Personal Independence No More

Seriously ill and disabled 16 to 24-year-olds are to be cured by being paid a new “youth allowance” at the Universal Credit standard rate, instead of PIP and the health element of Universal Credit. That latter has already been halved for new claimants despite being available only to people who had been found medically unfit for work. If you doubt the extreme difficulty of that, then try it. There are 690,000 job vacancies available in Britain, and there are 1.7 million people seeking them. This would put that second figure above 2.5 million. None of this has anything to do with either making people better or finding them work. This is about saving money by killing them. Yes, really. We are talking about one of Tony Blair’s closest allies here.

Whoever is to sort out the problem of young people who were Not in Education, Employment or Training, it is no job for a perpetual student. Alan Milburn started a PhD in 1979, but it remains lost in the Haze of Dope that he and Nick Robinson recently thought such a giggle. Dopey Alan was Secretary of State for Health. Specifically, with Blair and with Paul Corrigan, he brought NHS privatisation from the outer fringes of the thinktank circuit to the very heart of government. We already have a good idea of how he intended to repeat that trick.

Third and fourth generation middle-class teachers in primary schools will identify potential future NEETs. Third and fourth generation middle-class teachers in secondary schools will deliver to them a curriculum designed by and for the local vape shops, phone shops, nail bars, tattoo parlours, carwashes, mini-marts, adult gaming centres, Turkish barbers, American candy shops, and lap dancing clubs, there being nothing else, not even Poundland. And without trade unions, no one will be able to come up through those to enter the political process. I feel 24 again myself, back in 2001.

Indeed, this is a classic right-wing Labour Government all round, licking its lips to commit the second ethnic cleansing of Chagos Islands on the orders of the United States, in the finest tradition of Denis “Monetarism” Healey and David “The Torturer” Miliband. Not only should the anti-racist movement take to the streets over this, but just for a change it very well might. And in denying the rights of the people who were forcibly removed from the Chagos Islands and of their descendants, Andy Burnham is placing himself in the same category as Javier Milei, backed up by Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu. The same right of self-determination is enjoyed by the people of the Falkland Islands and by the Chagossian people. Anyone who does not believe in both does not really believe in either.

The British Right worships Argentina under Milei, the United States under almost anyone but especially Trump, and Israel under absolutely anyone at all, even though Israel armed Argentina during the Falklands War. Meanwhile, British centrism idolises the European Union of Emmanuel Macron and Friedrich Merz, who are offering to supply submarines to Argentina in a very significant departure from France’s strong support for Britain in 1982. Both the Russell Brand rightists and the David Walliams centrists are unfit and need to get out of the way.