chair of the Social Mobility Commission from 2012 to 2017. His report is welcome as far as facing the numerical facts are concerned, but for analysis and solutions Mr Milburn is hardly an inspiring choice. A Blairite who did not reform anything as a minister and never held an employment portfolio is the very same man who set in motion the unachievable aspirations of the latest generation of Neets.
Mr Milburn’s obsession has long been with social mobility. There wasn’t enough of it in his view and the remedy was, he believed, interventions, ‘acting at every life stage – including through schools, universities, internship practices and recruitment processes’.
What he advocated was a dressed up version of positive discrimination aimed to rectify relative disadvantage, a fundamentally flawed model, going back to Lyndon Johnson’s 1960’s interventionist Great Society agenda, that David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ was an iteration of. It was Mr Milburn who in August 2010 the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition made its ‘social mobility tsar’. The aim? To help people who felt they were barred from top jobs on grounds of race, religion, gender or disability. Milburn would have been better advised to focus less on such social engineering and more on real engineering and serious competitive skills training for those with the ability. What no one seems to have noticed how this victim-driven, ‘I have been discriminated against’, wishful thinking, along with useless degrees has led to today’s generation of no-hopers. The irony.
In partisan fashion, Milburn chose to preview his interim report mostly through the BBC. He gave a pre-launch interview to Laura Kuenssberg on Sunday, and launched his interim report on BBC breakfast television.
He said: ‘Detachment is no longer temporary. For too many young people it is becoming permanent.’ Milburn is right to blame the welfare/benefits, education, and health systems. What he fails to acknowledge is the deadening effect of the ‘all must be middle class’, the blame (I am being discriminated against if I am not) and sense of failure culture that he and Mr Blair unwittingly prompted.
Nor does he get to the root of Britain’s welfare dependency malaise which boils down to the lack of accountability that runs through all government systems and the associated bottomless pits of taxes and debts.
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. They are right.
This will involve cutting quangos, repealing the so called independence of the civil service (where there is in fact a leftist multiculturalist default), appointing public servants from outside government, making agencies answer to ministers and Parliament for their own performance (the horror), and properly investigate, audit and rule on welfare claims, asylum claims, jurisprudence, patient waiting lists and so on. Few politicians are prepared to go public with how radical 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. Milburn agrees that reforming welfare, particularly health and disability benefits, ‘is not an optional extra’ but a ‘necessity’. But Sir Keir Starmer said as much when coming into power in 2024 only to scale back immediately following major backbench Labour revolts. He excluded any new, primary welfare reform legislation from the King’s Speech.
And Milburn simply isn’t radical enough. The reason is obvious from the ideological selectivity with which he finds problems and offers solutions. For instance, Milburn cited a report that the government spends 25 times as much on benefits for young people than it does on supporting them into work. Milburn admits the Government should be paying less in benefits while adding: ‘The way to do that is not by some arbitrary cut. The way to do it is to get young people into work.’
Uh-huh. And one way to get people into work is to cut their benefits. How about you put a time limit on unemployment benefits? Crack down on fake disabilities? Make benefits contribution-based instead of entitlements? No mention of any of these options.
The fact is that welfare has become a permanent alternative to work, particularly for the young, for young immigrants and the children of immigrants. Leftists cry racism or youthism, but the facts have been clear for decades from the Government’s own data.
Labour’s problems don’t end with welfare. Employment law and taxation are massively complicated and repressive of entrepreneurship, enterprise and by definition of employment. Governments have added to the regulatory burden over recent decades, culminating in Starmer’s administration hiking employers’ national insurance contributions and the minimum wage, while strengthening employment rights, all of which discourages employers from hiring — particularly for entry-level jobs, thus driving youth unemployment most.
And then there’s education. Labour has deeper guilt here. Tony Blair wanted most young people to get a full secondary education and a university education. Now, 15 per cent of Neets are university-educated, and 30 per cent achieved five ‘good’ GCSEs.
We ended up with a generation of over-qualified and under-employed young people. Most earned qualifications of no direct use to the work they are applying for. Media studies, gender studies, PPE — come on, what are they good for, except more academic study (and politics)? These are the young people Milburn and his political allies duped with a false sense of their own worth, a cohort of graduates who have all the contrariness employers don’t want but few of the skills. Milburn admits: ‘Qualifications are necessary to get people into the labour market . . . [but] the biggest complaint that people have is about work readiness’. He referred to communication skills and teamwork, though he might have added the ability for hard work.
Milburn’s dancing on the head of a pin should be an opportunity for His Majesty’s Opposition, but the Conservative Party is insufficiently radical too. Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary Helen Whately told Radio 4’s Today programme that the Conservatives would cut ‘some of the red tape’ in the 2025 Employment Rights Act and help ‘businesses’ to create new jobs. It’s little different to what Milburn said.
Pushed on what a Conservative government would do, Whately said: ‘To the extent that [the Government] tried to do something to help young people, it’s been things like paid-for work experience programmes. What people really want is jobs. You’ve got to back businesses to create jobs.’ But she was silent on the radical deregulation required.
The mainstream political class isn’t yet ready for the reforms necessary to restore Britain to high employment.
The explosion of the Neets is going to get worse before it gets better. The Labour Party’s leadership contenders are even more to the left than Starmer and in hock to their welfare dependency constituency. Where Andy Burnham thinks the money is coming from to invest more in the education, welfare, and health systems is anyone’s guess. On the current trajectory, the Government is more likely to invest in failure, not reform.
Helping Labour to avoid the issues is the mainstream media. Take the BBC’s response to its privileged access to Milburn’s interim report. It profiled a 23-year-old Muslim woman who can’t get a job because of her ‘physical health issues’.
Strap yourselves in. Labour wants to give young people the vote from the age of 16 years. They’ve been raised to think they are the turkeys that would be voting for Christmas if they voted for Reform.
This article (The culture of useless degrees, entitlement and benefits that has spawned a million Neets) was created and published by Conservative Woman and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Bruce Newsome
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