Alan Milburn is Not the Solution to Unemployment
Zia Yusuf’s description of the Tories as arsonists now offering fire-fighting services can be applied to other political operators. The latest is Alan Milburn who has somehow transformed himself into a grand old man of the Left. He has an interest in helping the nearly one million young people not in employment or education (Neets), in spite of his record in the New Labour Government as causing the problems he now attempts to mop up. Milburn has been commissioned with authoring a report that seeks to understand the root causes of rising numbers of young people not in work or education.
The Times has reported that one of the problems is the fact that teenagers are not working at Saturday jobs. Fewer that one in five 16 and 17 year-olds have Saturday jobs when it used to be as many as 50% in 2000. The Times explains:
An early finding of the review into Neets has been a need to reverse a cultural shift over the last two decades away from teenagers getting their first job at an early age.
“There’s been a longstanding decline in 16 and 17 year-olds getting Saturday jobs,” Milburn said. “Previous generations, including mine, were all brought up where most of us had that type of job or had a paper round or whatever. That not only provided youngsters with the opportunity to earn but it also allowed teenagers to learn about what it meant to be in a workplace.
“They became familiar with things like the discipline of being on time. It’s too lazy to just blame today’s youngsters for not being work ready. Over many years those opportunities for young people have been in sharp decline. Since the pandemic, the number of young people in work has fallen. The rate of youth unemployment is rising. If we are to avoid a lost generation we have to find new ways of reversing those trends.”
Anyone who has children, works with children or indeed knows children will be able to explain exactly why they have found it harder to get Saturday jobs: competition, expense and attitude. Most of these reasons were caused by the activities of the New Labour Governments in which Alan Milburn was a leading figure.
1. Immigration (surged under Blair’s governments in which Milburn was a minister). Anecdotal evidence from across the country will reveal that in areas of high immigration, low skills and low wage jobs that were once open to teenagers are now taken by immigrants. Areas of low immigration will have higher levels of youth employment. Totemic of this are Deliveroo drivers – what once would have been a perfect paper-round style job for teenagers is now taken up by adult males, some legal, some illegal.
2. The minimum wage (introduced under New Labour in 1999 when Alan Milburn was Chief Secretary to the Treasury) obviously excludes small businesses from employing more people.
3. Expansion of the welfare state that makes work unappealing. Milburn was a Blairite loyalist and was fully behind the introduction of tax credits and Blair and Brown’s vast expansion of the welfare state.
4. Starmer and Reeves’s anti-employment measures. The £26 billion National Insurance tax raid on employers, the Employment Rights Act and the increase of the national youth minimum wage by 8.5% in April – from £10 to £10.85, more than double the rate of inflation – are all hindering chances of Neets getting work. Will Labour loyalist Alan Milburn mention any of this?
Unlikely. Instead, it looks as if Milburn is seeking to double-down on his former statist mindset. The Times reports:
Government sources said this could take the form of a personal pot of money assigned to each young person which allows them to get into work. If they fail to use those opportunities — such as enrolling in training or apprenticeships — then they would lose access to any out-of-work benefits.
Usually, people without a personal pot of money try to find a job to gain one. If a personal pot of money is being given to them by the Government, the incentive structure to work might not necessarily kick in. But, for the sake of the one million lost generation of unemployed and uneducated young people, let’s hope Alan ‘New Labour’ Milburn knows best.
Joanna Gray is a writer and confidence coach.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
What a roll call of dreadful policies, it really does look as if for 30 years the govt has been determined to destroy the country.
The destruction started from 1945 at an accelerated rate. After the 80s and 90s helped to pause that decline it immediately picked up when B.Liar destroyed the constitution and brought in so many laws that were utterly useless for economic improvement.
Delivery drivers work pretty much 24×7 outside regardless of weather conditions. Further, they don’t earn any fixed wages but are paid per-delivery fees which means they need to work as fast as they can in order to make money. This is also anything but harmless because it implies rushing through busy car traffic a lot. That’s a classic full-time shit job and not at all comparable with spending a couple of hours once per week delivering newspapers.
That the companies who employ or rather, exploit these people would hire illegal immigrants is – at best – a guess. Because of Theresa May’s hostile environment, this could really only happen if the whole business was operating illegally. It’s much more likely that this reflects Ms Gray’s prejudices against foreigners than any actual reality.
Importing a surplus of cheap labour puts workers in competition with each other bidding wages down. This reduces labour productivity, drives wages overall lower, reduces economic output, causes economic regression, excludes the indigenous population who cannot/will not work for peanuts from the job market.
Apart from that it’s a great idea and anyone who says otherwise is a Far Right racist who happens to understand market economics.
I didn’t write anything about that. Just about the entirely erroneous idea that teenagers could compete in the delivery driver market as a spare-time job and something on the realities of working in the UK: Signing a private contract for renting, opening a bank account or taking up a job requires applicants to prove that they’re either British or have permission to live and work in the UK and the party offering the service/ opportunity is criminally responsible for checking this. That is, Deliveroo managers would go to jail if they knowingly hired illegal immigrants.
That is, Deliveroo managers would go to jail if they knowingly hired illegal immigrants.
Badly worded, as they’d probably always go to jail for that. They’d also go to jail if they unknowingly hired illegal immigrants because of not checking for immigration status at all or accepting something other than the government-required standards of proof for that.
I imagine the author is referencing the report in November 2025 that Morrisons had sacked all their newspaper delivery boys and girls – 1700 possibly? – and given the contract to a delivery firm. The youngsters were given virtually no notice and many had been doing the job for some time and had built up relationships with their customers, many of them elderly.
She specifically mentioned Deliveroo. And that’s only suitable for people capable of doing ordinary ‘adult’ menial labour and even then only for the younger ones.
