Over the past week, the Evening Standard’s reports on London’s youth
unemployment epidemic have revealed tales of individual despair — and highlighted
a systemic failure. If one quarter of our young people are unable to find work,
it is clearly not a question of them not trying hard enough. Society has made
them promises it could not keep.
But while the immediate reasons are economic, there are still
more intractable cultural implications. The most desperate young people I have
spoken to are not just coming up against a depressed labour market — they are
engaged in a fight for their identity.
We have come to view both youth and the working class with
suspicion. When I met the MP for Hackney and Stoke Newington, Diane Abbott, she
described a cultural shift that has taken place over a couple of generations.
Her own father arrived in Britain from Jamaica in the
Fifties and became an apprentice welder. “The point about that generation of
working-class men was that they were defined by their job: that’s what gave
them their identity,” she said. “When you have a generation of working-class
males of whatever colour who are out of work, they struggle for identity. It
leads to feelings of helplessness. And the trouble with helplessness is it
stops you making the best of your situation.”
The following day, I visited the Pembury Estate in Hackney,
where that helplessness was palpable. The young men I spoke to couldn’t think
of a single person who was building a career. It wasn’t simply a lack of formal
schemes to help them find the jobs they desperately wanted, it was a lack of
informal support: no parents able to advise on interview technique, for
example, and no access to computers. They felt trapped, left with what George
Orwell described as “that frightful feeling of impotence and despair which is
almost the worst evil of unemployment”.
These are complicated problems, but our political leaders
routinely and deliberately simplify them. Iain Duncan Smith has cautioned
against raising benefits because the poor will spend them on alcohol and
gambling. Earlier this year, when his approval ratings were at an all-time
high, David Cameron declared that many poor people viewed a life on welfare as
“an acceptable alternative”. As if the vast majority of claimants wouldn’t
prefer an honest day’s pay to their soul-destroying dependancy.
Such rhetoric has a noxious effect. Youths become “feckless”
and “feral”, benefit claimants “scroungers”. These crude characterisations mean
that employers and politicians can feel better about ignoring the problem. They
mean that the identity of a generation of young people becomes tied up with
what they cost the country rather than what they can contribute. It is a
terrible, senseless waste.
Source: 26th September 2012, London Evening
Standard, Richard Godwin
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