Jenny Marra MSP
Youth Unemployment
Speech in the Scottish Parliament
1 December 2011
I am angry.
I am angry after yesterday's strikes.
I am angry at John Mason?s suggestion that young people in our country do not want to work, and I invite him to come up to Dundee and speak to some of the young people to whom I speak every week, who are desperate to work—the young men who have left school and are desperate to get into the construction industry but cannot because there are no jobs available for them.
I am angry that, since two weeks ago, when the unemployment figures came out, cybernats continually tweet me with their answer to the unemployment figures, which is that young people in this country do not want to work.
That seems to be the message continually coming from members on the Scottish National Party benches and from those who tweet and put things on Facebook in their names.
Those of us who marched and were on the picket lines yesterday recommitted ourselves to fight the scourge of youth unemployment in this country, because yesterday was not just about pensions, although their protection is exceedingly important.
Yesterday was, in essence, about work: people?s right to work, to expect to work, to aspire to work, to enjoy success at work, to be properly paid for work, to be challenged, to pay taxes and to build a financial and satisfying legacy for old age.
The crisis in youth unemployment in Scotland has grown to breaking point.
As the economic downturn has unfolded it has become increasingly clear that Scotland?s youth are being hardest hit in the fight to find work, training or access to further education.
I want to talk a bit about the structural problems of the economic downturn that are affecting the choices of the young people in those of our communities that are most decimated by unemployment, such as an increasingly competitive job market that keeps them shut out, and a further education system that will see fewer opportunities for them after the SNP has made its debilitating cuts to colleges.
In a recent study, Professor David Bell of the University of Stirling talks of a "trade-down" generation, with today?s graduates, who are faced with an increasingly difficult job market, taking on jobs in retail or services at minimum wage—jobs that would otherwise usually have been done by those who had not been to university.
The burden of the economic squeeze has landed on the shoulders of young people who are on the first rung on the employability ladder.
They have left school early without many qualifications or any work experience and have entered a job market where they are now competing for jobs against more highly qualified candidates—and they cannot compete.
Little wonder, then, that unemployment among young people in Scotland is rising at a rate that is double that for 25 to 49-year-olds.
Traditionally, for those who have left school early and want to boost their employability, there has always been the option of studying or training at college, but demand for college places has soared and the Educational Institute of Scotland reports that college courses are increasingly difficult to find.
Coupled with budget cuts of 40 per cent in real terms, which I have put to the cabinet secretary before, and college mergers—with a predicted loss of up to 2,000 places at Angus College alone—the college option is becoming harder and harder for young people to realise, leaving them with little option but to return to school.
The rate of pupils staying on at school past the age of 16 has jumped from a relatively stable rate of between 77 and 79 per cent between 2000 and 2008 to 83 per cent last year—the highest figure on record.
Immense pressure is being put on teachers to provide courses for such large numbers.
The First Minister: Will Jenny Marra acknowledge that among the many recommendations of the Smith group is one that says that staying on at school is a good thing? Might that have something to do with this Government?s determination to maintain educational maintenance allowance, which has been removed elsewhere in these islands?
Jenny Marra: There are many who find the cuts to educational maintenance allowance quite debilitating.
It is good that some people are staying on at school, but it is not acceptable that others are not.
I will read to the chamber something that was posted on Facebook yesterday by the brother of Angus MacLeod.
Labour members feel very strongly that this sums up the state of youth unemployment in our country.
It is about a boy called Liam Aitchison, who died earlier this week.
John MacLeod met him in late September as they waited for a ferry. John was returning from the Uist communion and ended up giving Liam a lift to Stornoway.
He said that Liam was,
"engaging, smart, funny, had quite a back-story, a strong handshake and was eerily old for his years ... he would hail me on the streets of town (usually to tap me for fags)."
Two weeks ago, they met up for lunch.
John took reams of notes to get a CV together for him.
He had a looming date before the sheriff for "some juvenile mischief" and they felt that finding Liam "a situation" or a job might help.
John wrote that Liam
"had ... lost weight in these weeks; looked rather flat and tired. Picked at his food; inexplicably declined pudding. 'I'll Facebook you,' he said; but he didn't".
Liam never touched Facebook or his mobile again.
John wrote: "Liam went missing a few days later. His body was found in a derelict shack by the edge of Stornoway yesterday ... a lad disadvantaged in many ways ... in life ... but who had worked hard in the Pollachar Inn and on four fishing boats, had earned six Standard Grades, was a drummer in Uist pipe band ... and who could play a bewildering range of instruments"—
John said that Liam "completed the John Muir award in 2009 and was a keen cook".
He was not "a ned, a chav, a loser or a statistic".
John described him as "a young man worth meeting".
Liam was a young man who needed a job and who will never now realise that potential.
Liam was 16 years old.
