From NEETs to recruits
More than one million young people in Britain are now classified as NEET: not in education, employment or training. The acronym appears clinical and neutral, it’s anything but. It bundles together young workers who cannot find a job, those priced out of education, the sick and disabled, carers, young mothers and people waiting to begin a course, then presents them as a single social problem to be managed as if these victims of capitalism are somehow responsible for their lack of opportunity.
The label serves its purpose in directing attention away from the system that has failed them. It asks why these young people are not ‘work ready’, ‘engaged’ or ‘motivated’, rather than the correct question as to why an advanced capitalist country cannot provide useful, secure and properly paid work for its youth.
Sainsbury’s recently supplied a perfect demonstration of how this political sleight of hand works. The company removed more than 3,000 paid jobs in 2025 but has been praised by the Labour government for offering 10,000 ‘opportunities’ to young people. We should not be fooled by deceptive headlines; an opportunity is not a job, a wage or even an interview. Much of the offer consists of school visits, classroom sessions, workplace visits, CV workshops and limited practical experience. More than half of the places are aimed at 14 to 18 year olds through school-based provision.
Ten thousand opportunities but not ten thousand jobs
The headline is designed to create an impression that evaporates on examination. Sainsbury’s is not creating 10,000 new posts, it is gaining access to thousands of potential future workers, helping to define what counts as ‘work readiness’ and receiving government-backed publicity without guaranteeing employment to those taking part. It is a farce and workers should not be fooled.
The contradiction is stark but not isolated. This recurring pattern of spin makes three insinuations: that whatever groups (in this case NEETS) are somehow responsible for their own predicament; that the economic system of capitalism has no hand in the immiseration of said group; and that philanthropic billionaires or corporations through a sense of decency and humanity will help to save the day.
So let’s examine the facts. In January 2025 Sainsbury’s announced more than 3,000 job losses through the closure of its cafés, pizza and patisserie counters and reductions in management roles. The cuts formed part of a programme intended to deliver £1bn in operating-cost savings. Yet for the year ending February 2026, the company reported retail underlying operating profit of £1.03bn. Total basic earnings per share rose from 10.9p to 17.3p, an increase of 58.7 percent. The company also announced a £300m return to shareholders following the sale of its bank, with a further £100m to be returned through additional share buybacks in 2026–27.
Under capitalism being profitable is never enough; profit must be protected and expanded. Just think about what that means. If a company makes a £1bn profit in a given year the following year it has make more. There is no limit to the drive to accumulate more capital, and any company that stopped would find itself swallowed by its competitiors. Labour is a cost to be cut, while training costs are pushed on to schools, the state and young workers themselves. Thousands of real jobs can disappear while a collection of workshops is repackaged as 10,000 opportunities. It literally is criminal, but it’s presented in a way that suggests we should be grateful. And remember, this is not a failure of the system to behave as intended, it is the system behaving precisely as intended. Production is organised for profit, not to guarantee every person useful work or a secure life – that IS what capitalism represents.
NEET turns a social failure into a personal condition.
Official figures for January to March 2026 estimated that 1.13 million people aged 16 to 24 were NEET, representing 13.5 percent of the age group. Of these, 400,000 were unemployed and actively seeking work, while 613,000 were economically inactive. The latter group includes people who are sick or disabled, caring for family, or unable to seek work for other reasons. The acronym conceals these differences while giving the appearance of a precise diagnosis.
Critical research into British NEET policy has described it as a pathologised status, which is exactly the state’s intention. Essentially it means that being NEET is treated almost as though it were a problem or defect of the young person, rather than a situation created by wider economic and social conditions – by capitalism! The young person is portrayed as lacking motivation, confidence, discipline or employability, while attention is diverted from the facts of life facing young people: shortages of secure jobs, apprenticeships, affordable education and properly funded youth services.
The language of employability and individual responsibility reframes mass youth unemployment as a defect in young people. The correct question — why are secure jobs, apprenticeships and affordable education unavailable? — is not addressed because to do so would highlight the permanent failings of the system. Instead it becomes an administrative question: how can ‘the NEET’ be corrected, activated and made employable?
