Labour can still help black jobless youth: The Guardian Comment is Free

21 Jan 2010

 

Hard upon John Denham's speech last week (which seemed to imply that the battle against racism had been won and we now needed to turn to issues about class) come the Office for National Statistics figures which show that almost half of young black people are unemployed – despite overall unemployment falling slightly in the three months to November 2009.

And an October 2009 survey by the Department for Work and Pensions found that only 39% of ethnic minority applicants received a positive response from potential employers compared with 68% of white British applicants, despite having the same education, skills and work history.

It is also significant that a 1999 survey by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation said this: "Although Caribbean graduates can be almost as successful in the job market as young whites with degrees, the Caribbean men's participation in higher education has been falling behind other ethnic groups. In contrast, a high and rising proportion of young African men are obtaining good educational qualifications. Yet their unemployment rates are higher than for any other ethnic group. African graduates in their 20s are seven times as likely to be unemployed as their white counterparts."

So, contrary to what John Denham was suggesting last week, these issues cannot all be reduced to class. It is a tragedy that, when the economy was booming and New Labour was in its pomp and power, the government was unwilling to focus specifically on disproportionately high levels of black and Muslim youth unemployment. But even in the dying days of this administration there are things that the government could do, if it had the will.

Successive schemes to promote youth employment and "apprentice" style training have shown that the private sector employers take fewer ethnic minority young people than white young people. The government should, long ago, have put pressure on private sector employers (in those geographic areas where it is relevant) to take a proportionate number of qualified ethnic minority trainees, interns etc. Setting targets would be the easiest way to do it.

Small business provides many jobs in the inner city. But the figures produced by the 57 varieties of business support schemes funded by the government show that ethnic minority business does not get its proportionate share of funding. (Although local authorities and public sector organisations are all too happy to "trouser" extra money on the basis of the number of ethnic minorities in their area.)

Last but not least, over half of Britain's ethnic minorities live in the Greater London area. By far the biggest regeneration and job creation activity in London is the Olympic park. Yet the number of local people employed on the Olympic park is disproportionately small. And within that, the number of ethnic minorities is even tinier relatively. Yet all the Olympic boroughs have large minority populations. If the government had the courage to insist on higher levels of local labour being employed on the Olympic park, that in itself would raise ethnic minority employment levels in London. This is something I have lobbied ministers and the Olympic bureaucrats on since the Olympics were announced, but the figures remain far too low.

John Denham's recent attempt to claim that substantial progress has been made on racial disadvantage and that consequently we must now turn to class, was a transparent attempt to pander to a BNP narrative. I have long argued that New Labour should have paid more attention to its working class supporters, black and white. But this should not be at the expense of fighting racial disadvantage. And, as these new figures show, on fundamental issues like employment we still have a long way to go.



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