THE future of the youth minimum wage is now under review by the former Health Secretary Alan Milburn.
The alleged ‘social mobility’ expert has told The Guardian newspaper that unless the government backed some ‘uncomfortable truths about the state of the Labour market there was a risk of creating a lost generation’ of millions of youth.
In his interview with The Guardian, Milburn insisted that the overall rising welfare bill is ‘unsustainable, fiscally and economically’.
His intervention was to suggest that an increase in youth pay rates could lead to youth ‘being priced out of entry level jobs’, creating a mass of unemployable youth.
There is no doubt that Labour MPs have been shaken by Milburn’s minimum wage warnings that any increase in youth wage rates could lead to youth being ‘priced out of entry level jobs’.
This is after the Labour party has been assuring workers that Labour would end ‘discriminatory’ lower minimum wage rates so that ‘all adults would be entitled to the same level pay floor’.
In fact, the incoming general secretary of Unison, Andrea Egan wrote in The Guardian that she ‘would call time on our union’s inexcusable habit of propping up politicians who act against our interests, undermine our fundamental values and make our lives worse’.
Alan Milburn has warned that without substantive action, the UK was at risk of abandoning a generation to a life on benefits, and could ‘push them away from mainstream parties towards right wing populism instead’.
Further, he insisted that: ‘You write off a generation, you write off the country’s future.’
He continued: ‘You’ve got this sort of downward escalator: We’re plunging young people into a lifetime on benefits, rather than creating an upward escalator, with opportunities for people to earn and learn.’
Milburn also issued a warning about the mental health of young people under crisis-ridden capitalism. He said: ‘We’ve got to be careful that just because you have anxiety or depression that automatically puts you onto the downward escalator. We’re at real risk of a new currency developing which says that work is bad for people’s health, whereas the opposite is the case.’
In fact, it is capitalism that is not only bad for people’s health but kills them off in large numbers of different ways, including extreme hunger and desperate health conditions.
He continues that: ‘If young people start feeling society is not interested in me … they could turn to Reform UK instead.’
In fact, what is required is not more reforms but a socialist revolution!
Humankind has reached a historic turning point where capitalism has revealed its extreme bankruptcy and the issue is going forward to socialism.
In fact, the productive forces have now been developed by humanity to the point where the socialist society that Karl Marx fought for, which he was able to state would function: ‘From each according to their ability to each according to their need’ was not only possible but was and is vitally necessary.
This means that building the revolutionary leadership of the International Committee of the Fourth International worldwide to overthrow and replace bankrupt capitalism with a worldwide socialist society is a matter of life or death.
What is required is the building of mass Young Socialists movements and sections of the International Committee of the Fourth International in every country to lead the struggle to smash and overthrow world capitalism and replace it with a worldwide Socialist Republic.
Now is the time to smash capitalism and go forward to the victory of the World Socialist Revolution!
