Youth plans have not been submitted

Readers of this blog will know that I do not think the EU is either like Nazi Germany or like the Soviet Union. Anyone who looks at the three political systems seriously knows that those parallels are not just unilluminating, they are nonsensical. But they do come from the same matrix of ideas and there are times when one wonders whether any lessons have been learnt at all from failures in history.

Take this headline, for instance: EU summit to warn youth guarantee laggards. Let's not bother with the obvious point that what is starting today is not a Summit but a Council as it has now been more or less officially decided that every Presidency will have two Summits.

Let us look at the gist of the article in EurActiv:

EU countries that have not yet submitted their national plans to introduce so-called Youth Guarantee schemes will be requested to do so without delay at an EU summit, which opens in Brussels today (19 December).

Internal European Commission documents seen by EurActiv reveal that a majority of countries have not sent any plans and risk losing the funding for the initiative, aimed at tackling youth unemployment.

The draft conclusions of the summit, obtained by EurActiv, call on member states that have not yet submitted their Youth Guarantee Implementation plans to do so without delay.

Under the Youth Guarantee, young people without a job will be guaranteed an offer of employment, training or further education within four months of finishing school or becoming unemployed (see background).

A €6 billion pot in the EU budget for 2014-2020 has been set aside to tackle youth employment in regions with high levels of unemployment.

We have national plans, youth guarantee schemes, the Commission handing out money to member states who have submitted the best (or not so good plans). A proposed disaster of statist socialism, in other words, though that still does not make the EU anything like the Soviet Union.

According to the Commission, the cost of not acting under the Youth Guarantee will in fact be much higher. The European Foundation for Living and Working Conditions (Eurofound) has estimated the current economic loss of having 7.5 million young people out of work or education or training at over €150 billion for the EU every year (1.2% of EU GDP) in terms of benefits paid out and lost output.

According to a Commission paper obtained by EurActiv, only 11 out of the 28 members have submitted national plans. The Czech Republic and Hungary have submitted a final draft, while France, Croatia, Italy, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Poland, Portugal, Romania and Slovakia have submitted a first draft.

The document shows that Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Germany, Denmark, Estonia, Greece, Spain, Finland, Ireland, Latvia, Malta, the Netherlands, Sweden, Slovenia and UK have not submitted their national plans within the required deadline.

However, Austria, Finland, Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands appear to be a special case. Austria and Finland have an excellent track record in combating youth unemployment and their experience is a source of inspiration for the EU, while Germany, the Netherlands and Denmark lead in averting youth unemployment, studies say.

But it may appear as a paradox that Greece, a country under bailout programmes,and Spain, with the highest rates of youth unemployment, and Bulgaria, the poorest country in the EU, have not made the necessary steps to receive EU funding to tackle youth unemployment.

Reportedly, the implementation of the Youth Guarantee is more complex than it appears at first sight. For many member countries, its implementation will require structural reforms. For example, public employment services must be able to ensure young people receive appropriate advice on job, education and training opportunities most relevant to their own situation.

Another area requiring structural reforms concerns vocational education and training systems, where member countries must ensure that they give young people the skills that employers are looking for. In this respect, trade unions, employers' organisations, educational establishments and public authorities have a role to play and prove their maturity.

I do not suppose it has occurred to any of the people in Brussels that by taking money out of the economy of the various countries in order to operate these schemes (and that means paying the people who operate them as well as handing out money) they are actually making it less possible for young and not so young people to get jobs? No, I don't suppose it has. If a job is guaranteed then somehow it will materialize and central funding will be provided out of the taxes gathered. Certainly, it is useful to remember one particular saying from the old Soviet Union: "They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work".

Alas, given the thought processes of our own politicians, I do not think that this sort of nonsense would necessarily stop if we were out of the noxious European Union.

I wish, I wish ...

... but my wish is in vain, as the old song had it. What I wish for is a media world in which hacks investigative journalists actually produce some data and information to back their shock-horror headlines. Yes, yes, I know that is unlikely. I did say that I wished in vain.

How many headlines have we had about people who were too poor to give their children proper breakfast or evening meal? Too many for me to link to. but here is one. (Here is a link to a blog on the subject but Mum in the Madhouse, which is a great title, does also mention that "£646m is spend [sic] by children on the way to school on snacks and fizzy drinks". Clearly there are no proof readers in the madhouse. And here is a link to a charity that comes up with the usual stuff about pockets of deprivation. As ever, this charity sounds more like an NGO, given their list of supporters.)

