Time to scrap the minimum wage?

Today’s youth unemployment figures are simply appalling. It’s now 21 per cent amongst the under-25s, above the peak of 18 per cent seen under the 1990s recession. For the first time since then, Britain’s youth joblessness is worse than the European average. This is a tragedy, and not one we should accept as being a grimly inevitable aspect of the recession. Ed Miliband said in PMQs that a million young people are on the dole: a statistic everyone should get angry about. And we can think of what has gone wrong.

The above graph shows how Britain has nothing left to boast about in unemployment. Blair used to love heading to Brussels and saying the real ‘social model’ was lower regulation which meant higher employment. What’s changed over the last 20 years? How did we end up with Euro-style levels of youth unemployment? Not by too little state spending, as Miliband suggests.