The latest episode is the Prime Minister's commitment to ensuring that those up to the age of 21 will, from the first day of unemployment, have to work for what are social security benefits in all but name (they will receive a youth allowance equivalent to the jobseeker's allowance rate for young people). It is not as if they have had time to confirm - in the language of the dreadful rhetoric directed towards the unemployed - that they are skivers, not strivers: they may not yet have been workers, but there is no indication that they are shirkers.
These proposals for the young unemployed are the latest step in a slippery slope that persuades at least some young people that there is, literally, little "benefit" in signing on and far too many potentially undesirable consequences.
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