Neets (not in education, employment or training)

Via Peter Cuthbertson, Charles Murray on the uber-chavs.

"“When I was looking at Britain in the 1980s, the offspring of the first big generation of single mothers were small children,” said Murray, speaking from his home in America. “Now they are teenagers and young adults and the problems are exactly those that I was warning they would be — high crime rates and low participation in the labour force.
“These people have never been socialised and they simply don’t know how to behave, from sitting still in classrooms to knowing you don’t hit people if you have a problem. It is very difficult, almost impossible, to take these people now and provide basic conditioning."

In Britain Murray found that since records began during the time of Henry VIII, the number of children born to unmarried mothers remained stable for centuries at between 4% and 5%. After the second world war, the numbers began to rise slowly to about 9% in 1976 before rocketing in the 1980s. When Murray arrived in 1989, he was shocked to find the figure stood at 23% and it has now risen to more than 35%.

At the time, evidence of Murray’s British underclass was only just emerging and he was warning of problems in the future. For his efforts he was given a drubbing by the left who said his work lacked “scientific evidence” and was “misleading”, perhaps “wilfully so”. He found few friends in the Labour party who were keen not to upset their core voters — many of whom were under Murray’s microscope.

A decade on, the mood has changed, though the causes of the Neet phenomenon propounded by Murray remain contentious. An unlikely supporter of Murray’s thesis, the former Labour minister Frank Field now describes Britain’s Neets as a “lost generation” and is calling for firm action to be taken.

“I regard this as the first nonviolent loss of a generation,” he said last week. “Just as happened in the first world war, we have wiped out a generation. Surely we can say that the traditional family unit is the best way to nurture children without making it a campaign to beat up single mums.”

The government, wary of being so outspoken, is nevertheless hurling brains and billions at the problem.

Which is why they'll fail. Because they can't be judgemental about anything but smoking and racism. Governments have been throwing money (ours) at 'problem estates' for thirty years.

This seems relevant here.

"It must be said that both Labour and the Tories have taken this view of crime - that 'they only thieve because they're poor'. In an attempt to correct this, they have thrown billions into urban regeneration, social exclusion units, outreach projects and all the other useless initiatives which keep large numbers of middle-class people (all right - be fair, a lot of builders also do well, rebuilding the vandalised community centres, libraries and youth clubs) employed at the expense of other people's taxes."




Charles Murray

'Underclass' here.'Underclass +10' here.