That reframing is vitally important because it changes who appears responsible. Not deindustrialisation, casualisation, zero hours contracts, low pay, the destruction of apprenticeships and the commodification of education – oh no! It is of course the young worker who is left carrying the blame for conditions created by capital.
The report above referenced how engaging with economically marginalised young people revealed three key insights. Firstly, participants were sensitive to how both the issue of NEET/youth unemployment and they themselves were framed in policy. The construction of young people as ‘risky’ and the framing of NEET as rooted in individual deficits resonated in their experiences of discrimination and labelling in education and the labour market. Secondly, the assumptions underpinning NEET policy were consistently challenged—both directly and indirectly—by the experiences of the participants. They generally possessed a range of skills, qualifications and/or work experience, for example, but were struggling to benefit from these credentials in the labour market. Thirdly, the young people found policy approaches to NEET/youth unemployment to be largely ineffective.
While the state has become more sophisticated at identifying and counting NEETs, it has of course dismantled much of the provision that might have supported them. The government’s own National Youth Strategy records that local spending on youth services in England fell by 73 percent between 2010 and 2023, a real-terms loss of £1.2bn. The latest YMCA analysis puts the real-terms fall by 2024–25 at 76 percent.
The label changes but the method is familiar
Whilst not every government acronym is followed by a campaign against the people it describes, there is a pattern. Services and provision are cut, statistics are produced to reflect the crisis and the ‘persons’ or victims produced by that crisis are labelled in a way that manifestly suggests that, somehow, they are responsible for their predicament. It is a clever and oft-used device for blaming the crises of capitalism on specific groups of workers and manufacturing dissent between workers themselves.
Social problems are detached from their material causes, converted into categories of people and then managed through bureaucratic systems and schemes of assessment and controlled conditionality, making support dependent on the person meeting particular requirements. A brief look back at the treatment of disabled and other welfare claimants during the austerity drive after 2010 provides another illustration of this effective tactic. Research examining 6,600 newspaper articles found fraud vastly over-represented and identified politicians, official reports and think-tanks as important sources of the stories. Another study found increasing use of terms such as ‘scrounger’, ‘cheat’ and ‘skiver’ in reporting about disabled people as welfare reform gathered pace.
The rhetoric used around NEETs is usually less openly hostile – so far. It speaks of confidence, aspiration, skills and opportunity but it performs the necessary ideological task: it places the problem within the individual and makes support conditional upon demonstrating the attitudes required by employers and the state – and with continued propaganda, other groups of workers will inevitably join the criticism. Readers will undoubtedly have anecdotal experience of conversations by older generations suggesting that the ‘young people of today’ don’t want to work, can’t keep a job, lack discipline or resilience, spend all their time on their phones, blame society instead of themselves. If you have had such conversations recently, think about who has put those thoughts in your mind, whether young people today have decent opportunities and if not, who exactly is to blame. Not them!
From the job centre to the recruiting office
And what a convenient situation is being cultivated. As the economic crisis of capitalism bites and young people are blamed for their own immiseration, what a great opportunity for preparing them as cannon fodder. And do not kid yourself that this isn’t the case. The connection with the drive to war is no longer speculative.
In February 2026 the Ministry of Defence and the Department for Work and Pensions established a partnership linking military recruitment with job centres, intending to steer tens of thousands of young people towards the armed forces. The government has also launched a paid armed forces ‘gap year’ scheme, initially for around 150 participants but with an ambition to expand it beyond 1,000. Cadet numbers are being expanded, defence is being introduced more visibly into education, and ministers have urged unemployed young people to give the forces serious consideration.
Alongside official policy comes more coercive rhetoric. In April 2026 retired Major General Tim Cross asked why the state was paying welfare to young people who could instead be told to join the military. He stopped short of advocating formal conscription, but the logic was clear: if capitalism cannot offer you a civilian future, your claim to support can be questioned unless you make yourself available to the war machine.
