Unemployment is not a cost worth paying

Yorkshire and the North East have the highest youth unemployment figures.

‘Austerity was a deliberate ideological choice…It has failed and can be expected to keep failing”.

If there’s something Brits hate more than being lectured at, it’s being lectured at by the US. But the above comment from the New York Times shows just how far disapproval at the UK’s slash-and-burn economic policies is spreading. And there’s one group this austerity is affecting more than the others: young people - on this side of the country.

The North/South divide is of course nothing new, but the employment market in the North has been protected to a certain extent by an abundance of public sector jobs over the past decade. But with a shrinking state, the number of opportunities for graduates up here is dwindling fast. And the private sector is clearly not picking up the slack, as last week’s depressing unemployment figures showed.

Youth unemployment is the highest on record - and the other stats don’t make happy reading either. 1.06m young people without work, the North East and Yorkshire having the highest number of these. Aside from a jobless North, six million people are also underemployed, as in, they are desperate for more work, according to the York-based Joseph Rowntree Foundation. It is easy to lament and ask ‘is this really what the baby-boomers have left us?’ but sadly it doesn’t get to the root of the problem.

Neither does blaming Labour, despite their impressive catalogue of fiscal calamities. Cameron is predictably quick to do so, saying the Tories didn’t ‘invent the problem of youth unemployment’. But going back to the ‘80s, they certainly didn’t help. Thatcher’s scheme of privatisation shut down most of the major industries that working-class kids used to rely on when they came out of school. And as we know now, you can’t build a country on finance and high-street shops alone.

What can be done? The coalition’s Work Programme is a flop, and has failed to build on the successes of the now-scrapped Future Jobs Fund, which got half of those going through it off benefits and into the labour market. You’ll be familiar with some of the proposed solutions: introduce a Robin Hood tax on speculative financial transactions (that lovely phrase), reinstate the bank-bonus levy and reduce VAT to get people spending again. The first two ideas could be used to invest in renewable energy and public transport jobs – both at the high and low end – with training schemes for the long-term unemployed. The last would itself get the economy going and might deal with the depressing flat-line growth we’ve had for the past year. But do any of these offer any real inspiration?

The Occupy movement offers something different and more exciting. Leading figures in the somewhat-extremist American mainstream have claimed ‘these protesters, who are actually few in number, have contributed nothing’. While they might be few in number, they have certainly contributed something - a few months ago there were no challenges to the strange state of affairs that said the banks should be bailed out for their mistakes, and to punish them we will give them huge bonuses while shutting down the youth centres? Now this absurdity is screamed out daily on front pages all over the world.

So perhaps the Occupy protesters are right. Perhaps we need a plan slightly more interesting than a few more taxes on the rich. At the moment, they don’t know what that plan is. But when they do, there is going to be trouble for those on the neo-liberal right who say unemployment is a price worth paying. Let’s get this straight: It isn’t, and the jobless youth who have been the product of that mantra are only going to get louder and louder.

I just hope those calls for change will begin where they are needed most – in the North.

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