Brown's children: on the scrap heap?

Gordon Brown's government is being "buried by an avalanche of job losses", says Jeff Randall in The Daily Telegraph. In the three months to June, 220,000 jobs were lost, bringing the jobless total to 2,435,000, or 7.8%. Over one million of those are 'Neets' those 'not in education, employment or training'. And that's before taking into account an estimated 300,000 graduates and 400,000 school leavers now trying to find work. By the time the country goes to the polls in 2010, Jobcentre Plus offices will be bursting with 'Brown's children', many of whom "borrowed a fortune to attend second-rate courses at third-rate universities".

Gordon Brown likes to blame the global recession, says Leo McKinstry in the Daily Express. But Labour's policies are directly responsible for this "shameful betrayal of the young". Educational standards are a "national disgrace" in spite of an unprecedented flood of taxpayers' money into schools.

A fifth of primary school leavers are "functionally illiterate and innumerate" and the dumbing down of exams means everything from GSCEs to university degrees is "increasingly despised" by employers. Meanwhile, young working-class people have been excluded from jobs by the vast influx of immigrants who continue to arrive here at a rate of 500,000 a year. "It is the economics of the madhouse".

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But what matters, says Richard Lambert in The Sunday Times, is where we go from here. The government's main response has been to start a Future Jobs Fund of about £1bn aimed at creating 150,000 jobs, mainly for the young. It also promises to "offer a job, work-focused training or a 'meaningful activity' for all young people who would otherwise be out of a job for a year." It needs to do more. How about identifying sectors where new future jobs will be created and training up our poorest and youngest people via apprenticeships? If skills and aspirations are not raised soon, it will consign a generation to the scrap heap.