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Opportunities for the Next Generation

We can tell that we have a Tory-led Government when we are back here again debating how a whole generation can be looking forward to so challenging a future. I was desperately disappointed by the speech from the Universities Minister. He spoke for 28 minutes today and he kept promising that he was going to get on to what he was doing for young people. I heard him say about four times, ““I'm about tell you what I'm going to do for young people.”” He quoted Lord Mandelson and my right hon. Friend the Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Mr Brown), and he tried to sell us his book. Perhaps we need to buy his book to learn what his policies are, but he did not tell us anything about what the Government's plan is to try to end the record level of youth unemployment. The Minister told us that apprenticeships were the way forward, but he was already doing that, so there was no reason for any young person listening to the debate to leave with any confidence that we had a Government with a plan that would do something about youth unemployment. Never before have young people in our country been faced with such an economic assault on all sides. The lesson of our history is that when young people start on the dole, they stay on the dole. It is so important that we get them into the right habits of working from the moment they leave school. We urgently need growth in our economy. The Prime Minister said last week that the country was facing a growth crisis, yet we come to a debate here about the central issue facing our country, and the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats run out of speakers a long time before the end because they have nothing left to say. We have had about five speakers in a row from the Labour Benches because Government Members have given up. They have no idea what to say about this policy area. We could look at education maintenance allowance, at university tuition fees, as my colleagues have said, or at the Government's decision to abolish the future jobs fund before they had even assessed its success. What has happened to all those show that we have a Government who are careless of the damage that they are doing to the next generation. Why? Because the young are dispossessed, they are less likely to vote and they pay less in taxes—but times are changing. The student demonstrations showed that young people are being politicised as never before. The number of young people who have been joining the Labour party in Chesterfield, coming forward and wanting to have their voice heard gives me great confidence about what young people will do in future. We are facing a desperate graduate employment crisis. The public sector is not growing. We have hundreds of social work graduates out of work. It is no accident that we have a huge increase in graduate unemployment at the same time as the public sector cuts. Perhaps that is because the Government have some sort of plan for a private sector-led recovery. However, the private sector recovery is not doing all that well, as we see from examples such as Bombardier, where the Government had an opportunity to safeguard jobs in British industry but decided instead to send those jobs overseas. In the case of Forgemasters, the Government could have taken a decision that would have put Britain at the forefront of a new industry, but instead they pulled the ladder away. We see what they have done to growth in our economy with the scrapping of the regional development agencies. In Chesterfield, when Auto Windscreens went into liquidation, more than 1,000 employees turned to the Government for help and no help was forthcoming. The future looks bleak for graduates, but it looks even worse for those who have not had the opportunity to go to university. In the next debate we will consider the dreadful mess in the careers service. At every level we see a Government who are careless about the future for young people and who are setting young people up to fail. If they do not take action soon, there will be a wasted generation.