The Great Resignation

The disabling of a generation

I’ve been catching up on bookmarked reading and viewing recently, and finally got around to watching Britain’s Benefits Scandal - Fraser Nelson’s hard-hitting but also rather humanising Channel 4 documentary on the shocking state of dependency in the UK. You come away from it in no doubt about the depth of the problem, but also disabused of any notion that this is a simple matter of sponging layabouts. Of course, we’re paying for it and that’s not on. But it is the waste of human potential that is so depressing. You realise how embedded is some people’s sense of hopelessness and how ill-equipped they, and we, have become in finding a way out of it.

Nelson interviews the addicts, the disabled, and others too defeated or too caught up in the infamous benefits trap, to do anything. Whether their helplessness is learned or a function of the system in which they are entrapped, its going to be no easy task unlearning their dependency or disentangling them from the knotted mess. But there are other, less seemingly downtrodden folk, who are caught in the net.

Gabriel McKeown, writing for UnHerd, makes the observation that the UK has a ‘generation trapped in a purgatory between the classroom and a job market that has rejected them’. The graduate dependent, she says, is a consequence of the mismatch between the higher education sector and the workplace. The access for all mantra has both flooded the market with ill-prepared labour and destroyed the reputation of a sector once associated with the pursuit of excellence. But is it really any better an idea, as McKeown puts it, to move away from today’s institutions that ‘sell courses based on what 18-year-olds think is interesting’ to ones that supply ‘what employers actually need’?

Is that really what universities are for? It seems to me that this would be to misunderstand, and further undermine, what is their limited but vital role. They are, or at least should be, centres of learning, unapologetically elitist, and nothing whatsoever to do with the world of work. Turning them into instruments of capitalism is hardly an advance on their being instruments of state policy. The fault lies elsewhere: in a failure to think coherently about our economy, about how we raise productivity and the general standard of living. And about how the state and market can best work together to plan a way out of our current woes.

Then, and only then, will young people know where they fit in, and what talents might be fostered in them. The vast majority should never go to university. I don’t say this out of any judgement on their abilities, or out of any desire to lower their ambitions, but based on my own lived experience (if, as a white, balding, middle aged bloke, I’m allowed one). I attended a ‘university’ which used to be a polytechnic and has since been demolished. It wasn’t an elite experience. It was disappointing and diminished. I would have been better served getting a job or going to a proper university (if I’d got the grades) rather than a rebadged poly. The education system can indulge you without educating you or preparing you for what comes next.

And that’s where these young people now find themselves. According to the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ), at approaching double the pre-pandemic rate, over 700,000 graduates are out of work and claiming benefits. A third of them on health grounds. The CSJ, like McKeown, berates the rise of daft degrees and contrasts the declining earning potential of young people compared with those who have taken the apprenticeship route. It rightly makes the case for putting an end to a two tier education system in which a technical education is seen as second best, when it is by definition the most useful.

According to PwC’s chief people officer, Phillippa O’Connor, post-pandemic graduates tend to lack the ‘resilience’ and ‘people skills’ that previous cohorts brought with them to the workplace. And for the govenment’s employment tsar Alan Milburn, its not just graduates who aren’t ready to work for a living, its young people as a whole that lack the work experience that previous generations had doing a Saturday job. Even I, homebound, distracted and skillless as I was, had one of those. Today, whatever their route to the benefits queue, young men seem particularly prone to passivity.

Over a third of men under the age of 30 who claim Universal Credit, are not required - on account of a reported health problem - to look for work. That’s nearly 1 in 20 men in their 20s. Or over 200,000 of the 6.5 million people on out-of-work benefits. Many of them with the perfect excuse to feel sorry for themselves and get paid for it. Of course, this is not to deny that among some of these numbers we must count the genuinely sick and disabled, but I imagine they most of all are genuinely sick and tired of being crowded out by those who may be less deserving of our support.

Having said that, I am sympathetic for anybody who finds themselves in this sorry position. I’ve perhaps been there myself at times, looking for something onto which to hang one’s troubles. But to become so dependent, so young, perhaps indefinitely, can only make it harder to find the resources in oneself to live independently and participate in and, most importantly, contribute to the community of which you are part. A million under 25s are not in education, employment or training. It is no good for them or us. Indeed, the weakening of the social contract implied by this breakdown of the link between those who pay and those who (sort of) benefit, isolates them further.

It’s not just young men. Ella Whelan argues young women are struggling too. Those who start families also have rocketing childcare costs to absorb, or else they stay at home. As we see in the Nelson documentary, this strain between raising a family and earning a living has a lot to do with the welfare problem too. Young women are particularly vulnerable to the undermining of resilience that is the hallmark of a therapeutic culture, says Whelan. After #MeToo, young women are to be forgiven for seeing the workplace as toxic or a threat. It is not so much laziness or something else lacking in young people, and others, so much as the culture of the couch. This is evident, as we’ve already seen, from the growth in sickness claims.

