Young people, so says the DWP Secretary, must ‘learn or earn’ or lose benefits. Be warned, dear reader, this is an angry post.
This announcement by Liz Kendall has put three things in my mind. Firstly, never underestimate the excessive power of rhyme in policy creation. Secondly, the authoritarian parties will never resist the temptation to hammer young people with a mixture of higher expectations and the threat of less money. Thirdly, it reminded me of one of the formative experiences for my liberalism.
I have worked with young people during a couple of periods in a varied career. The young people I encountered were often in profoundly challenging social-economic circumstances, and were generally coping with them with more resilience and pragmatism than I could have hoped to summon. I formed an analytical framing of sorts of the general experience of young people. Not all of this will be true of all young people, but much is broadly relevant to many.
To be a young person in this country is to be stuck between clear points in life. You are treated as whichever of the ‘child’ and ‘adult’ labels is most convenient for the power in the room. Your responsibilities and the expectations upon you grow exponentially, while your actual or effective rights do not. You are sent to school, where evidence of aptitude comes with pressure, and a perceived absence of aptitude results in pressure of a different kind – I went through both. Anti-social behaviour is blamed on you collectively, as if you are a uniform population subset (anti-social behaviour, by-the-by, is a ridiculous word that has been used to group together everything from slightly noisy loitering to active criminal damage. It should be stricken from the political lexicon).
Finally – lest we forget – the present generation were locked in their houses for 18 months, and then marched back to school or college en masse; if you think the person exists who was not at least somewhat at risk of finding one or the other of those experiences somewhat traumatic, I would very much like to sell you a bridge.
All of these complexities exist for most young people even before we talk about poverty, young parents, young carers, homelessness, mental ill health, substances, county lines, abuse, victimisation, bullying and the particular hardship of being an asylum seeker at that age, especially unaccompanied. It is hard even when your broader context is stable and financially secure.
A particular sadness for me is encountering political figures in all parties – some of them impeccably progressive or socially liberal on other fronts – who treat this as a policy area with a single goal; make young people fit into the world better. Such a perspective is inherently conservative and authoritarian. It also doesn’t work.
We are liberals. We believe that people are individuals with individual strengths, identities, goals and pathways. Liberal policy around young people should be focused on recognising the challenges shared by almost all young people without imposing top-down hard-line one-size-fits-all solutions that reassure the tabloids. As always, Labour in government feels the need to look tough and strict, when it should be enabling – and funding – an approach that listens to young people, as individuals. Kendall says that unemployment when young can lead to a lifelong employment issue – so can a poor experience of early employment. Forcing young people to take the first job that comes up, or even the second, under threat of state-sanctioned penury, will result in a chunk of a generation being frightened out of aiming higher. Whatever the aspirations of Labour’s new offer, it will end up with some young people being sent to jobs that will stunt ambition and fuel anxiety, just so the DWP can tick a box. It is social meanness and economic cobblers, and pairs beautifully with Yvette Cooper’s plan for tough love youth clubs as a kind of pre-emptive policing.
Our approach, the approach we should push unrelentingly whenever we get a chance in any local legislature, should be about helping young people into the work or education situation that helps them develop, not by threatening them until they comply for the convenience of others. Support for proper community youth work projects would be a good start, staffed by practitioners who understand how to work with young people where they are rather than where they are supposed to be. It would be politically distinctive, inherently liberal and, conveniently, the right thing to do.
* Jack Nicholls is a Liberal Democrat member in North East England.
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37 Comments
While I agree that some young people have genuine physical or mental health reasons for no being able to engage in education, training or employment, I am also aware that other young people – a small minority – prefer to stay at home gaming rather than engaging with either learning or earning. I’m not sure it is a particularly liberal idea to argue that low paid workers who are working long hours to provide for their families should be paying income tax to subsidise the lifestyle choices of these particular young people.
