Fight for our future not their wars
Adam Gillman, Socialist Students
In the run-up to the Labour conference, defence minister Wes Streeting announced the promise of 40,000 ‘defence apprenticeships’. To combat the “moral emergency” of youth unemployment, Streeting wants to justify increased spending on military equipment and low-paid, exploitative apprenticeships.
Apprenticeships can be a good thing, a way for young people to get experience, training and a decent job. But it’s not benefiting young people to push them into the defence industry to be paid the outrageously low apprentice wages.
If this government truly cared about giving young people a future, then it would have a mass programme of council house building that could create thousands of jobs. Or use money to create decent jobs dealing with our crumbling infrastructure, the climate catastrophe or our understaffed health service. They would also scrap the exploitative minimum wage youth rates, which they stood to abolish in their manifesto.
It’s clear this government doesn’t care about our future and we need to fight back. This is why Socialist Students, alongside 25 other youth organisations including ones involved in the mass protests in France and Spain, is campaigning for the international youth strike on 20 November. We will “fight for our future, not their wars!” We demand an end to the increased militarisation and instead, decent jobs with decent pay with the resources taken from the super-rich.
