---

Youth Unemployment

Following Mr Speaker's ruling last week, it is clear that it would be utterly unparliamentary to accuse any other hon. Member of being a hypocrite. I therefore give an absolute assurance that I will not do so this afternoon. It is clear, though, that the Opposition Front-Bench team is suffering from a bout of collective amnesia. We should be concerned for their welfare. I looked up the symptoms of amnesia, and it looks like an open and shut case to me. Amnesia is a condition in which memory is disturbed or lost. In some cases it is described as almost total disruption of short-term memory. What other possible explanation could there be for what we have just heard? I can only think that the right hon. Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill (Mr Byrne) cannot remember his time in office, so let me remind the House what happened. He and his party stayed in power for 13 years. One of their great missions was to tackle youth unemployment. Their former leader, his former boss, the former Prime Minister and Chancellor, the right hon. Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Mr Brown), made his maiden speech on the subject back in 1983. When, 14 years later, he took office and became Chancellor of the Exchequer, he said that the problem was a ““human tragedy””, ““sickening”” and ““an economic disaster””. He had a mission for change. What happened? Nine years later, in the middle of one of the biggest booms that this country has seen—let us remember that that was at a time when the then Chancellor was saying he had abolished boom and bust—the youth unemployment rate had gone up compared with 1997. It was higher than it had been when the Labour Government took office. As my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State rightly said from a sedentary position a few moments ago, that was despite the billions of pounds spent on the new deal. In total, £3.8 billion was spent on new deal programmes to get more people into work, yet in the end youth unemployment had increased.