Opinion: The Lost Generation

Finito World

Britain is developing a dangerous habit: telling young people that work will somehow arrive later.

For decades, the first rung on the ladder was not glamorous, but it existed. A Saturday job in retail. Evening shifts in pubs and cafés. Stacking shelves. Working tills. Folding jumpers badly while a manager sighed nearby. None of it was perfect, but it taught punctuality, resilience, confidence and the subtle social disciplines that formal education often misses entirely. It also gave young people something more important than wages: momentum.

Now even that is beginning to disappear.

The boss of Next recently warned that the number of applicants per shop job at the retailer has nearly doubled in two years. That is not simply a retail statistic. It is a sign of a broader economic and cultural failure. When entry-level jobs become fiercely contested, the people who suffer first are always the young, the inexperienced and the uncertain.

Youth unemployment in Britain now sits at over three times the general unemployment rate. Behind every percentage point are thousands of people in their late teens and early twenties drifting into a strange and demoralising limbo: qualified enough to aspire, inexperienced enough to be rejected everywhere.

And once that drift begins, it becomes psychologically corrosive very quickly.

The modern economy has quietly removed many of the places where young people once learned how adulthood actually works. Retailers automate tills. Restaurants reduce staffing. Warehouses digitise logistics. Offices recruit fewer juniors because senior staff are themselves overloaded and hybrid working makes informal apprenticeship harder. Meanwhile government policy, however well intentioned, often increases the cost and perceived risk of hiring inexperienced workers.

The result is an economy that increasingly prefers proven competence over potential.

This matters far beyond economics. Work is not merely transactional. Particularly for the young, work structures time, identity and self-belief. The first payslip often matters less than the first sense of usefulness. A society that cannot absorb its young into meaningful labour begins to generate anxiety, resentment and passivity in dangerous quantities.

There is also an uncomfortable class dimension emerging here. Middle-class young people can often survive a prolonged period of underemployment because families subsidise internships, unpaid creative work or extended education. Working-class young people usually cannot. When entry-level work shrinks, inequality hardens.

And yet Britain still talks about work as though aspiration alone were enough.

We encourage young people to “follow their dreams”, pile them into university debt, and then seem surprised when they emerge into an economy with too few genuine routes in. In truth, many young people do not need another motivational slogan. They need a manager willing to train them, a business willing to take a chance on them and an economy confident enough to expand.

That requires growth. Not slogans about growth, but actual growth: more housebuilding, cheaper energy, functioning infrastructure, and a planning system that does not throttle enterprise before it begins. An economy that barely grows inevitably becomes risk-averse, and risk-averse economies stop investing in the inexperienced.

Britain’s post-war social stability rested partly on an assumption that effort would eventually find a place. That assumption is weakening. The danger is not simply economic stagnation. It is the emergence of a generation who begin to suspect that the adult world has no real use for them.

Once that belief takes hold, the costs become far greater than unemployment statistics.