Shona Craven: Young people have the right to feel disillusioned

The National

27-05-2025

'Call for more police powers to tackle rise in knife crime' was The Scotsman's line. Reports of these calls by the Scottish Conservatives coincided with
the sentencing of a 21-year-old man for murdering 18-year-old Lewis McCartney with a knife in Edinburgh, and came days after Kayden Moy, aged just 16, was stabbed to death in Irvine.
The general secretary of the Scottish Police Federation says officers need more stop-and-search powers. Scottish Tory leader Russell Findlay says the SNP have been 'weak and reckless' in their approach to youth justice. The evidence, however, supports the Scottish Government's decision to take a public health approach to violence prevention.
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There are no quick-fix solutions here. The question of why a young person would even think about carrying a knife – let alone using one – goes far beyond police procedure, or sentencing guidelines.
We know by now that risk factors for youth violence include poverty, addiction and social isolation, plus broader societal factors such as high levels of unemployment and societal inequality. In other words, politicians must look at the bigger picture. Unfortunately, that isn't looking very positive right now for under-25s in the UK.
Hundreds of thousands of young people are struggling to find jobs and an even greater number are 'economically inactive', meaning they can't work, have given up trying or never even started, going directly from school to living off benefits and essentially admitting defeat.
It's a miserable situation that's projected to get much worse. But it's hard to blame these youngsters for feeling disillusioned.
A youth adviser who addressed the House of Lords last month was met with gasps after he reported that there were 'kids on the internet 24 hours a day, and they don't want to work for anything less than 40 grand'. He said there was a need to 'imbue them with a sense of 'you need to put a shift in, to get what you want in life'.'
But what do these youngsters want out of life, and is it realistic for them to believe that with hard work they'll be able to achieve it?
It's easy to dismiss them as coddled and delusional, but perhaps they're actually just numerate. If they're looking at rents, mortgage rates, energy bills and supermarket prices, they may conclude that even if they graft for 37.5 hours a week there won't be an awful lot left after they cover their essentials, especially if those include a car and fuel, or rail travel to a workplace.
Their parents and grandparents may grumble that it has been ever thus, and these young people just need to buck up their ideas, but the job landscape is fundamentally different to when they entered the workforce.
Past generations were willing to endure entry-level wages, flat shares and beans on toast for a spell, safe in the knowledge they would be able to climb a career ladder and improve their position. So fast-changing is the current technological landscape that young people who 'put a shift in' might end up sliding down a snake instead, finding themselves replaced by a chatbot or an AI agent.
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Maybe during the '24 hours a day' they apparently spend on the internet they are reading or hearing about the scale of in-work poverty – that's if they aren't experiencing it first-hand in their own family homes, with parents working multiple jobs but still drowning in debt.
The results of the latest Consumer Scotland Energy Tracker were published last week, with 15% of survey respondents reporting they were in energy debt or arrears (up from 9% last year) and a third saying they were unable to heat their homes to a comfortable level due to the cost.
Young people are living in these cold homes. It seems unlikely that a well-timed motivational lecture will convince them that hard work is guaranteed to get you what you want out of life. Of course, if you don't even try you will end up stuck, but tragically it seems many view that as a safer option – or their only option.
Responding to the £40k-a-year revelation, the Daily Mail's headline referred to 'internet-obsessed and job-shy Gen Z'.
There's a huge abdication of responsibility there – especially from a title whose website was a gateway drug for those vulnerable to what we now call 'doom-scrolling'.
Is it fair to chide digital natives for not having the self-restraint to put down their smartphones when their own parents are glued to the damned things?
It seems the best the Prime Minister has to offer is a European youth mobility scheme – in other words, an escape route out of the country.
The news that he is planning (probably, maybe) to scrap the two-child benefit cap (at some point, if he can find the money) won't do much to lift the sense of despair about the kind of future the broken UK political system is storing up for young people who have every right to feel demoralised.