The Youth Guarantee also joins opportunity to compulsion. The government has promised funded jobs and additional employment support, but its language is a ‘new social contract’ in which opportunity is matched by responsibility. Parliamentary questions have explicitly addressed the proposed removal of benefit entitlement from 18 to 21-year-olds who refuse a work placement. A right to subsistence is thereby converted into a reward for obedience.
This is the basis of what critics rightly call an economic draft. Formal conscription may not yet exist, but material compulsion does. A young person faced with unemployment, benefit sanctions, high rent, student debt and no secure prospect is not making a free choice when the armed forces appear as one of the few routes to wages, training, housing – survival! And of course which young people will this primarily impact – those who come from poorer backgrounds.
The military should not be treated as just another employer. The purpose of armed-forces recruitment is to prepare people to fight wars on behalf of the British ruling class. The government is not reconnecting youth with society. It is reconnecting a generation denied a civilian future with the imperialist state that will require it to kill and die abroad. As Labour peer, Baroness Smith of Malvern so succinctly put it, “The Youth Guarantee is part of a new social contract with young people – opportunity matched by responsibility.” And that responsibility will be to fight and die for the ruling class.
Austerity at home and war abroad
The war drive guarantees that austerity will deepen. Successive British governments (and prime ministers) speak endlessly of scarce resources when workers require housing, healthcare, education, social care or benefits. No such hesitation applies to military spending. The 2025 Spending Review committed to raising defence expenditure to 2.6 percent of GDP from 2027, with an ambition to reach 3 percent in the next parliament. By June 2026 the government was committed to 3.5 percent of GDP on core defence by 2035 as part of NATO’s wider 5 percent national-security target.
The transfer is already explicit. The first increase was partly financed by cutting overseas development assistance from 0.5 to 0.3 percent of gross national income. Future increases will not fall from the sky, they will be extracted from workers through taxation, inflation, lower real wages, deteriorating services and further attacks on welfare.
Britain doesn’t lack wealth. Sainsbury’s can return hundreds of millions of pounds to shareholders while cutting jobs. Banks, energy monopolies, arms manufacturers and major retailers continue to accumulate enormous profits. The gap between the ruling class and the working class has never been wider. The problem is not wealth, it’s who owns and controls that wealth and for what purpose production is organised.
Capitalism in crisis produces a growing reserve army of labour: workers, inevitably younger people, who are unemployed, underemployed or forced into insecurity. Their existence also disciplines those still in work by reminding them that they can be easily replaced. Government schemes may move individuals in and out of the statistics, but they cannot abolish the conditions that continually recreate unemployment. When civilian capital cannot profitably absorb the available labour, militarism offers another use for it.
The answer lies with the organised people
Young people classed as NEET are not a separate social species. They are part of the working class, as are supermarket workers, disabled benefit claimants, students, pensioners, carers, public-sector workers and soldiers recruited from working-class communities. The labels divide people whose interests are fundamentally joined.
Our immediate task must be to recognise our class enemy and unite against austerity, benefit coercion, job destruction and imperialist war. Trade unions, community organisations, anti-war groups, students, pensioners, claimants and working people must refuse the attempt to set the employed against the unemployed, the ‘deserving’ against the ‘undeserving’, or older workers against the young.
That means demanding real jobs rather than corporate publicity schemes; properly funded education and youth services rather than employability workshops; an unconditional right to welfare rather than sanctions; and socially useful production rather than the expansion of the arms economy. It also means opposing every step towards conscription, whether it arrives by statute or through economic compulsion.
Inevitably, only socialism can end the contradiction at its root by organising production to meet human need rather than private profit. Whether or not everyone who enters this inevitable struggle calls themselves a socialist is irrelevant, only the united force of the people can prevent the ruling class from making workers pay for its crisis and supply our children for its wars.
The young are not failing society. Capitalism is failing them. The answer is not to classify them more efficiently, discipline them more harshly or funnel them from the job centre to the recruiting office. It is to organise the power capable of ending the system that has made them surplus.