UNEMPLOYED youth are once again the number-one target for a Labour government, determined to slash the UK’s benefit spending.
A year ago, Labour unveiled its ‘Get Britain Working’ plan, hailed by the Starmer government as the ‘biggest employment reforms in a generation’, to drive over two million unemployed, youth and those on long-term sickess benefit back into jobs.
12 months on from announcing this great plan, which was simply to carry out the pledge by the last Tory government to cut sickness benefit, unemployment in the UK has increased dramatically, especially amongst young people.
The number of 16-24 year olds not in employment, education or training (NEETS as they are called) has been increasing since 2021.
According to the latest data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS), almost one million youth are in this NEETS category – one in eight young people.
In what is being claimed as an effort to bring this number down, Chancellor Rachel Reeves announced in last month’s budget the creation of an £820 million fund to finance a raft of measures aimed at getting young people off Universal Credit and into work.
The money includes funding for training and work experience in construction, hospitality and health and social care.
Speaking on Sky News yesterday, Labour’s Work and Pensions Secretary, Pat McFadden, made it clear that those who ‘refuse to engage’ with Labour’s plans will face having their benefits withdrawn.
Asked directly whether benefits would be withdrawn, McFadden replied: ‘If someone just took that attitude, yes, they would be subject to, you know, the obligations that are already part of the system.’
The entire plan is a charade designed to cover the fact that Labour intends to drive youth into low paid, minimum wage jobs that simply don’t exist as a cover for a savage cut to benefits.
Big questions have been raised about youth finding jobs in the hospitality sector, a sector in crisis following Labour’s increase in National Insurance Contributions in Reeves 2024 budget.
The retail sector saw 45,600 jobs lost in the nine months following Reeves’ budget.
The UK construction industry, meanwhile, continues its crash with activity falling at the fastest rate in five and a half years last month, according to data published by S&P Global.
With no jobs to be pushed into, all that is left for youth is to be labelled as ‘scroungers’.
Last year, Labour employment minister Alison McGovern claimed that some benefit claimants are ‘stealing from the state’, a true depiction of the Starmer government’s attitude to all claimants.
Today, Starmer and McFadden can’t get away with statements like this that provoked an outcry from the working class, so instead they have come up with this latest plan to achieve the goal of slashing benefit payments to youth while claiming their intention is to provide them with non-existent jobs.
With UK capitalism diving headfirst into recession and unemployment reaching levels higher than those experienced during the pandemic, the Starmer government is desperate to cut spending on benefits in an attempt to bring down the massive national debt of nearly £3 trillion.
It is not young people who are scrounging from the state but the capitalist state that has been looting the working class through savage austerity cuts to wages and benefits while deliberately de-funding the NHS and public services in order to pay back the national debt and prevent British capitalism from collapsing into bankruptcy.
The time has come to answer Labour’s war on youth and the entire Welfare State, by forcing an immediate recall of the TUC to organise a general strike to remove this Labour government and bring in a workers government – a workers government that will nationalise the banks and major industries, placing them under the management of the working class and building a socialist planned economy.
Socialist revolution is the only way forward for workers and youth – join the WRP and Young Socialists to build up the leadership required for the victory of the British Socialist Revolution.
There is no time to lose!
