Meeting of the Parliament 19 March 2014
The European youth guarantee began as a campaign by the Party of European Socialists, of which the Labour Party is a member, back in May 2012, one year after the International Monetary Fund stepped in to bail out the Greek economy with a loan of more than €100 billion and just a month before Spain agreed its own bailout. The campaign was devised as the world watched the eurozone’s collapse and the decline into insolvency of states that, just years before, had been in growth and in plain sight of the stringent cuts to public services and the loss of livelihoods that caused riots on the streets of Athens and marches in Madrid.
Through it all, young people, particularly young women—the students of Lisbon, Rome and, closer to home, Dublin—were forced into a world not of their own making but in which, nevertheless, work was nearly impossible to come by and wages even less likely to meet the rising cost of living. In countries such as Spain, the situation has not abated. Earlier this year, youth unemployment in Spain was reported to have reached a staggering 58 per cent—in other words, six out of 10 young people are unable to find work. In Greece, the figure has peaked at nearly 70 per cent.
At its heart, the campaign for a youth guarantee was for those young people whose hopes of a career, whose trust in the political process to deliver opportunities and, most important, whose self-belief were evaporating. Scottish Labour, UK Labour and socialist parties across Europe came together and voted to support the youth guarantee, because we saw the long-term risk to our economies of a generation of European young people—students and school leavers—being out of work.
The EU says that the youth guarantee is “not a jobs guarantee”. Rather, it is a commitment to re-engage young people in work or education, with the shortest possible delay, as the minister said. To fund the guarantee, states are urged to make use of the European social fund, and a further €6 billion has been set aside for member states whose youth unemployment rate is more than 25 per cent.
I want to challenge the minister’s assertion that without the full powers of independence we cannot deliver jobs and opportunities for young people in Scotland.