‘Socialism 101!’ | Labour TORCHED over tax rises on businesses as youth unemployment BALLOONS

Added: 2026-05-30

[00:00:00]Well, we're going to start with the news that young people will be offered tens of thousands of new workplacements and training opportunities as the government steps up efforts to tackle rising joblessness.

[00:00:11]>> Yes. Over the next three years, placements in industries from construction to hospitality will be rolled out nationwide with some of Britain's biggest employers.

[00:00:19]>> Well, these include Manchester and Gatwick airports with ministers insisting actually this is going to spread right across the country. But will it be enough to get Britain's young back into work? Well, we're joined now by shadow defense minister David Reid.

[00:00:34]David, we heard from Alan Milbour, former Labour Minister yesterday, laying out all of the reasons why uh the youth unemployment rate has now touched 1 million people. What would the Conservatives do if they were in power to tackle this scourge of unemployment in the young?

[00:00:51]>> So, just listening to the comments that were uh just raised, I think this is absolute madness. Now just looking at labor economics, this is socialism 101 is that they put all these new taxes on business. So you think about employers national insurance um increases, increases in the national minimum wage, uh business rates increases, and then you compound those all with higher energy costs and then throw in a bunch of new legislation around employee rights and you realize why businesses are closing and not being able to take on uh young people. And in the same breath then you're saying right we're going to give government funded or taxpayers funded grants out for businesses to be able to take on uh young people. It's absolute madness. I think the difficult conversations that we need to have is that I think if we look at a chunk of the people that are outside of work now uh in that category and I hear this from constituents from um from their parents and from those people out of work um on some of the issues and this is a difficult conversation to have but for some of the issues around um uh non-debilitating depression or anxiety or ADHD we need to have the conversation around personal independence payments and the conservatives uh under Kem have been very very wrong to say we need to do a rapid reassessment of those PIP claims to make sure that those who can work do go into work. And I think there's a strong argument to say that um the fulfillment you get from work to have the agency to have money coming into your own bank account and to be able to control those decisions is far better than just being written off, put on the benefits uh train and then losing all your confidence because you're not in work uh and then staying on benefits for long periods of time. Um the interesting part so we were doing the numbers this would cost231 million pounds to do the reassessment of PIP but for every uh pound that is spent on that reassessment within the first year we would get £10 back so we would be in a position where more people were going to work paying income tax and then actually contributing to the country isn't it isn't it David >> there's nothing more important than keeping your money and your identity safe online and with so many VPN options available choosing The right one can be pretty daunting, but this video sponsor, ExpressVPN, is making the choice easier for GBN News viewers. ExpressVPN is offering up to 75% off, plus four extra months free. That's top level security from just £249 a month, and you're covered by their 30-day money back guarantee. So, just click the link in this video's description or scan the QR code. Now remember, when you're online, you are often sharing personal data. So hackers can steal your information, your passwords, your photos, and your bank details in just seconds. But ExpressVPN encrypts your connection, making it virtually impossible for hackers to access your personal information. So why choose ExpressVPN? Well, it couldn't be easier to use. With just one click, you are protected. And ExpressVPN uses militarygrade AES 256 encryption, which is the same standard trusted by the US government to guard their classified information. With their new tiered plans, you can protect up to 14 devices at once and manage password securely.

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[00:04:27]Start protecting yourself today with ExpressVPN. It you've got to categorize it as tough love because there's going to there will be if not all of those people saying, "Well, I don't want to lose these benefits. You know, I should be entitled to this." So it's you're going to have to it might do them good in the long term, but you you're going to have to force force them out if you like.

[00:04:48]>> So So there is that conversation definitely, but I also I don't want to put the blame at young people's feet. If I think about growing up, the conversation was that if you work hard, uh if you contribute to society, then those doors will open and there'll be a good job for you afterwards. I think that started to break down when we sent 50% of school levers to university under Blair policies. And that social contract, something we keep hearing about repeatedly now, has broken down.

