As Leaders Pose in Cannes Jobs Crisis Gets Worse for British Youth
by The G20 meeting, the annual jolly as which world leaders gather to stuff themselves with the finest food, drink the most expensive wines and discuss how best to rip off us poor taxpayers and give our money and the fuits of our labour to their obscenely rich sponsors, in the real world things just get worse.
The unemployment problem throughout society but particularly among the young has been discussed many times in my articles like The Jobless Economy we have pointed to reasons why employment has collapsed, ranging from 50 years of naive politicians and poodle-like academics framing policies to support the drive by big money to supplant human workers with machines and to export low skilled jobs to the low labour cost economies of the developing world.
Earlier in the week we learned from the latest British employment figures and yesterdays we saw repeated in statistics from the United States government that the traditional industrial areas have the highest numbers of “disengaged youth” compared to any other environments. In some conurbations where traditional industries have been hard hit by off-shoring the so called NEETs (Not In Education, Employment Or Training) number as many as one in four of the population aged between 16 and 24. Governments are coming under increasing pressure from local and regional authorities to take urgent action to help this so-called lost generation or risk a “crisis” in Britain’s communities, with a surge of anger and social unrest similar to this summer’s riots which took the nation by storm, according to experts.
A UK – wide study out today highlights the stark and growing North-South divide between jobs and opportunities for young people. The problem is not confined to the north however.Some of the worst affected areas are around London and in other large cities in the midlands and south. With the recession exacerbating the problem can anything be done other than repeat the costly and pointless exercises of the past, paying young people to stay in full timed education or the notorious Youth Training Schemes in which the government paid employers to take on “trainees” who received little training because there was no real job for them and were jettisoned at the end of their six months contract so new trainees could be brought in. As the largest proportion of Neets are found in those cities which already have high levels, the report by the Work Foundation and the Private Equity Foundation warns of manufacturing pseudo-jobs for the purpose of massaging the statistics.
Shaks Ghosh, chief executive of the Private Equity Foundation, said: “This report has highlighted the great disparity in opportunities for young people across Great Britain. The fact that nearly a quarter of 16 to 24 year olds are disengaged from education or employment in certain cities is not only shocking but very sad. Children from deprived areas urgently need the right support to continue in school, go to college or to get a job. To neglect these Neets risks a crisis in too many of our communities.”
A report by the National Centre for Social Research, commissioned by the Cabinet Office, on Wednesday highlighted “poverty and materialism” as one of the causes of the riots which swept across Britain in August. Focusing on the motivations of young people in five riot-affected areas, and two areas which did not riot, the report said: “Young people talked about the difficulty of managing on the money they received when out of work or in training. The same materialistic culture was cited as having contributed to looting by young people and older community members alike. Participants from unaffected areas in the north and Scotland suggested that the starker contrast between rich and poor in London and other cities might mean the disparity between young people’s material desires and what they could afford gave rise to greater dissatisfaction.”
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