I’m afraid I don’t understand Jack’s claimed anger in this post. Jack makes lots of valid points about how people are individuals with individual goals, and that many people have had all sorts of mental health or other issues in their lives. But none of those points justify a person (whether young or old) expecting to be able to just sit back and do nothing and be provided with a living via money taken out of other people’s hard earned wages. Welfare benefits should be there to support people who for reasons beyond their control are unable to support themselves, and there’s nothing either wrong or authoritarian about making sure that that is the purpose benefits are used for, and they are not abused by (a small minority of) people who could work but choose not to.
Regarding the comment, Forcing young people to take the first job that comes up I don’t believe that’s what Liz Kendall has said the Government will do. I would hope and assume that benefits would only be withdrawn if a person has consistently turned down a variety of jobs and demonstrated through their actions that they are not seriously looking for any work.
We are talking about the threat of age-specific benefit withdrawal that is being communicated in perfect with a standard discourse about young people that both major parties have peddled forever. That’s not about the morality or otherwise of welfare (which is very rarely a lifestyle choice, though I grant it is sometimes a tarpit of absent confidence), it’s about treating young people differently from other people and speaking about them rather than to them.
My anger is born of experience. No system will prevent some people from willfully abusing it, but I would rather have a system where a small number get what they don’t deserve than where many others are stripped of what they need. If that’s an unpopular view, then perhaps the IDS model of welfare has become the new centre-ground, and maybe I’m in the wrong party.
I disagree with Jack Nicholls and agree with the DWP Secretary.
A young person should in my view preferentially be in full time education. Apart from developing them as a human being, it will also increase their future earning potential.
The only acceptable reason (apart from illness etc) for not being in full time education is that you have instead decided to work full time.
If you are neither in education nor working, don’t expect the taxes that I pay to be paid to you as social security benefits.
Jack, thank you for this post. You have expressed yourself with eloquence and clarity and, frankly, you are absolutely entitled to be angry.
One of the things that winds me up the most is phrases like “I don’t want my hard earned taxes going to support (name of category of people I disapprove of). Because one day, someone might not want their hard earned taxes going to support you. Someone might not want the NHS to fund the drug that gives you an extra year of decent life with your family. Someone might not want to fund that course that will give you the skills to find work after redundancy. Someone might not want to fund your child’s ASN tuition.
We should not base our social security system (or any other part of government) on the value judgements of a few people. We should base them on the principles of human rights.
I know a great deal about helping people navigate the various cruelties and brutalities of our social security system. It is far from fair on anyone, believe me.
I would strip out a lot of the conditionality in the system and treating people differently because of their age, paying them less because they are younger as if things cost less, would be fairly close to the top of my list.
I want to see a generous-spirited society which helps everyone to live the best life they can. The most important things for me is that the social security system provides a safety net which ensures that everyone has enough to not starve and keep a roof over their heads.
Some of the early comments to this article are very disappointing. They are essentially saying, “It offends my ego if someone has it easier than me”, and attitudes like that will make the world burn.
I want future generations to have easier and easier lives. This is surely the whole point of human progress? We could build heaven on earth if so many people were not so determined to build hell because the idea that they might have had a better life had they been born later is, what, offensive?
It’s not very emotionally mature, is it?
Caron, you’re an inspiration and a star
Excellent post, Jack. Educationalists and politicians have never really got to grips with NEETS (a rather insulting term that means young people who are Not in Education, Employment and Training). In most cases they have complex needs and have been failed by the education system so far.
Some years ago I held the Education portfolio in my council and amongst other things I chaired the Panel that dealt with persistent absentees from school. We had an enlightened School Attendance Officer who saw non-attendance as a cry for help or as a result of chaotic parenting, which could not be dealt with by fining parents. In all cases he put in support systems to help the young person and/or the family towards stability – and it often worked.
