Yesterday, Labour’s ‘worklessness tsar’ Alan Milburn published an interim report that warned the UK faces a ‘generational fault line’ in which over 1.25 million youth between the ages of 16 to 24 in Britain could be out of work within the next five years.
Official figures released yesterday showed youth unemployment standing close to one million – the highest level in over a decade.
Milburn, a former minister in the Labour government of Tony Blair, was given the job by Keir Starmer last year of reviewing why so many young people are ‘economically inactive’.
One thing that is striking in both the report produced by Milburn and the subsequent interviews he gave yesterday was that he went out of his way to deny that young people themselves were to blame for being thrown on the scrapheap.
Gone are the days when politicians, and even the right wing press, could get away with blaming ‘workshy’ youth scrounging off the state.
Instead, Milburn is concentrating his fire on the entire welfare system, schools and the NHS, blaming them for causing mass youth unemployment.
Yesterday, Milburn presented an interim report with concrete proposals for the Labour government due in the Autumn, but it is already clear what these will be.
In the front line for attack, is the welfare state where Milburn clearly thinks the amount spent on health related benefits are excessive and not succeeding in driving the sick back into jobs.
The NHS is also under fire from Milburn, who said yesterday that the health service does not recognise getting young people into work, as a ‘core health outcome’.
For doctors, nurses and all health workers, the job of the NHS is to provide medical care and treatment to the sick not to prepare them for low paid jobs where their labour can be exploited for the profit of the employer.
As for schools, Milburn demands they need to be more accountable for how well they prepare pupils for the workplace, or more accurately prepare them for a life of poverty with only the prospect of low paid, insecure work as their only future under a bankrupt capitalist system diving over the cliff into a gigantic economic crash.
Milburn’s solution to the crisis is to call for the Labour government to launch a ‘system reset’ to overhaul health and disability benefits.
In a recent interview with The Guardian newspaper, Milburn urged the Labour government not to ‘shy from’ making cuts to welfare benefits.
He criticised Keir Starmer for framing last year’s failed attempt to impose savage cuts on benefits for the sick and disabled, for framing them as simple cost-cutting, where what is required to push them through, is to frame them ‘more for moral reasons than for fiscal reasons’.
Framing a brutal austerity war on the Welfare State, NHS and education system as being driven by some ‘moral’ reasons of helping young people into jobs that simply don’t exist, will cut no ice with workers and especially with youth.
Over five million households in the UK are estimated to be living in absolute poverty, with a further 200,000 estimated to be joining them soon, as the full impact of the US-Israeli war on Iran hits the fragile British economy.
Alongside this, is the projected loss of a quarter of a million jobs by the middle of next year as a result of the imperialist war.
The working class has demonstrated it is not prepared to being driven into poverty and mass unemployment by a Labour government and young people, the generation that is the future of society, will never tolerate having their lives shattered to keep bankrupt British capitalism from collapse.
The working class, with youth at its forefront, has had enough of capitalism.
Now is the time to build a mass revolutionary movement of youth in the Young Socialists to lead the working class into forcing the TUC to call a general strike to kick out the Labour government and bring in a workers government and socialism.
Join the WRP and Young Socialists March For Jobs on Saturday 27th June at 2pm, meeting at St Marks, Brixton SE11 4PW to build up the leadership required for the victory of the British Socialist Revolution!