What none of those hacks, not even Bee Wilson in the link above, bothers to do is tell us just how much those families get either in earned income or unearned by way of welfare benefits or what the money that comes into the family goes on. Until we know those answers we cannot decide exactly why children go without meals. (And if they simply do not have lavish meals and eat meat maybe only once a week, that is not real poverty.)

For the last couple of days we had other shock-horror headlines. Record numbers of young people are unemployed. The Guardian says: "Unemployment figures show more than one in five young people out of work"; the Daily Wail is also upset:"Record 20% of young people are now unemployed"; the Financial Times concentrates on the figures in London where youth unemployment is supposed to have shot up. We get the usual rent-a-quotes:

Youth unemployment rose by 66,000 to 965,000, its highest since records began in 1992. The jobless rate is now 7.9 per cent, with the rate for the young jobless running at 20.5 per cent.

Martina Milburn, chief executive of youth charity The Prince’s Trust, warned: ‘If we fail to help them into work, it will have a devastating impact on young people, their families and the economy.’

Brian Johnson, of insolvency firm HW Fisher, said it was ‘a modern-day tragedy’ which will have a ‘ripple effect’ for many years to come.

And, hilariously, Richard Littlejohn's somewhat different take on the subject.

Getting away from Littlejohn, I think some questions need to be asked. For years now we have been told that young people in this country are experiencing difficulties in finding jobs (though the real difficulties are experienced by people who are in their forties, fifties and sixties who have lost their jobs mostly through no fault of their own and who are deemed to be "too old" by most employers) because those nasty, pushy, enterprising East Europeans grab them. Why is there a sudden upsurge in youth unemployment or, to be precise, in the number of young people who register for unemployment benefits for how else are these figures obtained?

Somebody suggested to me that the upsurge is because fewer places take interns who cannot sign up because they are not considered to be unemployed. There are problems, I replied, with the internship system, not least in the political and think-tank world where that kind of cheeseparing results in shoddy research and no incentive to improve matters, but the numbers are not high enough.

Cuts in the public sector are blamed. Were all those youngsters who could get jobs last year but not this year going to be employed in the non-productive public sector? Hardly a good idea for the future. Or did these cuts finally get rid of the phony three- and six-monthly training schemes that amounted to little more than keeping youngsters occupied? I recall having arguments about this when I was working in the Great Glass Egg a.k.a. London Assembly.

What, I asked in connection with a report on projects funded by the London Development Agency, was the point of some ridiculous dance training or drama scheme that lasted three months, taught the youngsters very little and gave them the idea that it was easy to break into dance or drama? Well, I was told, it's better than nothing. Really? Possibly, some of the youngsters who would have been off the list of unemployed because they were doing their third meaningless training scheme (and I am not referring here to real training or apprenticeship) are now on that list and that pushes the numbers up. If so, confronting reality as a result of this development might not be a bad thing. I fear, however, that the knee-jerk reaction of "we must help our young people, no matter what it takes" is not going to solve any problems.

Actually, no, there is nothing we can do

Readers of this blog will undoubtedly recall a certain Mr Gordon Brown (who he? ed.) promising that British jobs will be primarily for British people. Setting aside the sheer stupidity of that statement, we need to point out that it is not an idea that can be implemented within the EU, being against the four freedoms that are the basis of the project and have been so since its inception.

So, what now, that we have a new government that is determined to do its best for Britain and be in Europe but not ruled by Europe? Well, Lord Stoddart of Swindon asked:

whether, in light of the rise in unemployment predicted in the Budget, they intend to follow the statement of the previous Prime Minister about "British jobs for British workers"

Lord Freud or the civil servants who write those responses pretended that the question was something completely different:

The Government will be taking action to reduce net migration from the hundreds of thousands it has been in recent years to the tens of thousands it used to be. A consultation process on the implementation of an annual limit on the number of non-EU migrants who come to the UK to work is currently under way.

We are committed to tackling the nearly 5 million people claiming one of the main out-of-work benefits, by reforming welfare and ensuring resident workers have the skills, attributes and help they need to be able to take up work.

Or, in other words, no because that is not something we can decide on. Then again, as I said above, it is an idiotic promise.