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One Million Young People. No Jobs. Labour Blames the Paper Round. Pat McFadden has identified the cause of Britain's youth unemployment crisis. Writing in the Telegraph this morning, the Work and Pensions Secretary explains that young people cannot find work because the paper round has disappeared. News is online now. Retail is in decline. The Saturday job has gone the way of the high street. This, he tells us, is why nearly one million young people are not in education, employment or training, with sixty percent of them having never held a job at all. The National Insurance rise announced in last October's budget is not mentioned. The near twenty percent jump in the youth minimum wage rate is not mentioned. The consequent collapse in entry-level hiring across retail, hospitality and service industries is not mentioned. The government that hammered the sectors where young people get their first foothold from every direction simultaneously has commissioned a review to find out what went wrong and concluded, apparently in good faith, that the answer is the internet. The Milburn review finding published alongside McFadden's column deserves to be read slowly. The government currently spends twenty-five times more paying unemployed young people than finding them jobs. Twenty-five times. That is not a funding gap. It is a system designed around managing failure rather than ending it. And it is a system that McFadden's party has been operating, expanding and now proposing to reset while affecting surprise at what it contains. In February I argued that Labour had priced a generation out of work. The employer National Insurance rise, the surge in minimum wages and the resulting collapse in entry-level hiring were the mechanism. The warning lights were not coming from political opponents alone. The Office for Budget Responsibility, the Bank of England and economists from think tanks close to Labour's own orbit were all pointing in the same direction. Employment costs rose sharply. Entry-level jobs shrank. Youth unemployment climbed. The link was obvious to anyone willing to see it. McFadden is not willing to see it. His solution is 300,000 work experience placements over three years. The Youth Guarantee will give every unemployed young person a shot at work after eighteen months of unemployment. Eighteen months. A young person who left school in the summer of 2025 will be eligible for a work experience placement in early 2027. A government that had not made entry-level employment more expensive would have got them working within weeks of leaving school. Meanwhile welfare costs the taxpayer £322 billion a year, twenty-three percent of total government spending, and is set to rise by a further £74 billion over the next five years. Starmer was forced to abandon his own benefits reform last year after Labour MPs said it would drive families into poverty. The system reset Milburn is now proposing is the third attempt to address a benefits bill that grows regardless of which party is in office because the structural incentives have never been reformed. The paper round is a convenient villain. It requires no policy reversal. It offends nobody in the Cabinet. It places the blame on technological change and shifting consumer habits rather than on decisions made in the Treasury last October. It allows a government that made youth employment more expensive to present itself as the champion of youth opportunity. Youth unemployment stands at 16.2 percent. 729,000 young people are out of work. The ladder into employment was kicked away by this government's own budget. Pat McFadden has written a nostalgic column about delivering newspapers. The connection between those two facts is the story he will not tell.

It is being reported that Chancellor Rachel Reeves will today argue for increasing alignment with European Union single market rules and greater development of artificial intelligence (AI) in Britain. Who will tell her she can have one or the other — but not both? While the UK is already the 3rd biggest AI power on the globe (after USA/China) the EU’s ‘prudential’ approach to regulation had already made it an AI backwater. The EU will understandably not let us pick and mix when it comes to closer alignment, which would inevitably mean our AI development coming within the dead hand of the Brussels’ regulatory ambit. She’d never give me an interview but perhaps someone from His Majesty’s Political Press Corps, which does have regular access to her, might like to mug up on this and ask her how these conflicting aims can be reconciled.

Shabana Mahmood flew to Copenhagen last week. She came back convinced she had found the answer. On Thursday she announced it: Britain will pay failed asylum-seeking families up to £40,000 to leave. She called it the Danish model. Denmark would barely recognise it. This is the political equivalent of visiting a Michelin-starred restaurant, asking for the recipe, and coming home with the napkin. Denmark's success on immigration is not built on paying people to go away. It is built on making sure they don't want to come in the first place, and on removing them efficiently when they do. The payment scheme exists in Denmark as a minor instrument inside a much harder overall architecture. Mahmood has extracted the instrument and left the architecture behind. Here is what the Danish model actually consists of. Political consensus across left and right that the system must deter arrivals, not attract them. Asylum treated as temporary by default, with regular reassessments and a clear expectation of return. Benefits for new arrivals cut below standard welfare levels. Family reunification tightened. Rapid decisions. Rapid removals. Return agreements with origin countries treated as a diplomatic priority. Integration demands that are explicit and enforced: learn the language, work, respect Danish law. Denmark didn't find a magic policy. It decided what it wanted its system to do and then aligned everything around that goal. What has Mahmood adopted from this? The leaving payment. One tool from the toolbox, with the toolbox left in Copenhagen. And even on its own terms the comparison doesn't hold. Denmark offered up to £30,000 per person – three times the British rate. But the figure is beside the point. The payment works in Denmark because it sits inside a system designed to make staying impossible. Strip that system away and the number becomes irrelevant. What remains is a cash offer to people who have already been told they have no right to be here. That is not the Danish model. It is one line from the Danish model, lifted out of context and dressed up in Scandinavian branding for political cover. Now consider the pull factor. The people crossing the Channel in small boats are overwhelmingly single young men. That is what the data consistently shows. This scheme is explicitly targeted at families. So where are these families coming from? And what signal does a publicly announced £40,000 family payment send to anyone considering the crossing? Come as a family, fail your claim, take the money. Labour's Alex Norris went on television to insist this would not act as a magnet. He would say that. The incentive structure says otherwise. There is something deeper here too. Mahmood has been warned by her own department that the system creates perverse incentives – that people place children on dangerous boats precisely because families are harder to remove. Her answer to that perverse incentive is to attach a £40,000 reward to it. The deterrent and the incentive have changed places. Mahmood is at least trying. The 30-month asylum review, the welfare restrictions, the Article 8 changes – there are genuine moves here that previous governments avoided. But trying is not the same as succeeding, and borrowing Denmark's reputation without borrowing Denmark's methods is not a policy. It's a press release. The 150 families sitting in Home Office hotels got a text on Thursday morning giving them seven days to decide. The Home Secretary spent a week in Copenhagen and came back with a payment card and a photo opportunity. Denmark took twenty years to build the system she is claiming to have copied. Someone is getting a good deal here. It isn't the British taxpayer. "On Thursday [Shabana Mahmood] announced it: Britain will pay failed asylum-seeking families up to £40,000 to leave. She called it the Danish model. Denmark would barely recognise it."