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Hello and welcome to this week's newsletter; please find herewith 14 utterly shocking facts about young people in Britain today. Each one of them is a scandal; each one an urgent call to action. But, being numbers, and moreover being big numbers that have become bigger in recent years, they may not immediately manifest as a dagger to your soul. If you consider the human catastrophe behind each of these numbers, however, you may begin to feel your blood boil; and indeed if you have any wearable technology close to hand, like one of those fancy rings or watches, you may wish to strap it on right about now to see how you cope with the below details. If you don’t find evidence of rising panic, well, I’ll explain what that tells us later.

(see below for my Sources)

1. One in 8 of every 16-24 year-old in Britain is not in education, employment or training. They are NEETs. This means they have, in effect, exited society. For 18-24 year-olds, the figure is 1,038,000. For 16-24 year-olds, the figure is 1,239,000 - bigger than the population of Birmingham.

2. This rate has, according to Alan Milburn's interim report into the issue, "barely crept below 10% in 25 years". It's a chronic problem.

3. 60% of these young people have never had a job. That's up from 40% in 2005.

4. 60% of those more than 1 million people - that is, 600,000 young people - are economically inactive. This is much, much worse than being unemployed. It means not looking for work.

5. The cumulative cost to this country is estimated to be an annual £125bn. Sure, that's about as much as we spend servicing our debts - also a disgrace. But it's more than double what we spend on Defence. Or Transport.

How's that blood pressure doing? Feeling stressed yet? Angry, maybe? Let's keep going.

6. Of those who fell into health-related economic inactivity between 2017 and 2019, almost eight in ten were still NEET more than two years later.

7. Around 70% of young people claiming a health and disability benefit are still claiming a decade later.

8. In London, fully 40% of young people 16–24 are NEETs. Forty per cent! In London!

9. Youth unemployment has shot up during Labour’s time in office, while remaining flat in Europe, and I understand from well-placed sources that there is a recognition in the Treasury that Budget measures may be a cause. In July 2024, youth unemployment was 13.8% in the UK and 15% in the Euro area. In June 2026 it was 16.4% in the UK and 15.2% in the Euro area.

10. Between 2023/4 and 2029/30, spending on working age disability benefits (Disability Living Allowance and Personal Independence Payments) will have increased from £19.1bn to £37.2bn (95%).

11. Spending on DLA for children will have increased from £3.6bn to £8.3bn (128%)

12. For the 420,000 children who speak out about their concerns, and seek out medical help, the average wait time for a first appointment is… 10 months.

13. For the 3.9m people on sickness benefits (not just NEETs), all are meant to get regular check-ups, whether 3, 6, 9 or 18 months on. But it doesn’t happen: 1.8m have been waiting an average of 2 years for the call. Many don’t get it.

How’s that heart rate going? What’s that you say? You want another one? Ok, ok.

14. The NEET rate 5 years after a first claim - i.e. those still NEET 5 years after dropping out of education, employment, and training - has risen sharply since 2010, from 46%, to 62%. This is the strongest possible data point to show that the system is working in exactly the opposite way to how it should. Instead of being a trampoline, stopping a fall and bouncing people back into society, it is a net, a trap, entangling ever more for ever longer.

This is a national emergency. It is the great calling of our times. Fixing it should be the single greatest imperative, after keeping our citizens safe, that our government has.

It is becoming increasingly clear that, for all the advances in technology - and perhaps because of them - the past 15 years have been, for millions of young people, a particularly hard time to grow up. Yes, smartphones and social media have taken a huge toll. So too the pandemic, which robbed so many young people of some of the best years of their lives. The point is the cumulative effect. We have in our time an astonishing catalogue of misery, gloom, and human waste, what the always-worth-reading Ed West calls the “failure to launch” generation. And all this is happening outside of a recession. It’s usually in recessions that youth unemployment spikes: right now, we’ve got the spike, without the recession. What happens in the recession?

I want to know: how did you feel, really, reading those statistics? I only ask because two of the great challenges for journalism that I have spent years trying to address are, first, the human experience behind big numbers; and second, a shift in emphasis from ephemeral daily events to deep underlying trends. I believe that one of the biggest reasons our NEETs catastrophe has been allowed to grow (and grow, and grow) is precisely because it is a chronic rather than acute ailment in our body politic. There is no one moment, or ‘hook’, to shock people into action. Just the slow-motion horror show of a generation decaying - and countless statistics, rather than stories, to prove it.

So do me a favour. Go back up, right now, and read points 6 and 7 above. Please. Surface level: stats about health-related benefits. Beneath the surface: generational decay. Young people who - by definition - should be in their physical prime (this is why sporting and military careers start around this age) are not looking for work because of health issues - but then failing to get better and if anything getting worse. At what should be an exhilarating time in their lives.

