Simon Pearson reflects on three diagnoses, one statistical baseline, and a shared refusal to name what actually happened to the economy that was supposed to absorb a generation.

Alan Milburn has a diagnosis. Close to a million young people are not in education, employment or training, and the reason, his interim report will say, is that they have been rewired. Smartphones have restructured how they sleep, how they concentrate, how they manage stress. They are not snowflakes, Milburn insists. They are an anxious generation, and businesses must adapt by offering pastoral care and flexibility.

Peter Hyman, former adviser to both Blair and Starmer, has a complementary diagnosis. Schools have become a pipeline to worklessness. The system is joyless, exam-obsessed, blind to mental health. Young people leave it ill-equipped, adrift, consumed by a rejection economy they cannot navigate.

Rishi Sunak, writing in the Times yesterday with the particular confidence of a man who has already failed, knows the real problem: the minimum wage is too high.

Three diagnoses, one statistical baseline, and a shared refusal to name what actually happened.

The framing has taken hold quickly. Paul Embery, who presents himself as the trade unionist willing to say what the metropolitan left will not, shared the Milburn story with the observation that young people are “slaves to their smartphones.” On GB News, radio presenter Mike Parry told Ted Newson, a commentator for Young Voices UK, to “stop waiting for the world to come to you, go and seize the world,” while the chyron asked whether Britain had created “a generation of wimps.” Newson’s response was the libertarian retail cut of the same argument: get government out of the way, let business create opportunities, and his generation would capitalise. A former Blair cabinet minister’s neuroscience-flavoured welfare reform argument and a GB News moral panic: different registers, identical premise. The problem is the young people. Not what was done to the economy they were born into.

The NEET [Not in Education, Employment, or Training] rate is now 12.8 per cent, close to a million people. Milburn describes this as a “generational problem” worse than the damage inflicted by the 2008 financial crisis. That may be true. What he cannot bring himself to say is that the 2008 crisis was itself not an act of god but the consequence of specific policy choices, made by specific people, over several decades. The same is true of the NEET rate.

The infrastructure that used to turn school-leavers into workers did not dissolve. It was taken apart. Apprenticeships with genuine training budgets attached to engineering firms, to utilities, to the railway, and to the civil service are either gone or replaced with programmes so attenuated they share only the name. Manufacturing that required skills and developed them over time, giving a 17-year-old somewhere to be and something to become, has contracted to a fraction of its former scale.

In Peterborough, firms like Brotherhoods, Molins, and Perkins Engines once ran apprenticeship schemes that moved young men from school gates to skilled work without requiring a university degree, a LinkedIn profile, or a letter explaining their personal brand. For young women, distinct but parallel routes ran through the NHS, local government, and the civil service. These clerical roles, nursing auxiliary posts, and administrative grades trained workers on the job and promoted them from within.

While these historical pathways reflected the gendered divisions of their time, they provided a material security that has vanished. Modern economic restructuring did not liberate young people into better industries; it simply demolished the entry points. Those pathways closed not because the young people who needed them became worse, but because the economic logic that sustained them was declared obsolete.

None of it was inevitable. Decades of outsourcing, headcount reduction, and wage compression were choices, made by successive governments, that removed the one thing the market has never reliably provided for working-class school-leavers: a structured route in.

This is where Milburn’s framing does its political work. By centring the story on mental health, on smartphones, on the anxious generation’s rewired brains, it takes a structural failure and relocates it inside individual psychology. The young people become the explanandum. What they cannot become, in this account, is the product of an economy that stopped needing them in the form they arrived.

The welfare reform argument follows automatically from the diagnosis. If the problem is that young people are trapped in a system that encourages learned helplessness, the solution is conditionality, activation, pastoral nudges toward work. Milburn says as much: “welfare reform is not an optional extra, it is a necessity.” He frames this as progressive. A cause for the left, a refusal to write off a generation. The framing is not dishonest exactly. But it treats the welfare system as the primary site of intervention while leaving untouched the labour market conditions that make that intervention necessary.

Those conditions are not complicated. Retail and hospitality, which between them account for close to half of all jobs held by under-25s, have been restructuring for years: automation, e-commerce, casualisation, independently of this government’s NIC changes or the minimum wage trajectory. The entry-level jobs that used to exist in these sectors have not merely become more expensive to fill. Many of them have disappeared. Pastoral care and flexible working arrangements are useful. They do not create jobs that are not there.

Sunak’s column is at least honest about its premises. If employers respond to the price of labour like price-sensitive consumers, and if you raise the floor price faster than productivity rises, some of them will buy less of it. The young, being the least experienced and therefore the most marginal hire, will bear the cost disproportionately. This argument has internal coherence. Sunak even admits he knew the minimum wage trajectory was a problem when he was chancellor, calculated that acting on it was politically inconvenient, and did nothing. That is a more candid accounting than most politicians manage.

What the argument cannot explain is why the structural collapse in working-class institutional infrastructure predates the minimum wage by thirty years. Brotherhoods closed its Peterborough works long before anyone was paying an 18-year-old £10 an hour. The apprenticeship schemes at British Rail were wound down not because they were too expensive, but because British Rail itself was being wound down. A political choice, made by people who believed that public ownership of the means of economic reproduction was ideologically intolerable. The minimum wage is a real variable in a real labour market. It is not the reason a generation has no pathway.

Farage, campaigning in Makerfield, has his own answer: no income tax on overtime above forty hours. He frames this as making work pay, as rewarding the hard-working people the system has forgotten. The labour movement spent decades arguing the opposite: shorter working weeks, base wages high enough that overtime was a choice rather than a necessity, more jobs rather than more hours concentrated on existing workers. Farage’s proposal reverses that logic entirely. If a worker can increase their take-home pay by working longer rather than seeking a pay rise, the employer gets more labour from the same headcount without touching the base wage bill. The pressure to hire additional workers, which is the one thing that would actually open entry points for young people currently outside the labour market, disappears. The tax relief is funded by the state, not the employer. So the employer gets cheaper additional hours, the worker gets a marginally better deal on those hours, and the public finances absorb the difference. The party of the workers is subsidising the people who stopped hiring them.

Hyman’s schools critique is not necessarily wrong. A system organised around exam performance, with inadequate attention to vocational routes and chronic underfunding of pastoral support, does produce young people without qualifications or direction. But schools are not pipelines. They receive young people and attempt to equip them for a world that exists outside the school gates. When that world stops providing the things it used to provide, the school cannot compensate. It can only produce a better-equipped person with nowhere to go.

The “pipeline to worklessness” framing inverts causality in a way that is rhetorically powerful and analytically wrong. Schools did not create the NEET rate. The NEET rate reflects a labour market that has shed the institutional infrastructure that once absorbed school-leavers at scale, over four decades, through both Conservative and Labour governments, because that infrastructure was judged to be too expensive, too unionised, or simply incompatible with the neoliberal turn.

The direction of travel was a choice. Milburn, Hyman, and Sunak all worked in governments that made versions of it. And Farage if Reform UK win the next election will continue.

The anxious generation did not rewire itself.

Capital did it.

Simon Pearson writes at Anti-Capitalist Musings on Substack, where this article first appeared.

Image: https://www.flickr.com/photos/145362372@N03/46049068851 Creator: Kevin Smith Licence: Attribution 2.0 Generic CC BY 2.0 Deed