The Dutch have done it again. While Britain’s youth wobble on the precipice of a jobs crisis, clutching a zero-hours contract in one hand and a lukewarm Pot Noodle in the other, the Netherlands has unveiled its secret weapon: a jobs programme with no dead ends. Yes, you read that right. A scheme that doesn’t treat young people like disposable components in a gig economy meat grinder. Quelle surprise.
Let’s take a moment to imagine this. Picture a world where a teenager with a chaotic fringe and a GCSE in woodwork isn’t immediately funnelled into a dystopian call centre. Instead, they’re given training, support, and a proper job. With prospects. And, dare I say it, dignity. This is the Dutch model, a behemoth of common sense that seems to have sailed right over the English Channel and into the collective blind spot of Westminster.
I sat in a drab Jobcentre Plus in Slough the other day, watching a twenty-two-year-old philosophy graduate re-apply for Universal Credit. She was told to ‘upskill’ by learning Excel. Excel! The very soul-sucking spreadsheet software that has more life in it than the average Tory backbencher. Meanwhile, in Utrecht, some lucky sod is being paid a living wage to apprentice as a canal-boat mechanic. The injustice is so thick you could bottle it and sell it as gravy.
The British approach to youth unemployment is a masterpiece of bureaucratic incompetence. We’ve designed a system that punishes aspiration with means-testing and rewards stagnation with sanctions. It’s as if we took the worst parts of the Victorian workhouse and mixed them with a bad episode of Black Mirror. The Dutch, by contrast, have realised that young people are not just statistics. They are humans, with dreams and anxieties and, in many cases, a desperate need for a decent cup of coffee. Their programme offers personalised coaching, proper apprenticeships, and a gentle shove rather than a hard boot. It works because it treats people like adults, not recalcitrant children.
Of course, the British establishment will sneer. They’ll say the Netherlands is too small, too wealthy, too sensible. But let’s be honest. Any country that can make bike lanes and tulip bulbs a global brand can certainly teach us a thing or two about not letting our youth rot on the dole. The true lesson here is that political will beats political theatre. While our politicians grandstand about ‘levelling up’, the Dutch simply get on with it. They’ve built a labour market that values people over profit, and the result is a generation that isn’t drowning in precarity and resentment.
We need a similar revolution in the UK. Not a revolution of red flags and barricades, but a revolution of common decency. Imagine a government that actually invested in young people, that funded colleges and created real jobs, that stood up to the gig economy barons and said ‘no more’. It sounds like a fantasy, I know. But if the Dutch can do it, with their clogs and their stroopwafels, surely we can muster something beyond a three-line whip and a vague promise.
Let this be a lesson to the suits in Whitehall. The youth unemployment crisis is not a force of nature. It is a choice. And it is time we chose differently. Otherwise, we’ll be stuck with a generation that knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. Just like their parents.