I don’t believe in the feckless poor, but I do think there are young people who need sympathetic support to enable them to become good citizens. And as you point out, the lockdown trauma is a real thing and has impacted on a generation of young people. Some are fortunate to be resilient enough to sail through but any that have vulnerabilities really struggle.
I have to agree with this article. Doesn’t the Preamble to the Federal Constitution have something about not being enslaved by conformity? What greater pressure to conform is there than the assumption that human value is tied only to how much labour we provide to others?
I grew up in the 1980’s* which was a time of enormous creativity and discovery from young people who made great music, great art, great comedy and a lot of it fuelled by either free access to higher education or the old unemployment benefit (the dole). And the country has benefited astronomically from all of this, not least from those kids who “stayed at home playing on their computers”.
Jack, you and the young people you work with have every right to be angry, and you deserve so much more.
A true Liberal approach is to give people what they need to make their own lives, and not impose any expectations on them – they know better than we what they want to do.
We have to make a choice to change the economy, turn away from self-interested capitalism that only ends up with billionaires sucking the life out of society, and start again with a co-operative, sharing commonwealth that breaks the old stagnation of wealth servicing only wealth.
Jack, stay angry.
(*sure, it wasn’t all fun, we had our own plague and our own fascists, and nuclear Armageddon was always on you mind, but hey those were the days)
I, for one, happily pay taxes so that some kid can sit on their computer and play games because that kid might turn out to be a game designer or an artist or a composer and those things add way more value to humanity as a whole and to the life of that kid than being forced into a minimum wage job they don’t want to do because of some illiberal “work ethic”.
We are living in a country where the creative arts are becoming the preserve of the rich because everybody else has to scrape an existence under DWP rules and I hate it.
That’s a damned good post. To the people complaining that they don’t want their taxes to go towards supporting younger people, I’d ask, if we don’t want to make a better world for those who follow us, then what the hell are we even here for?
There is a huge difference between a dialogue involving young people who someone seeks to help and a government that simply issues threats. In the former it is sometimes appropriate to do and say whatever one can to persuade a young person to change behaviour and work hard and so on, but the circumstances and understanding of that young perons’s situation is crucial. Political diktat and its resulting policies are ineffective.
As to earn or learn, there should also be the opportunity to do something of both simultaneously, but we are being let down by some employers who are not willing to provide the right kind of opportunities and rewards and an education system that provides little practical learning, increasingly values only examination type qualifications and is inflexible.
I taught 17year olds who were troublesome, had been labelled as failures at school but then were on a one year course (Pre-vocational Certificate) designed to allow them to reflect on their situations and personal problems, give them a taste of various practical subjects and improve their basic skills in number, literacy and computers. It was successful in helping many of them sort out their troubled lives.Government axed it because they said at the end of the course students were not sufficiently further qualified on the ladder of so-called educational attainment and therefore it was a wasted year. I was angry.
@Jack. If the concern is the specific reference to young people, then I agree that you need to be careful about singling out any particular age group. I think the context was that Liz Kendall was talking about a new “Youth Guarantee” scheme due to be announced, which we don’t yet know the details of, but which probably explains the focus on young people.
@Sarah Brown I don’t think that’s a fair representation of some of our views. The issue is not about whether other people have it easier, but about that society works best when there is give and take on both sides and people generally expect to do something to help others in return for their income.
@Richard Flowers. Yes, creativity is a great thing, but you’re talking about maybe a few hundred people out of a population of (in the 80s) over 50 million. If you want to encourage creativity, then education/training/scholarships/etc. would provide a far better way of doing that than paying loads of people to do nothing for the sake of a tiny number who might as a result create something.
@Mohammed Amin – “If you are neither in education nor working, don’t expect the taxes that I pay to be paid to you as social security benefits.”
So from that, I take it you are quite happy that the taxes you pay subsidize the lifestyle of the rich and idol?
