Join more than 90,000 readers and receive evidence and analysis that challenges the establishment each week. Become a paid supporter to unlock every article, the full Silent Majority podcast every Friday, and our group chat — while supporting voices that are speaking up for ordinary people.
A country that abandons its own young people is abandoning its own future. But that is precisely what Britain is doing, as shocking new figures reveal.
The latest figures from the Office for National Statistics, released in the last few days, reveal something that is nothing short of a national scandal.
There are now nearly one million young people in Britain – 981,000 to be exact – who are not in employment, education, or training. That’s one in every eight young people.
Nearly one million 16-24-year-olds who have nothing to do, who are not contributing to their community or country. And while some of them might be looking for work or opportunities, roughly six in ten of them are completely inactive. They are not just out of work — they are not even looking for work.
I don’t know about you, but I think this should be a national emergency. Because what’s happening seems crystal clear to me, even if nobody in Westminster will admit it. An entire generation of young British people have been abandoned by a political class that’s become addicted to two things — mass welfare and mass immigration.
Let’s start with mass welfare.
Over the last twenty years or so, the number of young people in Britain who claim to be disabled or suffering from mental health issues has exploded.
Nearly half of all young people who are not working, in education, or training now say they have a disability — which is more than twice what it was twelve years ago.
Close to 45 per cent of these young people who are out of work and education say they have a ‘work limiting health condition’ — up from 26 per cent a decade ago.
And the share of disabled young people who say they are out of work and education because of ‘mental health’ has likewise nearly doubled — to 43 per cent.
Are young people today really more disabled than in the past? Are they genuinely suffering from much higher rates of mental illness? Or have politicians built a mass welfare system that now medicalises the ordinary struggles of young adulthood, dramatically broadens the range of conditions that are treated as ‘barriers to work’, and pushes ever-growing numbers of young people into welfare instead of work?
Labour and Tory politicians should have been answering these questions for much of the last twenty years. But they took the easy option. They pushed countless young British people into a wasted life of welfare dependency and looked the other way. For every £1 the political class now spends on providing young people with job support, it spends £25 providing them with welfare benefits. This is, in a word, insane.
Again, look at the numbers.
Over the last 14 years, the number of young people claiming incapacity welfare benefits or Universal Credit welfare payouts on health grounds has more than doubled. So too has the number receiving disability benefits. Unless something changes, and changes fast, then within ten years British workers, who are already having to fork out £8 billion a year on welfare for young people, will be having to subsidise a much larger welfare bill for roughly 820,000 young people.
In fact, things are now so absurd that even a government review just conceded that one reason why so many young people refuse work, education, or training is because they do not want to risk a secure monthly income of £2,000 or more in benefits.
Nobody should trivialise mental illness or disability. Young people who genuinely cannot work deserve our support. But what is happening in Britain today does not look like compassion to me. It looks like a colossal failure of the social contract, where the entire system is now fully geared towards pushing hundreds of thousands of young British people into welfare dependency.
And as if that’s not bad enough, then comes the second half of the story.