We cannot abide this. If there is one passion, one mission, one cause to which I have devoted any spare energies over the past 20 years, and intend to devote more over the next 20, it is turning young lives around.

This is an idea whose time has come in politics, too. Everyone, across the political spectrum, has finally woken up to the scale of the challenge. I very specifically sourced all of the above statistics from three people across the political spectrum. Points 1-7 come from Alan Milburn’s outstanding and, if I may say, unusually well written, interim report on the subject. Points 8-11 came from Neil O’Brien’s Substack. O’Brien is one of the most original policy thinkers in the Conservative Party today, a kind of latter day Oliver Letwin, albeit much tougher on immigration.

And points 12-14 came from Fraser Nelson’s outstanding Substack. Fraser is a mate, a compassionate and wonkish fellow who has been chronicling the failures of our welfare system for more than 20 years. Whether you agree with his politics or not, I can tell you he has a deep, almost Victorian obsession with reducing poverty.

And here’s the thing. There is nothing - nothing - in either Fraser’s post, or Neil’s (which ends with a few digs at Rachel Reeves) that, in all honesty, Andy Burnham or Alan Milburn would disagree with. How do we know? Because this week, Andy Burnham put his name to an excellent op-ed in The Times re-casting the NEETs crisis as a moral, as well as economic catastrophe.

Burnham’s article was part of The Times’ Welfare Inquiry, which ought on the basis of its first week to win every award under the sun next year. It is a phenomenal, deeply humane and impressively researched overview of this utter abomination we have allowed in our country. It gets into causes and solutions.

In keeping with my promise to lean toward brevity, I won’t chronicle all of those causes and solutions here. Suffice to say that the causes are several, and a mix of cock-up and conspiracy. Deep economic trends, about the changing nature of work, both graduate and non-graduate work, the value of some degrees, the availability of apprenticeships, and specific regional contingencies all play a huge role. Culturally, there may have been a fundamental shift in attitudes, whether to work, disability, neurodiversity or self-actualisation. Technology has hijacked some young minds. And above all, welfare provision has been one of the signature modern failures of the British state: an appalling litany of perverted incentives and cruelty masquerading as generosity.

It follows that the solutions span all of these. Economic policies that increase access to work, including by lowering the cost of employing people; a cultural celebration of the idea of hard work and agency; a smarter relationship with smart technology; and a raft of policy changes which Milburn may suggest next month, when his final report is delivered.

I’ll pore over those so you don’t have to. And I’ll do the same with next week’s Budget. Last week, I argued that Britain is at war, it’s just we haven’t collectively noticed it yet. This week, I hope I’ve persuaded you that spending twice our Defence budget, and then some, on entrapping an entire generation shows something is rotten in the state of Britain. This is the key argument the Chancellor, John Healey, needs to prosecute next week. That his party, founded as the party for workers, is still the party of work; and that ‘Welfare to Warfare’ is the journey our fiscal priorities must undertake.

A country is only as good as its people; it follows that a country’s future is only as good as its young people. Our children, who should be in the prime of their lives, are decaying. I want you to know that, in the coming years, I am going to mobilise all the strength and zeal and determination of The Amol Rajan Connection in service of fixing this, the greatest moral failure of our times.

We are constantly told by the experts that every communication should have just one, simple CTA - Call to Action. I think that’s rather patronising. I know you can cope with 2. So the first humble request, mindful that you’ve already very kindly joined this club, is to please Subscribe to or Follow our twice-weekly interview show.

If you Subscribe or Follow, it deepens the connection between us, helps us understand what we should do more or less of, and helps us to grow - which in turn helps us to bring you ever better guests. Thank you so much for pressing that button. It’s free - and it makes a huge difference for us. Once you press that button, every time we publish a new episode, it will come to you, so you don’t have to search for it.

You can Subscribe on YouTube here.

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By the way, I’ve got a big thing about demystifying tasks or ideas or technical challenges that you might not want to ask about. I know that some (in particular older) readers aren’t too comfortable working out how these platforms work. Don’t worry. I’m going to do a video explainer in the coming weeks. I’ll link to it from this newsletter, so it’s easy to find.

Well we had a lovely avalanche of questions for Ian Hogarth from you. Thank you so much to everyone who sent one in.

Remember, these are for our Monday, QUARC episodes (Questions + ARC). I really want them to belong to you, and be an integral part of your week, not an ARC-afterthought.

So this week: what’s your one great question on… farming? Perhaps more specifically, British farming - and how to save it? At times in recent decades, it has felt to many farmers like there has been a conspiracy against them. Surging costs, tricky demand, hellish weather, unfavourable policy - and yet we depend so utterly on them. And, perhaps, take them for granted.