Could not agree more. Punishment doesn’t work, at least I’ve never seen it do so. And I’ve lost track of how many patients fell off the wagon when they were sanctioned for being five minutes late. Imagine that : you have a horrible life, you lose you benefit, you end up homeless next step is street drugs if you weren’t on them already. What a country. All that time in opposition and Labour comes up with this.
Lib Dems don’t seem to be a particularly revolutionary bunch of people. They generally support the system albeit at the same time advocating for various reforms. However the same system they claim to support, fundamentally, isn’t quite as liberal as it might seem to them.
The purpose of taxation is generally thought to be about raising money for Government to spend. An alternative view is that taxation is a means of forcing us to work. It levies taxes on us so that we’ll have to work to get the money, money that Government itself has created, to pay them. In the process we all end up doing something useful, creating goods and services that can be bought with the Govt’s currency of issue. We give a real value to the Govt’s fiat currency of issue.
Jack rather overstates his argument about “forcing young people to take the first job that comes up”. But he does have a valid point in that the system does force nearly all of us into doing some work which isn’t only for our own benefit.
From a socialist perspective there can’t be too many objections. Providing of course that the fruits of our labours are more equitably shared than they are.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2014/05/randy-wray-taxes-mmt-approach.html
Threatening people with destitution if they don’t accept a job/training position puts them in a vulnerable position as walking away from a difficult situation (bullying at work, low wages) has huge financial risks to the individual. We want people to have real strength and bargaining power in the workplace, and surely Labour wants that too? I support the idea of a Universal Basic Income without conditionality as I thing the party does.
As a young person who has been on benefits for a long time for reasons outside of my control, thank you for being angry, Jack. It’s unfortunately been quite rare for me to hear/see someone who really gets what we’re up against.
I completely agree with Andrew Toye above. We need better support and understanding, not threats to make our lives more difficult than they already are. I’ve had therapists, doctors, and council employees who I grew afraid to see because of how disinterested they were in my actual issues, being more focused, it seemed, on trying to make a square peg fit into a round hole. It didn’t feel like they saw me as a person who was really struggling – I was just a problem that needed to be fixed and made ‘normal’ as quickly as possible.
On the other hand, I’ve met people who have gone above and beyond to help guide me to a better place where I can heal and grow in my own time, rather than pushing me toward the ideal outcome with no regard to my actual ability to make it there. A bit of kindness and understanding goes so much farther than many think, and it’s the sort of thing people in my situation never forget.
And to add: I’ve become a bit embarrassed by how much over everyone’s ‘hard-earned taxes’ goes to support my age group – including those of us who have decent employment pensions and are sitting on large capital gains on our houses (I daren’t tell you how much our house in London is now worth). Votes for 16-year-olds may redress the balance of political spending a little; but there must be some way of increasing taxes on the affluent retired?
I agree with this posting. My opinion is that we must start with fighting to reduce family poverty. We need to start with looking at the figures for children getting free school meals – they do not measure family poverty directly but they are the best we have. We can look at their performance because the figures are published. When I was a councillor the figures given to us showed that on average the children on the list of those registered for free school meals were about two years behind the rest at 16.
We need to base discussion on the reality.
@ William Wallace,
“….but there must be some way of increasing taxes on the affluent retired?”
Well yes. How about reintroducing the old Schedule A tax? It’s basically a tax on imputed rent. So, if your house in London could be rented out at say £3000 per month, this would be added to your income for tax purposes.
Someone buying a similar property on a mortgage could offset their interest payments against their income. Possibly the same, or at least at a partial level, could apply to renters too.
This would redress the imbalance of wealth marvellously.
The chances of Lib Dems doing this? Zilch!
The old schedule A tax on imputed rents is a good land Value Tax policy.
To those who have spoken here in support, thank you very much. Special mention of CM – that was brave.
To those doubting what I’m saying, I promise you this is always what happens with schemes like this, whatever the intentions of the government. Those who need the most support and understanding always end up getting the least, and get railroaded into situations that make everything worse, all to keep those fortunate enough to fit the mainstream world happy and reassured.
