Have we all pulled a collective national sickie? That’s the contention of Labour health secretary Wes Streeting, who has justified freezing personal independence payments (PIP) on the basis that mental health conditions were being “overdiagnosed” and many capable of supporting themselves were being “written off”.
All this reawakened a long simmering debate over the growing population of economically inactive individuals, especially amongst the young. If the early 1980s were a period of mass unemployment, the 2020s are the era of mass disability. There are labour shortages in many sectors, but despite this, many Britons are simply disengaged from the workforce.
What is to be done about this is a serious discussion conducted with typical modern British unseriousness. Nothing has changed since 2010. The government is claiming it’s addressing a deep structural issue, but it is obvious that its primary motivation is fiscal — Streeting has no plan to get Britain working, he’s just trying to justify cuts imposed by the Treasury. On the other side of the ledger, those who attack the cuts often refuse to acknowledge the problem of welfare fraud and dependency altogether, and argue for a unilateral duty of the state to finance the needy. It comes down to an argument over whether welfare claimants are greedy and lazy, or in desperate, unmet need.
Trying to tackle one element or symptom will not clear the road
It’s a debate that is far too narrow for the breadth and scale of the problem. Like a 5 car pile up on the motorway, a whole series of problems have smashed into each other one after the other, leaving a deadly mass of wreckage in the path of society. Trying to tackle one element or symptom will not clear the road. It is going to take great time, effort, and short term expense to get things moving.
So what exactly does the problem consist of? The deadly elements are the youth mental health crisis, the collapsing legitimacy of the welfare state, the changing nature of work, the housing crisis, and regional inequality.
Worldwide, young people are more anxious, depressed and mentally ill than previous generations, and antidepressants are being prescribed to over 8 million people, an unprecedented situation. This generational demoralisation has been tied to technological change, with ever earlier exposure to screens and the internet, but can also be linked to social changes like the decline of religious faith, the loss of early childhood independence to roam, and social atomisation. One in 10 Britons lacks a close friend, and statistics show that the younger you are, the lower your social trust and the smaller your social circle.
The technological hothousing of young people who are ferried about by car, shoved in front of screens and not allowed to play outside has created anxious, unconfident young adults. But the catastrophe of youth worklessness, which is more severe in Britain than many equivalent countries, is undoubtedly related to the dismally poor economic prospects of the young. Work is increasingly fluid and precarious, with over a million Britons on zero-hours contracts, and young workers disproportionately represented. Wages have stagnated and failed to keep up with inflation, and private sector workers are increasingly unlikely to be unionised. Many workers feel pressured to come into the office when too unwell to work, a practice that has, according to one survey, tripled since 2010, and others feel obliged to work outside of office hours and during their annual leave.
Even for those who do find reasonably well paying work, young people who lack inherited wealth will struggle to buy a house, or save for a deposit whilst paying high rents, especially in London and the South East, where so many jobs are concentrated. Despite labour shortages, competition for jobs, especially the shrinking pool of high quality work, is astonishingly intense. From 2023 to 2024, there was a 286 per cent increase in applications per vacancy.
Young people are in an objectively bad situation
Little wonder that many young people have simply given up. Many simply live for the moment, prioritising travel and eating out, with little incentive or scope to save for the future. People drift from job to job, embracing the precariousness imposed upon them and making a virtue of necessity. It’s very hard to build a stable life, but very easy to get by without working too hard. Others do strive, but not everyone succeeds. Some end up sedentary, unmotivated to work and increasingly socially isolated. None of these situations — precarious pleasure seeking, desperate competition, or sedentary isolation — are conducive to good mental health or personal flourishing.
Young people are in an objectively bad situation, but instead of this being acknowledged, young people are instead encouraged to pathologise feelings of sadness, anxiety and an inability to focus as problems of “mental health” — a disability status that is rewarded with extra time and assistance in school and university. That attitude has increasingly broken out of education, and spread across the generations. More and more people opt out of work and get a car, council housing and cash as a reward. Learned incompetence is taught at school and rewarded in the benefits system, whilst the private sector offers few incentives to balance the ledger.
Little wonder that so many people who are in work have lost faith in the welfare state, which takes from their pay packet but offers few benefits in return. If you are a healthy university graduate on a medium income, you will be paying off student loans, paying rent, probably to an older person who may be in receipt of old age benefits, and paying a high rate of marginal tax. Even for those who are in receipt of benefits, in work or otherwise, this is no guarantee of affection to the redistributive state. The most seriously disabled have unique problems, and our current system of widely available but ungenerous and highly administered benefits does not necessarily meet their needs. Social care is often inadequate, even as the system of cash benefits expands out of control.
The reciprocal principle, so morally and politically essential to social welfare, has simply vanished. Even though actual reciprocity was taken out of the system in policy terms almost from the beginning, an implicit reciprocity sustains it to this day. Older people assume they are entitled to pensions because they have “paid in”, yet state and public sector pensions are drawn directly from the taxes of current working age adults. In the same way, disability and other needs based benefits are entirely unmoored from contributions, and there is little expectation that those who receive them have corresponding duties.
All of this is tied to regional inequality, with the long term poverty and worklessness that have taken hold in the most economically stagnant British regions driving an intergenerational culture of dependence. This encompasses not only the most obvious cases, as with those out of work or on disability, but also regional economies as a whole. In the poorest regions of the country, the state is a proportionately larger employer, with public sector jobs in healthcare, administration and education keeping struggling areas on life support. In former industrial communities, there is a common dysfunctional pattern of female public sector employment, and male unemployment, with men reluctant or lacking the qualifications to take up roles in childcare, teaching or nursing, but also demoralised by the low quality and availability of private sector jobs.
Young people are left with the choice of scraping by for not very much in a culturally and economically stagnant region, or heading to larger cities and the South East for work. But when they get to the promised economic Mecca, they discover, as we noted earlier, that the cost of living and housing is far higher, offsetting the benefits of employment. The inability to settle down or start a family in the areas where work occurs alienates vital elements of life and sets them at odds. You can’t have a baby, get a job, buy a home, access culture and hang out with your friends all in the same place and at the same time. These trade offs have always existed, but they have been radically heightened by the nature of the economy.
Taken together all of these elements add up to a series of roadblocks between young people and the good life. They can be navigated, but only with effort, discipline and luck. A certain ease of life, in which employment, friendship and stability cohered organically, has been lost. In this environment young people themselves have lost confidence and strength of character, further compounding their plight so it is spiritual as much as social. Clearing the path for their future, and forging a new national character are now urgent, existential challenges.
