PAGE 1 CHRIS GRAYLING – “The Jeremy Kyle Generation” MONDAY
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CHRIS GRAYLING – “The Jeremy Kyle Generation” MONDAY 14 TH FEB 2008 Britain today remains a society dominated by men. Glass ceilings can still be found in too many places. There are not enough women in Parliament. There are not enough women in the board room. Women still lose out in our pensions system. Our workplaces still do not offer women the flexibility they need to balance the different pressures of life. Step by step we as a party are looking to change that. That’s why we are working so hard to get more Conservative women elected to Parliament. That’s why we are committed to greater levels of flexible working. Later this week my colleague Theresa May will set out in a new policy document some of the challenges that policy makers still need to overcome if we are to secure the right deal for women. So it might seem a strange choice to pick this moment to make a speech warning about the challenges facing men. Not all men. But it is a growing number. And they are challenges we simply cannot afford to ignore. As a society, we’re leaving a lot of men behind. We have a growing generation of young men, alienated and drifting without a purpose in life. Lacking a sense of responsibility and involvement. This is not just about gangs on street corners. It’s about young men growing older with no clear understanding of how they can carve themselves a positive role in life. PAGE 1 Becoming fathers in name but not fathers in action. Struggling to find worthwhile work, if indeed they are looking for work at all. Developing mental health problems. Sometimes becoming homeless. When someone charts the course of their life they need reference points, they need the experience of their family and of their peers, they need to understand the mechanics of going to school and then on to work. In too many of our communities these reference points have vanished, and along with them, the hope of bettering ones self is disappearing. In too many places, in too many communities, we have a Jeremy Kyle generation of young men reaching adult life ill-equipped for it. Lacking the right social skills. Lacking a sense of purpose and responsibility. Lacking self-confidence. Lacking the ability to seize on an opportunity and make the most of it. And as a result turning against the society in which they live. For too many of them, this is the beginnings of a permanent lifestyle. On the margins of society. Living hand to mouth on welfare. In some cases, supplementing their income with a little drug dealing, a bit of petty crime on the side. In today’s neglected class, you see the seeds of tomorrow’s underclass. Drifting from despair to irresponsibility, from taking dings to peddling drugs, from aimless idleness to active criminality. This is why we see so many young people being robbed and even murdered on the streets of our big cities today. That is why drug crime and violent crime are rife on our estates. And what we witness today is a harbinger of what we will suffer tomorrow. If we do not grip it now, we will not be able to cure it when every generation of our population suffer from this malaise. From the earliest age, the structures that once surrounded young men have been corroded and in many cases simply don’t exist any more. PAGE 2 Family break up often means that there is no father figure in childhood. Teaching recruitment patterns often mean there are few male role models at school. For those whose skills are not academic, the path into stable employment is much less clear than it was for past generations. And so while the craft jobs of today are occupied en masse by young men from Eastern Europe, our own young men all too often hang around on the fringes, uncertain about where and how to build their lives. Housing estates no longer surround large factories and other employment centres where generations of men worked. More particularly, globalisation has led to the inevitable export of low-skilled jobs to other parts of the world. The job at the end of the road, and the footsteps in which to follow, aren’t there in the way they once were. The institutions that once cemented those communities together – the church or the chapel, the working men’s club, the trades union branches no longer provide the same sense of structure that was once there. And at the end of it all, we have much too much of a generation of young men growing up outside any kind of real social structure. We need to ask ourselves some pretty serious questions about how this has come to be. …what has happened to a society where we allow a generation of fathers-to-be to end up workless, loitering on the margins of society …we need to ask ourselves how we have devised a system of state interventions which fail to re-engage so many young men. …we need to ask whether it is right that we have built a society where we have come to fear many of our young men? These questions pose a deeper concern, a concern about apathy: we seem content to accept that a good proportion of our young men won’t ever grow to be active citizens. Citizens who will make their lives better, their families lives better and their country’s life better. Instead we have come to fear them, we fear their gangs, their knives, their ASBOs and their crimes. PAGE 3 We’re not alone in facing this problem in the developed world. Other countries face similar challenges. But in Britain it’s become particularly acute. And we seem to have accepted that this is just the way it is. And that there’s little that can be done to change it. We seem to accept that our society can be built on an inequality of hope where the majority can get on with their lives, quite rightly, but that we consign towns worth of young men to a life where the best that they can hope for is dependency. It is morally negligent to abandon so many young men, so, I want this speech to spark a debate about how to end the inequality of hope. For all his talk of a moral compass, Gordon Brown’s actions have undermined rather than strengthened the purpose and role of men in society. The New Deal and the welfare programme have been inadequate, the criminal justice system too soft. Some Government failings - like the malfunctioning of the Child Support Agency and the idiosyncracies of the tax credit and benefits system – have actually encouraged men not to take responsibility for their children. A view that the state knows best, and a lack of concern for the fortunes of voluntary groups, especially those working on sporting and similar activities, reduces the prevalence of positive male role models. And, too often our schools cater poorly for underperforming young men and provide too few positive role models. It is failure of policy and leadership that have resulted in two great social problems of today: worklessness and educational disengagement or schoollessness. For all of Labour’s rhetoric about job creation, ten years of timid back to work projects and tinkering at the edges of welfare has failed to deal with the problem of inter- generational worklessness. There is a real chance that in the next few years people will begin to claim their pension and never have worked in their lives. With this government, there is usually an inverse relationship between the toughness of its language and the effectiveness of its measures. PAGE 4 Nowhere is this more true than in its welfare policies. For all its rhetoric Labour’s schemes have not dealt with the scourge of worklessness. Perhaps most extraordinary among all its failings is the fact that unemployment among the young is actually higher today than it was in 1997, despite all the money spent, despite all the jobs the Government says it has created. And the problems are deep-rooted. There are hundreds of thousands of homes up and down the country where no one has worked in living memory. The importance of this cannot be overdone: good intentions and an overdose of understanding have produced communities of institutionalised despair. There’s nothing compassionate in abandonment: a life lived without the hope of betterment is a life half lived. We know from all the academic evidence that children brought up in workless households are more likely to fail at school, more likely to end up workless themselves, and are more likely to get involved in antisocial behaviour and crime. And in the depths of the figures there is a straightforward reality to be found. It is the men, far more than the women, who are struggling to find a role. At school, boys are consistently doing less well than girls at all stages. Between the ages of 18 and 24, more than twice as many men as women are claiming Jobseekers Allowance, and overall 75% of claimants are men. The New Deal for Young People caters for twice as many men as women. By the age of twenty-four, the number of young men claiming incapacity benefit is already outstripping the number of young women by ten thousand. Only once they both reach the age of fifty does the gap close again. The men in these figures spend their teenage years not learning and then spend years not earning.