If this party of all parties has those patrician conservative attitudes in it, even if it’s a minority of people, I don’t belong in it. I’m done with party politics. Better to fight for what’s fair outside where it might make some impact.
@Jack: I wouldn’t feel so discouraged. Yes, I (and some others who’ve posted here) disagree with you. You think you’re fighting for fairness, but fairness is very subjective and on this particular issue what you think is fair I think is unfair (and economically unworkable). But so what? Different people having different beliefs is part and parcel of democracy – and very especially in the LibDems who have a long tradition of allowing more freedom to dissent than do the other main parties. The way to deal with these kinds of disagreements is to listen to others, and try to understand why they believe what they do – and if you still think they are wrong, to try to help them understand your point of view.
FWIW I suspect your view on this issue is likely to be the majority viewpoint amongst LibDem activists, although not amongst the wider population. But please don’t give up party politics just because of this: If everyone gave up party politics as soon as they found some people didn’t agree with them on some issue (even an issue you feel very passionate about) there’d literally be no-one left in politics!
@ Jack,
I was thinking about making a comment on the same lines as Simon but it’s probably better coming from a Lib Dem.
I don’t even agree with myself at times! So I do have to be tolerant of others who might disagree too 🙂
Roland,
I note your comment to @Mohammed Amin where you say
@Mohammed Amin – “If you are neither in education nor working, don’t expect the taxes that I pay to be paid to you as social security benefits.” So from that, I take it you are quite happy that the taxes you pay subsidize the lifestyle of the rich and idol?“
However, I’m not at all sure what point you are trying to make. Can you explain what taxes you are thinking of that we pay which are used to subsidize the lifestyle of the rich and idle? I’m not aware of any that do this, but if you are aware of some, I would willingly join you in campaigning to get those subsidies removed.
@David Evans – I did wonder if anyone had read it 🙂
I was intimating that many people seem to think it is okay to denigrate those on benefits, in this instance young people, as being workshy etc. Yet in my experience the children of the well off, ie. those who receive an income from the bank of mum and dad, exhibit very similar behaviours, just that mum and dad are paying, not the taxpayer.
My other point was around invisible taxes/benefits, the well off are able to take advantage of aggressive tax avoidance schemes and as we saw with the previous government, those with mates connections were able to fleece the taxpayer with questionable contracts. you and I pay increased taxes to cover these largely invisible transactions.
“……you are quite happy that the taxes you pay subsidize the lifestyle of the rich and idle”
The resources to supply these lifestyles do have to come from somewhere. The rich are only rich because they can rely on the services of those who aren’t.
I don’t think Roland has got it quite right about taxes. With a few notable exceptions, these resources aren’t directly derived from the taxpayer. However, he does have a point.
We need to look at the bigger picture and understand why our society has the high levels of inequality that it does. We can start by looking at why companies like Amazon pay little or no corporation tax. Why we allow the PFI pirates to insert themselves into the operation of our public services such as the NHS and railways.
They can only have one motivation.
“We can start by looking at why companies like Amazon pay little or no corporation tax. Why we allow the PFI pirates to insert themselves into the operation of our public services such as the NHS and railways. ”
Seconded
Far too many young people are doing degrees that won’t reflect the career that they actually end up in, & only then do they understand that that degree was unnecessary in the first place ..When you get older & will normally have greater responsibility – rent, bills etc ….That luxury of a chosen career path falls by the wayside – as millions do work earning a living in a job that many in here couldn’t envisage or survive on ….Welcome to the real world…
In a mixed econony (as all economies across the world are) you have to be able to earn income to partiicipate as a consumer, and the basic necessities of life – food, shelter, clothing, transport etc – have to be affordable within that income.
