Linda Taaffe, Waltham Forest Socialist Party
Whatever next from this Labour government? First, we had more powers to mayors without any talk of funding, then £2 bus fares, and other ‘breathing space’ measures, all in the name of helping workers a little bit with the cost-of-living crisis – or more aptly the cost-of-capitalism crisis. In other words, do or say anything except face up to the big real threat to working-class people – the billionaires and oligarchs.
NEET stands for those young people not in employment, education or training. Alan Milburn, who has been given the task of investigating this sorry situation and coming up with some answers, has now placed the blame squarely on the NEETs themselves, saying the risk of a child becoming a NEET can be traced back to primary school. Blame it on the kids themselves, or their teachers, or their families!
So how are these little kids going to be identified as a potential NEET. Don’t ask teachers to add this to their workload or it might be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. It’s hard enough to get the right support for pupils with special educational needs and disabilities.
It is not education that decides the jobs’ market. In whose hands lies economics? Once upon a time young people with few or no academic qualifications could come out of school and get a job in the shipyards, docks, mines, engineering factories or climb up telegraph poles for BT. The employers financed apprenticeships. That was when Britain was an industrial capitalist system. Then Thatcher broke up public services and closed down industry to make Britain a so-called modern financial services centre; another period of high unemployment.
Today we are in a desperate situation with an ailing capitalist system where those with wealth to invest are just not investing. They’ve got such little faith in their own system. We are now an economy based on property and all its related spin-off services together with some financial services.
For those who are around 20 years old today their babyhood was during the 2007-08 crash when the government decided they were not going to penalise the big company perpetrators but rather bail them out – and make those growing up over the next 20 years, and other workers, pay for them. It’s alluded to as the austerity years (yet another euphemism); same with the Covid economic downturn. Spending on schools was frozen for 14 years; youth services axed by £1.3 billion. Now this generation today are poorer than their parents. Meanwhile the rich have got even richer.
Let’s bring this tiny handful of the super-rich under public scrutiny by our young unemployed. Open the books. Let the rich explain to those young people living in poverty why the rich need so much wealth; and let us socialists help unemployed young people come to the conclusion that we need a revolution to kick these parasites out of power so we can plan for what is needed by all. Many reforms have been introduced under the threat of revolution.
Let’s start with getting a protest demonstration; call on the Trade Union Congress to organise all unions to come onto the streets. Young people can’t live like this, with no real future. And us older people are not going to stand by either and let all that we, our own parents and grandparents fought for, be taken away from our grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
