The NEET crisis

I've learnt a new word: NEET. It refers to the young people living in the United Kingdom who are "not in employment, education or training" . . . a group of over one million people (or 20.1%) aged between 16 and 24 years of age.

It's a boggling statistic.

We hear daily about how it is time to reform the public services by dis-investing in them, privatising services (I'm not sure how that prevents us paying for them) and how the private sector is going to create jobs and wealth to turn the government deficit into a credit. Every job "lost" in the public sector is going to somehow be compensated by a new job in the private sector.

The prevalent political view is that it is better to pay share-holders a dividend for providing public services than to be the sole financial share-holder. This can surely only be successful if the collective of new share-holders have the same vision as the community and is prepared to accept a pitance of a dividend.

In fact those companies that currently do provide the front-line public services (parks, waste management, etc.) enjoy massive profits and ensure that they have the "competitive edge" by driving down the wages paid to their staff. Their staff are happy to accept the reduced standard of living because with it comes a temporary work visa for the United Kingdom and opportunity to learn English amongst other things.

For the private public services contractor there is no need to invest their profits in training or apprenticeships, to consider the national skills shortages or real investment in communities; just the requirement to lower the cost to the local authority and ensure maximum return to the share-holders.

The reduced expense of providing front-line services has other advantages too: the public service pension schemes draw off less from the public purse and there is more money available to the Treasury to invest in apprenticeship schemes and other get back to work flagships that attract nobody because there are no paid jobs for them to go into (all vacancies having been filled by external applicants - see above).

I don't see or understand how we break this cycle and I'm not advocating spending money for the sake of it.

Into this potentially explosive situation of a million plus youngsters sitting around bored, we have the Prime Minister of our multi-ethnic country stating that multi-culturism is dead and buried. Cue the far Right (mainly unemployed it seems) and we have the right ingredients for a revival of early 20th century Europe.

Surely, somebody in the coalition Government can see that they are fanning the fires and feeding the flames of civil dissatisfaction and discontent. Can they not understand that this number of idle, frustrated hands can only lead to groups of young people coming together in a quest to carve out their own destinies? Intolerance of different races, age groups, faiths and sexualities is borne - history teaches us - out of economic deprivation. Question: why has he / she got that job or income and I have not? Step in the extremist with all the answers and in no time we will find ourselves relying on what ever remains of our armed forces to supplement the thin blue line trying to maintain civil order on the streets. Surely it is better to have people employed and contributing to the economy than unemployed and unskilled. What costs more: a front-line public sector worker in gainful employment or the same person on benefits?

Enoch Powell was probably right about the 'rivers of blood' heading our way: but for the wrong reason in my opinion. Fueled by a vision to clear the previous government's disasterous economic deficit, this coalition is currently beating out the wrong tune and one that will send a seismic tremor of frustration and discontent across the country. Targets will be random, almost certainly from the ethnic and other minorities and completely without justification.

The students' riots earlier this year have ensured that the Establishment and new Whitehall recognise the sound of breaking glass. I fear that without an urgent reappraisal of the causes, what we witnessed in Greece yesterday, will be widespread across the United Kingdom in the near future.