7
QMESSENGER MONDAY NOVEMBER 28 2011
Comment
The Great Debate The Striking Thing The fundamental power that all people have, so the old line goes, is that of their work. However excluded from political process or economic policy you are, you can always chose to withhold your work and, in numbers, this is power. But strikes, of course, have not always been the most successful form of political action. Many pass by into the distance having made little difference to those who hold the keys to the kingdom. Strikes, though, are not all of a kind. Magnitude is the variable that makes, or breaks, a strike. That is to say they must be on a truly industrial scale. November 30th looks set to be one strike on exactly that scale. With 3 million people estimated to take part, it looks set to be the largest strike since 1926. As a result, this, the largest strike in decades, has the potential to be a hammer blow to a Coalition government that, with bad economic growth and Occupy London taking their toll, is looking all black and no blue.
Defending The Right To Insult (And Quite Right Too) Greater minds than I have defended the right of all to free speech. “I do not agree with what you say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it”, so said Voltaire. Or, to throw a bit of Mill in there: “If mankind minus one were of one opinion, then mankind is no more justified in silencing the one than the one – if he had the power – would be justified in silencing mankind.” I think it’s a bit odd that there is a need to reiterate the following point at a university: free speech is an important, and indeed a rather lovely, thing. The fact that a No Platform policy was brought up at last week’s student council is disappointing. A university should surely be a place that, more than any other, celebrates the importance of free speech and open debate. When you disagree with someone, the answer is not to refuse to engage with them, but to attempt to understand where the person is coming from. I understand where the motion came from, it was aiming to defend and protect students from offence, but why are one person’s feelings more important than another’s?
Is youth unemployment being tackled effectively?
Yes Patrick Ford Is this some sick joke? How can anybody attempt to defend the Government at a time when youth employment (18-24) has hit the one million mark? It’s a tough sell, certainly, but it’s important to get a few basic facts right. Ed Miliband and the Labour Party may talk of a ‘lost generation’ but the reality is that youth unemployment has been gently creeping up since 2002, and Labour left office with the figure standing at well over 900,000. Their wish to get 50 % of people to go to university was sold as social mobility, but the cynics have been proven right: more and more people are getting worthless degrees – and racking up debt in the meantime – when they would be better off training up as an apprentice, learning new skills, or gaining work experience. Far too many graduates complain about not being able to walk straight into their chosen career, and the £9,000 tuition fees should certainly make people think twice about going to university for the sole reason of ‘that’s what people do nowadays’. The Office for National Statistics’ decision to calculate the ‘value’ of a degree for the first time should come as a welcome bonus. This issue transcends party politics. Youth unemployment rose under Labour and it’s rising under the Coalition. The harsh reality is that there ain’t all that much a government can do about youth jobs. Encouraging older workers to retire, so that companies can take on young people, isn’t going to work at a time when people are working harder and longer than ever to secure an adequate retirement. Lowering transport fees – especially on the Tube in London – for young people might help, as
they would be prepared to look further afield for work. But this would again cost huge sums of money, and Britain simply cannot continue to live outside its means. We have seen that piling up debt leads us to painful recessions. Chucking state money at a problem is a heavy-handed, inefficient and wasteful method of intervention. State-created jobs compete against the private sector, and the latter is responsible for growing the economy. You can’t grow an economy when the state pays your wages and only receives taxes in return. The private sector, which pays wages out of profits, produces goods for export and pays taxes to the state. So the Government’s policies of encouraging the private sector to hire young people are a small step in the right direction. Apprenticeships offer youths the chance to learn new skills, gain experience and have the chance to impress their employers with a view to gaining a permanent job. And the coalition government have worked with the private sector to increase dramatically the number of apprenticeships. A National Insurance holiday for firms who employ under 25-yearolds was announced in the Budget; likewise, cutting corporation tax for small and medium enterprises will directly place more money in company coffers, and this will only increase the number of jobs. But the single best way to reduce youth unemployment is to help the wider economy grow. In Britain’s boom years of the early 2000s, around 800,000 more young people were in work. In order to go back to these years we need to keep private sector taxes low and pay off our debts. The jobs will then return. Patrick Ford is a first year Modern and Contemporary History student and has been turned down for four jobs in the past two weeks.
Cartoon by Maria D’Amico
No Vanessa Meade Anyone who had harboured hope that youth unemployment was in decline will have been severely disappointed by figures released recently. According to the International Labour Organisation, youth employment has hit a record high, with 1.02 million 16-24 year olds out of work. In response, the government has repositioned the blame for these shocking statistics, away from their foolhardy handling of the economy, and onto the Eurozone crisis. However for all those economists out there the Eurozone is in fact a lagging indicator, therefore the crisis has no immediate effect on the economy. The figures we see today are wholly a result of governmental incompetence. While the coalition finds someone to blame for the economic climate, their schemes for youth unemployment continue to suffer. Instead of providing employers with incentives to take on young people, increasing university places, the coalition has put into place unstructured and inefficient schemes. When the government scrapped the Future Jobs Fund, a scheme set up by the last government to help the young unemployed get back into work, they failed to put an equal or better alternative in its place. Instead they offered to introduce a “work academies” scheme which, although promises work experience and training, does not result in a job. They have merely created an overblown CV workshop with limited places. Too late for many young people, Vince Cable revealed new incentives for small businesses to take on apprentices. Although the scheme may look good on paper, critics have slated it for placing too much emphasis on the num-
ber of apprenticeships being offered, rather than the quality. A recent report conducted by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) found that some schemes last for just 12 weeks, hardly enough time to equip an apprentice with all the skills needed for the workplace. Additionally the IPPR has suggested that in reality these schemes are not actually going to young people at all. Out of 126,000 apprenticeships only 37,000 went to 16-24 year olds. The rest were allotted to over 25s. Unfortunately for Britain’s youth, it appears that these government schemes are merely ways of reducing unemployment figures. The apprenticeship schemes have the ability to provide jobs at the end, but they are not living up to their potential. Instead they are being used as a governmental tool to get young people off the streets for a short period of time. What the government should be focusing on is providing the correct economic climate to encourage businesses and firms to take on new staff. Employers themselves have commented on the situation, saying that their reasons for not hiring young people are largely based on the current economic crisis. It has been proven that young people who experience long periods of unemployment are more likely to be jobless later in life, earn lower wages and be unhappy. Young people are the future generation, providing jobs for them is an investment made for the benefit of the country. If the government does not come up with a viable solution soon, the “lost generation” will only become more helpless. As the economist David Blanchflower says “We’ve got to do something drastic, because young people riot when they are unemployed”. Vanessa Meade is a third year History student and is involved in RAG.
comment@qmessenger.co.uk