Youth unemployment goes over 1 million
November 16th, 2011With youth unemployment passing the 1 million mark, David appears on Newsnight and gives an interview to The Times.
The Times interview:
David Miliband is calling for “extraordinary measures” to deal with the “tragedy” of youth unemployment, as figures out today are about to reveal that a million young people are out of work.
In a rare intervention on domestic politics since losing the contest to become Labour leader, the former Foreign Secretary said that subsidising transport costs, ring-fencing apprenticeships for the under-25s and bringing back a form of the Future Jobs Fund could all be used to defuse the unemployment “timebomb”.
In an interview with The Times, he said that the present Government did not “invent the problem of youth unemployment”, conceding that it started to become an issue under Labour from about 2005. The problem, however, had “undoubtedly got much worse in the last year”…
It was great to see you on Newsnight last night. I hope that it is the start of your return to frontline politics in a very precarious time.
As a small business which employs 4 full time staff and 40 part time (mostly young) I wish to stress my support for your idea to reinstate the Future Jobs Fund.We absolutely need young people to experience the value of working and how it can shape their future lives.We are currently in danger of allowing young people to throw in the towel and, as you say, this becomes a much greater problem in the future when they have no concept of work, crushingly low self esteem and even lower motivation !!Whilst I understand the way FJF was set up to support principally the voluntary sector, I feel that it would benefit from being opened up to commercial organisations as well. I experienced too many organisations who took young people on for the right reasons i.e. to try to give them a start, however they did not realistically need the number of young people they employed, therefore a large number had a negative experience with little activity and experience.
Commercial organisations are used to ‘balancing the books’ in order to exist. I am sure that they would recruit responsibly and in the right numbers ensuring that it will be a positive experience for the young person.
It is time that we in the Labour movement learned to trust entrepreneurs and private enterprise in this country.
dave. it’s your destiny to be PM. please hurry up. we all love your bro but he presents little challenge to cameron plc.
I thought that Chris Graylings remark, that he did not want a party political
argument, in reply to your remark about the relevance of economic growth ,was
lame.
As was the follow up remark by the master of political scraps, Jeremy Paxman, when he said :
“ we don’t want a political scrap”.
Perhaps Chris Grayling thinks that the Labour party is part of the coalition.
What is wrong with a party political point if one party believes that rising youth unemployment is linked to lack of economic growth and the other party does not ?
It tends to be a natural process, in the search for solutions, to first identify the causes of a problem.
I have noticed over the last few weeks that the word “growth” is becoming more popular than the
word “austerity” . Even the clueless IMF are starting to raise the profile of the word “growth”, as if they have just discovered the equation : austerity measures = diminished economic growth.
A recent investigation in the US Senate committee, in which three top economists were questioned about lack of private sector growth , gave rise to some impractical ruminations, until a senator asked the economists if “lack of business confidence” had anything to do with the problem.
Suddenly a flicker of “linear insight” registered on the faces of the academics.
If you live and breath austerity; if you start to engage every tool of austerity ; and if you marginalise growth ,then the emotional force of
negativity, will resonate on consumer and business confidence.
The coalition’s single minded project to smash the deficit into the ground is
a failure to comprehend the importance of the inverse relation of ”deficit reduction” and “growth” .
Pete Flynn
South Shields
17 November 2011