In the grand tradition of British official inquiries, which have long specialised in discovering that the obvious is illusory and the painful truth is merely a matter of perspective, Alan Milburn has delivered his interim thoughts on the vexed question of why so many of our young people are neither working, nor learning, nor, one suspects, terribly bothered about either. The report, with all the solemnity of a minor prophet announcing mild weather, declares that there is simply no evidence linking the arrival of millions of low-skilled migrants with the stubborn refusal of native youth to fill entry-level jobs. Instead, the fault lies, as it so often does in these enlightened times, with the young themselves, their schools, their health, the welfare system, post-pandemic ennui, and a mysterious shortage of starter positions that no one can quite explain.
One pictures Milburn at his desk, pen poised like a surgeon's scalpel, delicately excising the awkward statistical tumour that is the Centre for Social Justice's analysis of HMRC payroll data. For while the report wrings its hands over nearly a million NEETs—costing the nation a cool £125 billion a year, or roughly the annual defence budget multiplied by existential despair—the CSJ notes something rather more indelicate: since 2020, the number of non-EU migrants under 25 on UK payrolls has surged by 355 per cent. Young British nationals? A risible increase of just 11,000. Twenty-seven migrants hired for every one local youngster. In the hospitality sector, in retail, in those humble supermarkets where the British teenager once learned the ancient art of stacking shelves and resenting customers, the new face of British entry-level labour speaks with accents from rather further afield.
This, we are assured, is coincidence. Correlation, that tiresome pedant, has once again failed to prove causation. One might as well observe that rain frequently follows the appearance of umbrellas and conclude that brollies cause precipitation. The young Briton, apparently, suffers from a complex interplay of mental health issues, inadequate training, and a welfare system that makes idleness more appealing than the minimum wage. The migrant, by contrast, displays a touching eagerness for zero-hours contracts and night shifts in warehouses—jobs, we are delicately given to understand, that our own youth find beneath them. Or perhaps they simply lack the requisite "work readiness." Employers, poor lambs, report that native applicants require more hand-holding than their imported counterparts. One wonders whether this has anything to do with the latter's urgent need to justify their presence and send remittances home, but such vulgar economic realities are best left to the accountants.
The Milburn document performs a rhetorical feat of which only seasoned New Labour hands are capable: it acknowledges a crisis of biblical proportions—one in eight young people NEET now, potentially one in six soon—while politely declining to notice the elephant not merely in the room but tap-dancing across the welfare budget. Mass low-skilled migration, we learn, is not a factor. Indeed, the expected future decline in net migration might even present an "opportunity" for British youth to fill the resulting vacancies. This is rather like a doctor telling a patient with a broken leg that the good news is the cast will come off eventually, provided no one else uses the crutches in the meantime.
One must admire the intellectual dexterity required. Supermarket checkouts across the land swarm with first-generation arrivals performing tasks of no great technical complexity. Are these roles, then, suddenly requiring advanced degrees in applied logistics? Or is it simply that the new arrivals will work the awkward hours, accept the conditions, and display fewer expectations of a career path that does not involve eternal shelf-stacking? The left's traditional defence—that migrants take the jobs "Brits won't do"—has always carried a faint whiff of the Victorian workhouse overseer complaining that the lower orders lack moral fibre. Now it is dressed up in the language of systemic failure and generational fault lines.
The satire writes itself, as satire so often does when reality grows sufficiently absurd. Here we have a nation that once prided itself on sturdy yeoman stock and industrious apprenticeships, now reduced to importing its shelf-stackers from across the globe while its own young languish in a "hopeless Catch-22" of no experience, no opportunities, and no apparent incentive to acquire either. Meanwhile, the political class maintains the solemn fiction that none of this has anything to do with the deliberate expansion of the labour pool at the bottom end—a policy that conveniently supplies both cheaper workers for business and a more "vibrant" (read: less cohesive) society for the multiculturalists. Everyone wins, except the people who actually live here.
The Milburn report, for all its charts and concerned prose, ultimately offers the same comforting narrative Labour has peddled for years: the problem is complex, structural, and requires more intervention, better funding, and deeper understanding. What it does not require, apparently, is any serious reckoning with the most visible change in the British labour market since the millennium. To notice that would be indelicate. It would suggest that policy has consequences. It might even imply that the emperor's new diversity is rather scantily clad.
In the end, one is left with the image of British youth staring through the plate-glass windows of their local Tesco at the cheerful activity within, while officials inside explain, with exquisite politeness, that the issue is not the composition of the workforce but the character of those outside. The gaslighting continues, steady and relentless, delivered with the smooth assurance of men who have never had to choose between Universal Credit and the night shift. The young, meanwhile, are left to contemplate a future in which the entry-level rung on the ladder has been quietly occupied by others, and the official explanation is that they simply weren't reaching high enough.
One can only applaud the ingenuity. In a country once famous for its common sense, we have achieved the rare distinction of making mass youth unemployment into a problem of personal development. The migrants keep coming, the NEET figures keep rising, and the reports keep landing with all the force of a feather duster on a marble floor. Business as usual, in other words. God save the King, and pass the clipboard.