Shameful plight of the young jobless

Even if you take out “full-time” students who are looking for work, the remaining tally is 771,000. I am haunted by the voices of these young people: the girl with four Highers who can’t even get a supermarket job; the graduate who has written 120 applications. “I feel as if my brain is dying slowly,” said one of them yesterday. Add the underemployed, like the lovely clever handsome lad I’ve known since babyhood who has found only a part-time job in Gap, despite an excellent degree in anatomy from Strathclyde, and it equals not just a lack of jobs but a lack of hope that damages us all.

To listen to remorselessly-upbeat Alex Salmond, you’d think Scotland was somehow bucking the trend, thanks to some SNP fairy dust, but youth unemployment has risen sharply under his administrations too. It’s all very well scattering a few thousand apprenticeships around but it’s getting harder to find employers willing to take them and, besides, they often merely displace proper job opportunities as well as lowering wages. To add insult to injury, this week it emerged that nearly 2000 of those on the scheme were actually made redundant.

What’s really scary is that if you take out the increasing numbers going into further and higher education in recent years, the underlying level of youth unemployment has been rising since about 2005, so Labour hasn’t got much to crow about either.

As Paul Brown of The Prince’s Trust puts it: “Youth unemployment is like a dripping tap, costing tens of millions a week through benefits and lost productivity. And just like a dripping tap, if we don’t do something to fix it, it’s likely to get much worse.” Work from the TUC showed that those young people out of work for more than a year in the recession of the 1980s were still struggling to find and hold jobs two decades later.

It’s perhaps surprising that there have been only sporadic outbreaks of anger on the streets. “It’s not fair,” is the classic teenagers’ catchphrase but in this case, it’s true. They see bankers trousering billions in bonuses, MPs flipping homes and major companies avoiding tax on an industrial scale, while they are pilloried as “scroungers” by the tabloids and made to live on £53.45 a week, despite food and fuel bills rising at twice the rate of inflation. Ultimately, this resentment is going to boil over, as it has in the Arab spring and in angry demonstrations in Spain and Greece, all areas with very high endemic youth unemployment. Certainly, venal despotisms played their part in North Africa and the Middle East and shameless nepotism in the Northern Mediterranean. But here too the kids getting jobs seem to be the ones with family connections. I’m plagued by acquaintances trying to fix up work experience for their offspring. Meanwhile, the unlucky majority with no strings to pull are turning into the “baby busters”, as opposed to us lucky baby boomers.

Tackling this issue should be the Government’s very top priority. How? Well, not by abandoning the default retirement age, hampering small and medium-sized businesses from taking a punt on a youngster. (Such major changes need to happen during periods of declining unemployment.) And not by abandoning Labour’s expensive but high-quality Future Jobs Funds, with its promise of real jobs for the young unemployed. David Cameron’s “biggest ever back-to-work” scheme is no such thing. Treasury figures show Labour’s was bigger. The idea of allowing SMEs to waive National Insurance contributions for two years for hiring a young worker is worth looking at. Or making Government procurement contracts dependent on employing a proportion of under-25s. Holyrood should be kickstarting infrastructure projects and investing in college courses, instead of cutting both. Double-dip recession? Unemployment is already in one.