Writing in the Telegraph, Sean Thomas says his 20 year-old daughter can't find a job – any job, stacking shelves, washing pots, bar work – because the state has allowed all the work to go to migrants at a shocking ratio of 27 to one. Here's an excerpt.
Do you remember what you did during the long summer breaks from university? I'm ashamed I don't really, mainly because I did nothing much. I went inter-railing with friends and slept in a phone box in Vienna. I was so bored I tried to see if nutmeg is hallucinogenic (it isn't, really). Most of all I relied on my middle-class parents for cash, but they didn't mind as I was the lucky generation that was paid to go to uni so they didn't have to fund me the rest of the year.
Of course, I had friends who weren't this lucky and had to find summer work – but they did it with ease. There was work everywhere, back in the day. How different it is now. My daughter is 20. A few days ago she was nearly in tears because she cannot find a summer job.
Not a career, not a glossy internship – a job. "Dad, I'll do anything," she said. "I'll wash dishes at six in the morning." And she meant it: she did exactly that last year, gladly. Her work ethic is way more impressive than mine. And yet this year there is nothing. Let's be precise about the kind of work we mean. I'm talking about the first rung on the ladder. Stacking shelves, wiping tables, cleaning toilets. The work by which a young person learns there is dignity in earning a living. And, more importantly, earns money.
Is my daughter an aberration? The numbers say not. Youth unemployment stands at 16.2%, the worst since 2015 – worse even than at the peak of the pandemic, when the economy was switched off at the mains. A Government review has warned of a "lost generation", and has put the bill at £125 billion a year. It means real people, my daughter among them, going painfully workless, with all the damage that causes.
You might assume the cause is impersonal – a temporary slump, or the machines coming for us all. But then you read the news, and it turns weary resignation into something hotter, because you see much of this is deliberate.
This week we learnt that more than 150 takeaways and kebab shops have been granted Government licences to recruit staff from overseas – and that those workers may bring dependants, to lean on the same schools, surgeries and housing our young can no longer afford. Why? There are 1.8 million unemployed people in this country. There is a willing young woman at my table who will scrub a pan at dawn. And the considered response of the British state is to issue paperwork so a kebab shop – or a vape store, or a car wash – can fly someone in to do it instead.
I don't blame those who come; they are doing the rational thing, as I would. My quarrel is with a Government that looked at the first jobs of its own children and decided that they are surplus to requirements.
Consider one figure, carefully, because it ought to end careers. Since the start of 2020, for every additional young Briton who found a payrolled job, employers took on 27 young workers from outside the EU.