My Morrisons newspaper boys and girls were adults driving cars but I do live in the country and they did do a better job than the delivery company they sold their rounds to. In fact where I used to live the papers were delivered by adults but that was because the local newsagent has closed down and the rounds moved to one much further away. For me, it used to be a service from McColls but they went bankrupt and were taken over by Morrisons. I was wondering if the whole shop would be closed. And yes, the change of delivery service was very short notice.
JFTR: My opinion on so-called replacement (mass-)immigration, especially of people from totally alien cultures with no desire to integrate themselves is that it certainly shouldn’t take place and should ideally be reverted if this can be done without injustice and cruelty.
But I blame the politicians who want that for it and not the individuals who took advantage of perfectly legal opportunities which were available to them.
One of our sons worked for Deliveroo. He did the deliveries on a bike. He knew all the Deliveroo kids, they were all in the same 6th form as him.
2 things happened. Firstly, Deliveroo extended to supermarket shopping delivery. The loads became too big to carry in a backpack.
2ndly, a migrant hotel opened in the town. He knows some of them. They share a car. Use a single registration & all work under the same name.
Now there are no 6th formers doing Deliveroo in the town.
2ndly, a migrant hotel opened in the town. He knows some of them. They share a car. Use a single registration & all work under the same name.
This is flat out illegal in the UK and the Deliveroo managers face going to jail if they allowed it to happen. Because of this, I claim that this is – at best – an urban myth among residents. But I really believe it’s competely an invented story. Which strongly suggests that the first part is an invented story, too. Especially considering that this would very like violate UK child labour laws.
https://www.gov.uk/child-employment
While I confused 6th form UK with 6th form Germany, whose pupils are much younger (< 16), the Deliveroo requirements for applications (see attached image) make it extremely unlikely that lots of 6th former could ever have worked for them (unless the conditions where different in the past).
Add into the mix the “something for nothing” message that “Covid” reinforced
During “something for nothing” COVID, there were (in Reading) British or at least white delivery drivers, even some women. After “something for nothing” ended, they were quickly outcompeted by foreign-looking men in their 20s who were much more willing to take risks and physically more adept at this kind of physically demanding job.
The “Boriswave” perhaps?
I don’t think so. During COVID, the demand was obiously much greater and there were less other jobs to work in. Because of this, delivery drivers were a much more mixed lot. After COVID, demand obviously dropped and other jobs, especially hospitality jobs, became again available in numbers.
As I wrote in the other comment: Delivery driver is a ruthless self-exploitation shit job where people get paid more the more reckless they drive and which has high demands both for strength/ physical fitness and willingness to endure serious discomfort because of outside working at all times of the day and in every weather. That’s not something where teenagers, especially not female teenagers, can effectively compete against full-grown young men and not something many British parents would want or allow their kids to do to being with.
Why Joanna Gray believes this would be something like rather leisurely doing paper rounds at one’s own speed is anybody’s guess.
I agree it’s a shit job and not much like a paper round
Not sure that paper rounds exist, the papers have much lower circulations than they did pre-web.
Much fewer sure but there’s a boy cycles round our area in the morning delivering them.
Leafletting is still a thing though.
They do still exist but now mine is now from a delivery company and not a local newsagent. I do recall that a few years back they could not find children interested in doing the job as they did not need the money, so moved to using retirees.
Something for nothing arrived in 1945 when the Marxist-Labour Government introduced the welfare-state whereby everybody is entitled to live off each other.
Indeed
I bet a large proportion of these young NEETs grew up in households where no one worked.
It also explains why they do crap at school. It was the NON-working class kids (free school meals) who had crap GCSE results last summer, NOT the “working class” as reported by the MSM.
Growing up seeing your parent(s) never working but being comfortable hardly inspirers kids to put effort in at school or seek employment.
I wonder too how much our cotton-wool society plays a part wherein children Cosby be allowed to do anything – in case…
God how I hate the people in government and their boundless, destructive stupidity.
Government activity is an endless chain reaction of unintended consequences. The wreckage they cause from their policies and measures becomes the foundation for their next scheme, which will of course produce the next round of wreckage and on and on.
Here’s an idea for government. Stop! Don’t do anything. Stop coming up with policies and measures . Just get out of the way and let people get on with their lives and figuring it out for themselves. They’ll be amazed at the results.
I believe in Belgium not so long ago they had no government for over a year (it was a split election under PR and no one would agree a coalition).
Every single thing improved.
Crime down.
Unemployed down.
Exam results up.
Healthcare outcomes up.
Economy grew.
Etc etc etc.
As Douglas Adams wrote, “Belgium man, Belgium” as a pejorative term.
Paging Guy Fawkes… call your office.
Vote Libertarian!
I have tried but cannot think of any problem to which the solution is Alan Milburn.
It was encouraged by my kids school to not allow them to take up part time work on the basis that it would cost them grades and destroy their future prospects. I just gave them an allowance for fear I would be guilty of destroying their chances of university and future careers. I wish I’d trusted my better judgement now.
The Government has largely destroyed the kind of Saturday jobs teenagers used to do (retail and hospitality) and Theeves is busily destroying those that remain.
The best way forward for any youngster who wants to earn some money is to provide “services” for the reasonably affluent elderly: grass/hedge cutting; housework; simple maintenance tasks if they’re capable; car washing etc.
But that would require a bit of initiative; “entrepreneurial” skills and perseverance … which, unfortunately, and particularly post the Covid Tyranny, are precisely the attributes which so many of them lack.
Milburn is from the cohort who thought it would be a wonderful idea to send 50% of young people to “university;” load them up with debt and flood the market with millions of graduates with useless ‘ologies who had high expectations which could never be met.
In other words, he hasn’t a scooby-doo ….. just like the rest of Two-Tier’s Government.