The idle 'prentice

The idle 'prentice executed at Tyburn. From William Hogarth's Industry and Idleness (1747).

The Times this morning, Landon Thomas, Jr., was all on about the young people of London who are never in their natural lives going to have jobs—

Perhaps the most debilitating consequence of the euro zone’s economic downturn and its debt-driven austerity crusade has been the soaring rate of youth unemployment. Spain’s jobless rate for people ages 16 to 24 is approaching 50 percent. Greece’s is 48 percent, and Portugal’s and Italy’s, 30 percent. Here in Britain, the rate is 22.3 percent, the highest since such data began being collected in 1992.

And indeed it's horrible, the sequence of stories of... Hang on a minute, when did Britain [jump]
get into the Euro zone? It's hard to believe that was one of David Cameron's beastly plots! But actually no, it hasn't happened, so calm down, our author was merely suggesting that the country was figuratively in the Euro zone, with its economic affiliation to the continent next door, which means that as they say when Europe catches a cold Britain has a headache, or something, and that debt-driven austerity crusade is no joke either.

But as you read through the individual tales of the young people interviewed, it starts to come clear that they all have something narrower in common, which is a lack of qualifications for the jobs that do exist, and not through any fault of their own:

the majority of those who took to the streets in London last summer were young people who were unemployed, out of school and not participating in a job training program.
Classified by statisticians as NEETs (not in education, employment or training), they number about 1.3 million, or one of every five 16-to-24-year-olds in the country.

While youth unemployment has long been a chronic issue here, experts say the British government’s debt-reduction commitment to rein in social spending appears to be making the problem worse. Insufficient job training and apprenticeship programs, they argue, contribute to the large pool of permanently unemployed young people in Britain.

And is that a consequence of troubles in the Euro zone, and debt-driven austerity crusades? Not exactly. Young people can't afford to go to university, for example, because they can't pay the tuition, and that got started in the first place long before the debt-driven austerity thingy, when the government first began imposing tuition on university students, in 1998.

That's right (yes, my fellow Americans, for a large part of the 20th century Brits paid no university tuition at all), tuition fees were introduced to British undergraduate and postgraduate students in September of 1998, when Mr Tony Blair, of the newly christened New Labour Party, was just starting to enjoy himself; up to a thousand pounds (means tested) a year. Then up to £3,000 a year in 2004, and by 2010, when Mr Blair was no longer available to be kicked around, as the saying goes, to a maximum of £3,290. So most of the increase (technically infinite, since it started with zero) was long before the Euro debt iffiness and austerity such and such; although not for long, since this year it is permitted to rise to £9,000, which looks like class warfare on an American scale.

And as far as vocational training and apprenticeship programs go,

Britain lags far behind countries like Germany, Austria and the Netherlands in its use of training programs to introduce young people to permanent work

Fewer than one in 10 employers in Britain offered apprenticeships in 2010, she said, compared with at least a quarter of employers in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. And while government financing for such programs has increased in the last few years, [Hilary] Steedman [of the London School of Economics] said that much of the money went to training existing workers 25 years and older rather than building the skills of 18-to-20-year-olds.

“It’s completely perverse,” she said, pointing out that 40 percent of the 500,000 or so apprenticeships go to people age 25 or older. “Companies are subsidizing 25-year-olds who already have jobs.”

What happened in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and the Netherlands? Aside from generally everybody speaking a Germanic language? Social democracy: the bourgeoisie and the working class together worked out a deal in which both would survive and thrive, which has ruled the countries ever since. When conservatives are in charge, things can get unpleasant, but they never threaten the fundamental contract; if they did, they'd lose the next election.

In England and Scotland, no such contract has ever existed—what the working class has achieved has been generally by combat or by stealth, and usually on the cheap, and starting in 1979 with the vile Mrs T. as prime minister,  the bourgeoisie began working to take it down. Not the National Health, of course, people wouldn't stand for that, but a little here and a little there; and then came Mr Blair to accelerate the process, for reasons that, like his reasons for committing British troops to the disaster in Iraq, will probably never be known.

What didn't happen in Germany? When there's an economic crisis and conservatives are in charge there, they never really threaten to alter that basic compact; the socialism part remains largely intact, and young people have somewhere to go until they can find a job. The bad side being that those same conservatives treat the Greek or the British workers like criminals in need of strictest discipline, when it's actually the bourgeois in both countries who need to reform their behavior.