[00:05:13]So for young people, they don't understand what their relationship is with the states. And for I think if we look at that cohort between 18 and 24, people that come out of university, they're shackled with tens of thousands of pounds worth of debt. Uh and there's no graduate job for them afterwards.

[00:05:28]That's not a good position to be in as a country. That's something that we're working on in opposition under Kemy's leadership. And I think we need to have a much broader discussion around artificial intelligence and automation.

[00:05:39]So we're going through this new industrial revolution and some of those entry- level jobs that people would have expected to get jobs that we all had uh are now being automated away or more experienced people are going to those jobs uh and working on lower salaries.

[00:05:54]So we need to have the conversation around what does contribution mean in this new age of artificial intelligence and how do we value that contribution and make sure that there are good pathways for young people and more importantly that they understand their relationship with the state and that is work we are getting on with now. We cannot duck these these hard questions.

[00:06:13]We need to attack them head on.

[00:06:14]>> David, there's another hard question which I'll be interested to see whether you do or don't duck and that is about the triple lock. What Alan Milbour said yesterday is that part of the problem is that just no money has gone into giving young people jobs. The amount of job support out there for young people is so incredibly low. And he said that young people need to be at the center of our conversation. At the moment, the people at the center of our conversation are pensioners and pretty much every party has agreed to keep that triple lock in place. That is using up a lot of money which could perhaps be better directed at getting young people back into work.

[00:06:49]What do you think?

[00:06:50]So I think I'm always really cautious to wade into this discussion because it's easy to tear something down if you haven't got a plan. Um the most important thing is making sure that people understand what that plan is going forward. So if I was uh a pensioner now and I'd worked and grafted and contributed to society and the agreement was that there would be a triple lock for me at the end um when I retire and that's what I believed and that's what I based my finances around and then you had some young upstart politician coming out and saying that we need to remove that. we need to give to young people. It doesn't work. But if we look at the the pure numbers, I think we had five workers to um to every two pensioners when we were developing a lot of these plans. We've almost had an inversion of that now. So we have far less young people working and far more um people that are retired and we have an aging population. So there needs to be credible plans for each different category uh within society and we need to have that conversation and that's why it's so important and Kem has been strong on this to make sure we are doing the hard work in opposition that we're coming up with policies and those those policies are coherent and that we're having the conversation with those with those different groups. Yeah, >> we can come out and plead politics, but we are not in a position um to just throw throw away um sort of like cheap political comments when there is a plan that needs to be developed.

[00:08:11]>> Well, it's a frustrating thing, isn't it, about about being in in opposition that you know you can come up with plans and all the rest of it. It's whether you get to enact them. What you can do and what is interesting is um about the defend defense investment plan. Up until this year, most of us hadn't really heard of it. You had the strategic defense review. Then the de defense investment plan comes after that to show how it's all all going to work. We had the strategic defense review a year ago.

[00:08:37]We still haven't got the DIP. So what are you going to do about it?

[00:08:43]Now it's just gone 8:00. I don't want to bore your listeners with another government document, but this is so crucial. So the report that we're waiting for, this document, the defense investment plan, is the blueprint for how we're going to spend taxpayers money on our defense industry and our armed forces for the years to come so they can do the job of keeping us all safe. And we all know how volatile the world is becoming now. We've waited for 9 months for this defense investment plan to come out. The government said they were going to release it back in October last year, and it's still nowhere to be seen. And when you speak to defense companies, and I've worked in the defense industry before, I'm ex-military. you are realizing these companies are being starved of work. And when you have the European markets and the American market all investing in defense because the world is becoming more volatile, our companies becoming squeezed to a point where they're either closing down or coming to the conclusion that if you want to grow in defense, you have to go and they are going to where the contracts are. we are placing ourselves at the back of the queue for defense orders at precise the moment when the queue has not mattered um so much before. So we need to be making sure that uh that plan is there for defense that we know what we're doing and we can have the conversation with the country on how we fund it and that should be around uh welfare and it should be around the size of the states issues that I don't think the government are grappling with.

[00:10:04]Well, shadow defense minister David Reid, thank you very much for joining us on GBN News Breakfast.