On health grounds, 4.2 million people are in receipt of Universal Credit with no expectation that they will look for work. While this is, in part, a consequence of the higher level of needs of those being transferred from Employment Support Allowance, those with health issues now make up half of all claiming Universal Credit. Over two thirds of health assessments for Universal Credit include claims for mental health difficulties. 2.8 million people are economically inactive due to long-term sickness. There are 1.5 million people claiming the (perhaps ironically named) Personal Independence Payments (PIPs) for often mild mental health problems - with the likes of anxiety, depression and ADHD continuing to account for much of the increasing benefit take up, often from young people.

This is especially depressing for those nearer the beginning of their lives. A quarter of the economically inactive whose inactivity is apparently due to health problems, are below 35 years of age. These figures weren’t great before the pandemic, and have worsened since. Its as if a mass resignation has taken place. Demotivation has set in. And you can understand why. The world of work, like much else, has never seemed so depressing. Unemployment is on the rise, and what employment there is can seem full of dead end, dull and often poorly paid retail and hospitality jobs, especially for the young, and even these are on the decline.

As for the rest of us, many got used to not having to go in to the office. Some resent the return of the old normal or even take offence at going hybrid. As absurd as this may seem, you can see why some might have taken the easy option, made their excuses and decided not to take part anymore. They’ve given up trying and given in to the seductive narrative that they just can’t cope anymore. To be fair, the government, despite the backbencher defeat over its plans for PIPs, is making all the right noises about tackling the sick note culture. But it is a huge problem and there aren’t any signs that it will have any success in tackling it, especially as it’s more reasonable approach runs counter to the prevailing welfare-friendly views of its supporters.

Despite encouraging rhetoric about getting people back into work, the government can’t quite bring itself to question the status of some of those claiming - in both senses of the word - poor health. The language is all about supporting and coaching the sick and disabled. I suppose it can’t admit its own error. While there’s nothing wrong with compassion and helping people get off benefits - indeed, I’m all for it - and many will have genuine conditions, and a few will not be able to work at all; there are others who have - perhaps opportunistically, even cynically - piggy backed on a system that was never intended for them but has loosened its criteria, and both responded to and enabled a cultural sickness.

This is not to deny the material reality of growing unemployment either, but the UK does have a worklessness problem that is peculiar to these islands. This can be explained up to a point, by the government’s raising of employers’ national insurance contributions, business rates and the minimum wage, and not to forget the huge cost of net zero to potential employers. All of which have made it less likely that they will take on high risk, low skilled, unexperienced, young people, and contributed to the UK having a rate of youth unemployment above the EU average. But there is much more to it than that.

Unlike other countries, we didn’t recover after lockdown. We remained locked in. We stayed in bed. And that seems to be as much a consequence of the emergence of a therapeutic state and society over the past couple of decades, embedded further by our response to the pandemic, than it is driven by these more recent if wrongheaded and undeniably punishing policy decisions. The surge in mental health problems may itself be, in some part, a response to increased hardship, but people interpreting their experience through the disabling prism of psychological harm is more to the point.

As Milburn has explained:

We’re spending more money on health and disability benefits for 16 to 24-year-olds than we are on apprenticeships.

As the youngsters say, that’s messed up. It’s got to the point where the government is having to pay businesses to take them on. Not only those taking on young apprentices, but those who accept young people who have been on Universal Credit for more than six months. Young people out of work and education for more than 18 months will be guaranteed a work placement too. This is all very supportive I suppose, but it also sounds rather desperate. Instead of a well thought out policy, perhaps replacing those increased government imposed costs on businesses with a commitment to business-led apprenticeships in growth industries, there seems to be a knee jerk ‘get those figures down’ approach.

As Celia Walden at The Telegraph puts it ‘whingeing, sickness and inactivity’, contrasts embarrassingly poorly with the stiff upper lip of generations gone by. So much so, that this rather pathetic image is now ‘carved into our national identity’. While I don’t buy the argument that a clear line can be drawn between the genuinely sick and the ‘malingerers’ that she and other critics complain about, it is clear that something has changed in the national psyche. We’re not the same as we were. We see ourselves differently - as weaker, less able. The virtues that animated previous generations to make do or get on in life, or to pull together and fight wars, have faded. Blaming individuals or the system they are dependent on isn’t enough. We need to change our outlook, reboot the UK and expect more of ourselves.

Image: Owlchemy Labs