We all have both rights and responsibilities that are accepted as social norms in a modern democratic society. The right to work and earn a living should be among those rights, as should be the right to affordable accommodation. Our responsibiities as adults and parents is to provide for ourselves and our familiies to the best of our abilities and to collectively ensure that there is an adequate safety net for all citizens throughout life.
There are three basic policies that can directly aid in both the provision of these rights and the exercise of these responsibilities:
1. Public service Job guarantees for all who wish to take up such offers beginning with the long-term unemployed.
2. A Universal basic income for all working -age individuals permanently resident in the UK, sufficient to provide the basic necessities of food, clothing, transport etc outside of shelter – supplemented for the disabled.
3. Land value taxation, social housing and rent controls aimed at ensuring that all individuals permanently resident in the UK can have access to adequate shelter.
What we do not need is the denigration of families that are able to help their adult children from the bank or savings of mum and dad. Families should be encouraged to take responsibility for their offspring and help in anyway they are able. That is a natural and timeless human instinct. These families are not Kulaks to be strung up for having a bigger field or one more cow than their neighbours as they were by Lenin/Stalin in Soviet Russia or Mao’s China. The communists mistake was in reading too much Marx and not enough Henry George.
Martin Gray often comes up with assertions and value judgements without supplying any evidence to back it up. He’s done it again now by making a disappointingly utilitarian judgement on the purpose of a university degree limiting it to a purely short term immediate career purpose.
He takes no account of the fact that a great many people will have to make career changes at some point in life, sometimes by choice, sometimes by necessity, given the modern pace of change.
I prefer the more rounded notion of what I take to be a liberal education set out by John Henry Newman – that education is an end in itself, providing intrinsic benefits both in terms of moral judgement and wisdom.
“a great many people will have to make career changes at some point in life, sometimes by choice, sometimes by necessity, given the modern pace of change. ”
Indeed. I changed career quite early on through choice but the above point emphasises the importance of lifelong learning and the ability to adapt as circumstances change.
@ Joe,
It’s debatable whether what we have at the moment is a genuine mixed economy. After all the privatisations it is certainly far less mixed than it used to be. As it has become less mixed levels of inequality have risen everywhere. Not just the UK.
Of course we all help our children, even when they become adult children, as best we can. That’s not really the issue. At times some ,though, children do need a slightly firmer approach than others. It’s not all about “liberal listening”!
Sure we can read both Marx and George. The excesses of the revolutions in both China and Russia weren’t caused by anything the leaders had read in in either. Marx had lots to say about capitalism but next to nothing about what should replace it. In this respect George was more forward looking even though the economics of his “single tax” have never proved to be at all practical.
The thing about university isn’t what you study, but where you study it and who you study it with – I did a politics degree at Buckingham, which was pointless, as it was, in the words of its vice-chancellor later on, a vocational school for law and business for non-British students.
Or as I put it, a sheltered workshop for libertarian fantasists subsidised by Nigerian lawyers and Malaysian accountants. In my defence, I only went because I was subject to overseas tuition fees, as many young Brits abroad now are post-Brexit, and the two-year degree worked out cheaper.
The irony about Liz Truss is that her father would have been horrified at the very concept of a private university, Old Labour type that he was, though had he stayed in Canada, his daughter’s ability to attend university in the UK would have been determined by whether he could afford the fees to send her there.
Had she ended up at Buckingham, where there weren’t enough people with enough time to get involved in student politics, she might have never crossed paths with Mark Littlewood, who stayed with the Lib Dems for longer before becoming Director General of the Institute of Economic Affairs.
Indeed, instead of doing politics there, as she did at Oxford, she might have done accounting, become no more controversial than her colleague, and my contemporary, Brandon Lewis, whose line about ‘breaking the law in a specific and limited way’ from 2020 has long since been forgotten.
Young people need more of a voice in our society. In a world where everyone is supposed to have an opinion, they are forming theirs. We need to be more compassionate, respectful and caring of young people. They are our future and it is wise to invest in the future.