I remember, back in 1997, before the general election that brought to an end eighteen years of Tory rule how New Labour made such a fuss about the problem of ‘social exclusion’ among the young and how it boasted it would tackle youth unemployment by offering tem a ‘New Deal’.
Well, a decade on, and what do we find but that, according to a report in today’s Times, both the proportion and total number of young people officially unemployed is today greater than it was then?
Unemployment is particularly prevalent among 16 to 17 year olds, of whom as many as one in four are now unemployed.
What should make such figures especially embarrassing for the present government is that the problem seems largely to have been of its own making. Since May 2004, when, on alleged grounds of an acute labour shortage, it allowed nationals from the New Accession countries of Eastern Europe to work here, unemployment among all age-groups has risen, and the rise has been steepest among young people, especially in London and the south east of England to which most East Europeans labour migrants have come.
Now, I have nothing whatever against all the comparatively well-educated, hard-working, and law-abiding young East Europeans who have gladly taken up all the entry-level jobs in the south east which our own 16 and 17 year olds might otherwise have filled had employers been obliged to offer higher wages than the East Europeans have been willing to settle for. However, one has to wonder whether, even these latter will ultimately have benefited by coming here, rather than had they not done capital investment begun to flow eastwards instead.
But surely a government’s’ prime responsibility is to its own citizens, and this government ‘s much vaunted New Deal has turned out to offer our least well-qualified youngsters nothing more than a very raw deal indeed?
The writing is well and truly on the wall for the government, notwithstanding the deplorably low rate of literacy among our school-leavers