Anyone with a brain is jumping off HMS Britain

Telegraph

11 hours ago

A piece was recently published about five Oxford graduates. All of them are struggling to find work more than a year after getting good degrees. The article provoked a spate of online mockery about the young people's supposed sense of entitlement. Not for the first time, social media reminded us that we are what GK Chesterton called 'veneered vandals', savages under the thinnest of layers.
In fact, the five Oxonians came across as ambitious and determined. They were making ends meet through temping, tutoring and working summer jobs while firing off hundreds of application letters. They were simply finding out, like so many people of their age, that three years of study and tens of thousands of pounds in student debt no longer get you onto the first rung of a career ladder.
This discovery shocked them, as well it might. Theirs was the generation that was yanked out of school in March 2020, thinking that they would be back to take their A-levels after three or four weeks of lockdown. In fact, it wasn't just their schools that they never went back to; it was the way of life of pre-pandemic Britain.
Before lockdown, the UK budget was on its way to surplus. Now, the Government is borrowing nearly £150 billion a year, two thirds of which must go to pay interest on past borrowing. No one has a plan to undo the supposedly emergency spending of 2020. The only debate is over whether taxes must rise to meet the new commitments, or whether we carry on borrowing.
Did we imagine that we could pay people to stay home for the better part of two years without suffering an economic hit? As a matter of fact, I think a lot of us did. The same people who spent lockdown howling down attempts to loosen restrictions as 'putting the economy before lives' are now angry and bewildered because prices, taxes and unemployment have risen.
Britain has reached the end of a long run of structurally high employment. For more than 30 years, our jobs market was the envy of Europe. Yes, we could be hit by external events, notably the global financial crisis. But we bounced back quickly, because we understood that the best way to encourage employers to hire people was to make it easy to fire them.
A moment's thought reveals why. In a country with light employment regulations, firms take on staff during upswings, knowing that they can always drop them if things go wrong. But in a country with restrictive regulations, every employee is a potential liability, and companies hang back warily. In such countries, unemployment is structurally high, especially among young people. That has been southern Europe's tragedy for decades.
British governments used to understand this. Neither Tony Blair nor Gordon Brown tried to undo the labour reforms of the 1980s. Both knew that, if they wanted revenue for public services, they needed a buoyant economy.
Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves, by contrast, seem to struggle with the concept of cause and effect. Never mind their tax-and-spend policies. They appear not to grasp that raising the costs of employing people leads to fewer people being employed.
Four months ago, they hit businesses with a double tax. Employer National Insurance contributions rose from 13.8 per cent to 15 per cent, and at the same time kicked in on earnings above £5,000 instead of £9,100. What did they think would happen, for heaven's sake?
If tobacco taxes reduce smoking and carbon taxes reduce emissions, what did they suppose jobs taxes would do? Sure enough, the number of employees on payroll plunged by 109,000 the following month, and has declined further in every month since. Britain's overall unemployment rate is now at its highest since lockdown.
The really striking figure, though, is youth unemployment. Among 16- to 24-year-olds, the jobless rate has reached Mediterranean levels: over 14 per cent in recent months. Why? Again, because of our refusal to acknowledge that actions have consequences.
Pushing up the minimum wage (which applies from age 16) and the national living wage (which applies from 21) makes MPs feel righteous. They have voted to raise minimum remuneration for 20-year-olds by 55 per cent since 2020. The trouble is that these repeated hikes end up punishing young people, not helping them, by closing off job opportunities and condemning many to welfare.
Around 60,000 students a year go straight from university onto long-term sickness benefits. MPs with a basic knowledge of economics tend to keep quiet, because they are terrified of being asked how they would like to live on £10 an hour. It is an irrelevant question, but it nonetheless terrifies them.
I was, I think, the only parliamentarian to speak out against an above-inflation hike in the minimum wage during the pandemic, at a time when wages were falling across the private sector. Everyone else wanted an even bigger rise. Ignorant voters, self-righteous journalists and cowardly politicians make a potent combination.
This year, the minimum wage rose by 18 per cent for 16- and 17-year-olds and by 16.3 per cent for 18-, 19- and 20-year olds. Result? Fewer jobs for young people. Openings in the hospitality sector are down by 22,000 since last year, and graduate postings have fallen by an almost unbelievable 33 per cent.
To repeat, policies have consequences. I sometimes think that the readiness to acknowledge trade-offs is the real dividing-line in politics. And I don't just mean among politicians.
Among voters, too, there are those who look at the costs of policies, and those who go to the polling station humming 'I'm just a soul whose intentions are good'.
Hikes in the minimum wage are the least of it. The open-ended extension of equalities laws is an even greater deterrent. When retail workers can be compensated for being paid less than warehouse workers on supposedly sex discrimination grounds, even though the retail workers were refusing to be redeployed to warehouses, employers can hardly be blamed for being reluctant to hire.
And that is before we get to Angela Rayner's package of employment laws, the most far-reaching since the mid-1970s. The Employment Rights Bill, currently before the House of Lords, is a regulatory omnibill that covers sick pay, paternity leave, bereavement, privileges for new employees, a right to demand flexible working, new holiday entitlements and extra powers for trade unions.
As Tony Blair put it, early in his premiership: 'There is almost always a case that can be made for each specific instrument. The problem is cumulative. All these good intentions can add up to a large expense, with suffocating effects.' Quite so, and it is more than a little scary that we are governed by people who can't see it.
Here is a paradox. Labour – the clue is in the name – is meant to be the party of the worker. Yet every single Labour-majority government has left office with unemployment higher than when it began. Every. Single. One. This one, unlike some of its predecessors, has wasted no time.
Already we can see where it is going: more and more workers' rights, fewer and fewer workers. We are in a vicious circle. Higher unemployment means fewer people paying taxes into the system and more drawing benefits from it. Since Labour has already proven that it cannot cut spending – not even mildly to slow the rise in benefits claims – that can only mean even higher taxes, prompting more disinvestment, slower growth, higher unemployment and lower revenue.
According to a survey by the British Council, 72 per cent of Brits under 30 are thinking of working abroad, and who can blame them? We are pulling off the extraordinary double of simultaneous emigration and immigration crises, exporting our entrepreneurs and replacing them with people who go onto benefits. And, God help us, we have another four years of it to come.