The UK has a Neet epidemic: those aged 16 to 24 classed as not in employment, education, or training. At various times in my life, I have counted myself among their number. It’s an easy status to fall into, yet it’s not the land of sunshine and roses one sometimes imagines jobless youth to be. The numbers grow year by year, and many of those entering the status fall further into Neetdom, whether it be by a conspicuous gap on the CV that leaves them even more behind, the realisation that you can live just as well on benefits or mere feelings of hopelessness after hundreds of failed job applications.
The truth is, it’s bloody tough out there getting a job. I can’t deny my generation is more exacting in what they’ll choose to do, harbouring ideas about their intrinsic value that the job market doesn’t seem to agree on. After all, no one wants to be the first generation of their family to be downwardly sociably mobile. Yet the majority of university degrees given out nowadays have minimal value-add and offer the graduate little more than high expectations and £50,000 of student debt. This has led to what scientist Peter Turchin calls ‘elite overproduction’: there are more aspiring elites than there are positions available within the existing power structure.
This has led to a glut of friends scrabbling to escape Neetdom by entering the few industries that may not truly suit them but are still seen as a conventional route to a high socioeconomic status. There was a brief period where I considered doing a law conversion course, only to discover how many friends were already caught in that mire. It turns out it’s extremely difficult to get a placement – one member of my extended family, a well-respected KC, even commented that he didn’t think he’d have got very far in law if he’d tried again today. Other friends tried accountancy, only to discover how soul-destroying the life was, quit and have the firms (considerably un-Deloitted with the situation) chase them down to reimburse the exam fees.
Long gone are the days of turning up at an office, asking to speak to the CEO, giving them a firm handshake and handing over your CV (only to start in the mailroom the next day), despite the insistence of most Boomers. It’s not just white-collar careers either. If you listen to Desert Island Discs, almost every chef arrived in the big city with a knapsack and a dream, only to knock on the door of a major restaurant that hired them on a whim. Try that now, and you’ll get a dirty look and a referral to a kafkaesque online portal, even though the restaurant industry still professes to be predicated on learning on the job. It seems the only reliable method to secure an opening is to leverage one’s existing connections, which leaves the unconnected floundering even more desperately.
It doesn’t help to be competing with a global market either. Even the most die-hard free-marketeer sees the stupidity in offering high-skilled visas to work in a petrol station or bakery when youth unemployment is at 15 per cent. It’s also incomprehensible to have a system that strictly limits medical school places while relying on overseas doctors to fill shortages. Woe betide the youngster who wants to get a summer job at McDonald’s nowadays. The Centre for Social Justice analysis of HMRC payroll figures revealed recently that 27 young non-EU migrants have been hired for every young Brit since 2020. Try cheering up a Neet with that statistic.
Woe betide the youngster who wants to get a summer job at McDonald’s nowadays
Critics like to state snootily that young Brits are workshy but this only follows the incentives as they currently stand. If you can earn roughly the same from benefits payments as you would working full-time, then you’ll obviously choose the former (and can even end up better off by illicit working on the side). This gets even more entrenched if you end up diagnosed with ADHD or depression from all the time you spend alone in your room scrolling on your phone (this really isn’t just a cliché). You end up with a medical reasoning that legitimises your situation, further feeding the state of learned helplessness.
What can be done? Anything, really, rather than the system as it stands. The latest government report puts the cumulative annual cost to taxpayers of Neets at £125 billion, more than is spent on education, so it’s not as if the situation can get much worse. It may be worth taking a note from the Chinese, who built train lines to connect rural farmers to city markets to sell their wares, even though it would have been more fiscally beneficial to subsidise the farmers instead. The Japanese too have a similar practice – quite often you’ll see a man in his 70s standing around and waving cars into a car park, even though the role is essentially redundant. Continued engagement in society is the primary goal.
Being a Neet often feels horrendous, and the vast majority want the situation to end. They may not admit it, but they relish being pressured into some kind of role, even if it is merely a beginning.
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