Britain is in the grip of a growing crisis. And yet very few people talk about it. Since the pandemic and the disastrous lockdowns it caused, an alarming trend has emerged among 18-30 year olds, an age group increasingly prey to idleness, despair and addiction. regard to the welfare state.
Some 481,000 young people aged 16 to 24 are currently unemployed. A remarkable 280,000 young people – roughly the population of Milton Keynes – are now relying on some form of unemployment benefit, 50,000 more than before the pandemic and almost twice as many more than ten years ago.
Many readers will find these figures astonishing, not least because our leaders – in an effort to provide workers – allowed net migration to the country to reach more than 700,000 in a year, even as young Britons loitered at home. them.
In January, to help fill nearly a million job vacancies, the Treasury called for more immigration, much of which, incidentally, is low-skilled, low-wage, unselective migration from from countries outside Europe.
Why are Britain’s young people failing to meet the country’s education needs? work?
What is holding them back? The answer lies in these two words that we now hear every day: “mental health”. According to the Office for National Statistics (NSO), a record 2.8 million Britons are out of work due to “long-term illness”, of whom a staggering 560,000 are aged 16 to 34.
In a report analyzing ONS figures, charity The Health Foundation says the proportion of people who are out of work due to mental health problems has almost doubled in 11 years, from more than 6 per cent in 2012 to 12.7 percent in 2023.
In the absence of work, Personal Independence Payments (PIP) provide a financial lifeline for those suffering from a physical or mental illness.
The most dependent claimants can receive a maximum of £691 every four weeks, which is on top of other financial support they may receive, such as housing benefit and income support.
Last year, one in three new PIP requests were for anxiety, social phobia, depression and/or stress. The increase was fastest among those under 25.
As one analyst, Sam Ashworth-Hayes, recently pointed out: “The numbers are truly staggering. Personal Independence Payments, formerly known as Disability Living Allowance, currently cost the Government around £22 billion each year, of which around 38% is spent on cases relating to mental health problems .
Until recently, many of these mental health benefits were not associated with any work requirements, meaning that people eligible for a certain type of mental health condition did not need to prove they were looking for work.
After interviewing more than 1,000 young unemployed Britons exclusively for the Mail, I can reveal for the first time the severity of this ongoing crisis.
The results, collected by my firm People Polling, paint a grim picture of Britain’s idleness crisis and how, in my view, we are setting up an entire generation for failure.
Among the unemployed young people aged 18 to 30 who made up our sample, about 40 percent reported being unemployed for a year or more.
And 44 percent depended on social benefits to survive. I fail to understand how this contributes to their sense of purpose and meaning and the dignity of their lives.
Some of the young Britons interviewed were full-time carers, students or parents. But what’s truly shocking is that 49 percent of those surveyed, or nearly half, cited “mental health issues” as the driving factor behind their unemployment.
No wonder they’ve been dubbed “Generation Sicknote” – a cohort of young Brits whose instinctive reflex is to prioritize their mental wellbeing before getting on with their lives.
When we asked these young Brits to explain, in their own words, why they don’t work, some of the answers included:
- “I am unemployed because of my mental health issues.”
- “I stopped working when the Covid-19 pandemic started and since then I have felt great anxiety about having to work again in a new place.”
- “I struggle with interviews because of my anxiety”
- “I suffer from depression, anxiety and ADHD. Enough said.
- “My job was having a negative effect on my mental health, so I stopped.”
- “I just don’t feel safe working with people, it makes me uncomfortable.”
I had a glimpse of this mindset during and after the lockdowns, when I noticed that many of the “Generation Z” students (born between 1997 and 2012) that I taught at university were becoming strangely withdrawn and anxious.
Having had virtually no sustained contact with the rest of the world, many have withdrawn into themselves, away from society at large.
But can all this be blamed on the pandemic? I am not convinced.
Clearly, if young people are truly struggling with serious mental health issues, they need to be supported.
But it is increasingly apparent that the definition of “mental health problems” is expanding, while we are failing to address a much larger cultural problem.
The unbridled growth of the therapeutic state has also encouraged a “culture of victimization.”
The harsh reality is that even if the Chancellor Jeremy Hunt was right to recently announce a new “back to work plan” to encourage people on welfare to return to work, it won’t make much difference. For what? Because we are too quick to offer support and welfare for all kinds of mental health problems – and, in turn, this expands the role of the state and convinces more and more young people that it is perfectly acceptable to depend on the government for everything.
And it was a long time coming. In the 1970s and 1980s, there were warnings about the dangerous rise of the “therapeutic state” – the way governments were moving away from forcing people to work towards ongoing treatment for mental health and serving people’s “emotional well-being.”
Since then, therapy, counseling and mental health services have become key functions of the state, while our institutions – from universities to schools – are now responsible for ensuring “emotional security” and responding to all the whims and desires of a visibly fragile and insecure population. and an anxious younger generation.
As scholars Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff point out in their recent book, The Coddling Of The American Mind, many universities today regularly emphasize the need for students to have “safe spaces”, issue “warnings triggers” on controversial topics and “can’t hire therapists fast enough to meet demand.”
This is reflected in our exclusive survey, which reveals, remarkably, that only just over half of unemployed young people think it is their responsibility to find work.
And that’s not all.
The unbridled growth of the therapeutic state has also encouraged a “culture of victimization.”
In Western societies, young people are actively encouraged by the state, their schools and other institutions to see themselves as victims of mental health problems, “racism”, “sexism” and “white privilege”.
As a study by American sociologists Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning points out, while countries like Britain once fostered cultures that prioritized courage and honor, today they peddle a culture of victimization much more weak and narcissistic.
In this context, Campbell and Manning say, mental health problems can give young people “a kind of moral status based on suffering and need.”
This is clearly seen on social media, where you don’t have to look far to find visibly lost, aimless and confused young people talking about their “mental health” issues, rather than, say, what what they accomplished at work or how they succeeded. contribute to society as a whole.
The impact of this culture on public funds is bad enough – the state is predicted to spend £50bn on disability and mental health benefits by the end of the decade – but its effect on pride and the career of a generation of people will be corrosive.
This crisis risks getting worse if we do not radically change course. One of the main reasons why the UK economy is still doing worse than those of other advanced countries is precisely the lack of workers, with young people having become an important part of this story.
So if we really want to get Britain moving, then getting these young Britons back to work, giving them meaning in their lives and rolling back the therapeutic state must now be the Government’s priority.
Because if we don’t, Britain risks becoming even sicker than these young people claim.