Minette Batters ran the National Farmers Union for 8 years. She’s a force, trust me, and led an independent review of farming for the Starmer government. She’s coming on the show. What do you want to ask her?

Your one question for Minette Batters, by lunchtime on Thursday October 29th, please, to [email protected] And feel free to send it as a video or voice note, so long as you’re happy for us to use that in the show and on social channels. Thank you!

(That was the second Call to Action, by the way. See? It wasn’t that bad, was it?).

A final, brief, slightly personal word on this week’s guest, which many of you correctly guessed as Delia Smith.

The reason I didn’t solicit your questions for Delia Smith, in all frankness, is that when I read about the very sad death of her late, great husband Michael, I thought she would understandably wish to postpone. To my amazement, she insisted on still doing the interview. We spoke just a few days after his death. She could not have been more stoic, or brave, or warm, or wise.

To think of the girl who left school with no qualifications, taught millions of people how to cook, took so much flak for the simplicity of her approach, sold more than 20 million books, and has just written a new book - Us: Nine Ingredients to Change the World - is inspirational. (She’s starting a Substack soon). I made a point, very specifically, of not asking too much about Michael, while of course acknowledging his death. Others might have pushed it, in search of the viral moment, but I think that’s charmless. She did talk openly about him, and as she did so, this 86 year-old widow and icon, I thought of my own dear Mum, and all the women out there who find purpose in life even after the death of their husbands. This interview starts quite reflective and mellow, and becomes much more charged as we talk politics, populism - and potatoes.

A weekly selection of life-enhancing delights, curated by your humble correspondent, in response to popular demand. I think you will enjoy them.

Visit:

The Public baths in Ironmonger Row. I promise these recommendations of places to visit will expand beyond London soon. Next week, the Taj Mahal perhaps. For now, I must tell you that just off the Old Street Roundabout is a vast underground emporium of saunas, steam rooms, ice pools and misty showers with floral aromas which work very well for a date night or a chance to catch up with mates. Yes, I know how middle-aged it is to advocate a sauna with a mate instead of, say, a rave. Honestly, I’m relaxed about it.

Read:

War is Interested in You, by Gideon Rachman. Full disclosure: I know Gideon. When I was briefly sacked as a news reporter by The Independent in 2009, in one of the interminable rounds of job cuts, he met me for a coffee in Cafe Nero and was exceedingly nice. That’s just me being transparent. This book is brilliant. I get asked to do a lot of blurbs or cover quotes, and have a rule that I will only do them if I have actually read the book. That in turn means, because I’m quite pressed for time these days, that I have to really adore the book. Gideon’s book explains where the world might be headed. It’s not pretty. But you should really read it. I happen to know that he wears his very, very senior sources very, very lightly.

Watch:

Have I Got News For You, which is on Friday night at 9pm on BBC One, or available on iPlayer. Why? Because it’s funny, and because I am hosting this week. BBC News doesn’t let its presenters host this show any more, in case they compromise that sacred impartiality. Last time I was asked to do it, they pulled me out the day before. Now that I’ve left, I’m unshackled. Expect an avalanche of clickbait-ish, outrageous opinions, like: ‘cream-first-then-jam’ on scones, or ‘no, the Barbican is not as beautiful as the Notre Dame’.

Listen:

Bob Marley and the Wailers’ Greatest Hits at Studio One, because this is the greatest music ever made. Martin Amis said the novelist must listen to his or her inner ear; I think we each of us have an inner era too. Mine is 1960s Jamaica. The early Wailers produced melodies and harmonies and riffs and musical soul that will never, ever be matched. If there were one music that I had to choose above all others, it is this. My eldest daughter is called Jamaica; my youngest, Nesta, after Robert Nesta Marley. Try ‘And I Love Her’ or ‘Who Feels It Knows It’.

Those of you who have very kindly become paying members will start to see some juicy benefits rolling in over the coming weeks. I’ll send a short email out on Monday explaining some of these. You’ve already got some of the very fun behind-the-scenes action. Next week, I’ll let you know details about both the first ‘Ask Me Anything’ episode I’m doing, and the first virtual meet-and-greets. We’ve had such a heartening and positive response to these. Thank you so very much. I certainly don’t take your commitment for granted, and will do everything I can to provide some real value for you. It will be nice to make our ‘connection’ even stronger.

Have a great weekend - and be sure to check out the episode with Delia. Thousands of people are watching and listening to it, and it is surging up the charts, which is frankly thrilling to see. It’s special, because she’s special.

Yours ARCfully,

AMOL