John Healey has announced what he believes is a revolutionary economic insight: young people would prefer jobs to benefits. Groundbreaking stuff. The Chancellor made this declaration ahead of next month’s Budget while trying to convince bond markets that the government has a plan to bring down borrowing costs—spoiler alert, it involves telling teenagers to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and embrace the gig economy.
The logic here is airtight, if you squint. Instead of paying people to not work, why not create jobs? Genius. Except the jobs being offered are largely the same ones that have been keeping young people afloat for the past fifteen years: hospitality, retail, delivery apps, and the occasional unpaid internship masquerading as a career pathway. The Chancellor is essentially saying, “We have solved youth unemployment—it is called making lattes.”
What makes this particularly rich is the timing. Healey needs to reassure financial markets that the government is serious about reducing borrowing, so the solution is to throw young people at the labor market and hope something sticks. It is not about creating skilled, well-paying work or addressing why entry-level jobs pay less in real terms than they did in 2010. It is about optics. The Budget is coming, the numbers probably do not look great, and a speech about the moral virtue of employment is cheaper than actually investing in education or infrastructure.
The real innovation would be admitting that the economy has fundamentally changed and that telling young people to “just get a job” is advice that stopped working around 2008. But that would require a harder conversation about wages, housing, and whether the current model actually works. Much easier to dust off the old “work builds character” line and call it policy.