It's not surprising that a report from the Prince's Trust and RBS should find that 73% of young people in Scotland think that life is harder than ever for the unemployed, though their great-grandparents' generation might beg to differ.
Even if it is preposterous to compare today's welfare state with the kind of world my grandfather grew up in, where families of 12 lived in couple of rooms up a close with a shared cludgie, the figures are stark enough. The jobless may not face the absolute poverty of the Depression of the 1930s, but this is nonetheless on many indices the worst economic crisis since.
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