The Director of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, Jonathan Portes has criticised the statistics which claimed over 49% of Black and Ethnic minorities youths are unemployed. Portes states, “high levels of unemployment in this group are a long-standing problem and a serious one, but, as the sample size for this group is small, it's difficult to conclude from this data that things are necessarily getting worse.”
As mentioned in the previous edition of Asian Voice, the Labour Party have pledged to guarantee every young person who are out of work for over a year and claiming benefits a paid starter job as well as training, which will help over 3,200 black and ethnic minorities young people back into work. However, Jonathan Portes underlines that the suggested approached by Labour may not be sufficient in dealing with the problem as a whole. Portes says, “Labour's Jobs Guarantee clearly doesn't address the scale of the problem- 3,200 young people is a very small proportion of the total.”
On 11th March, the BME unemployment event took place at the Roundwood Club Youth Centre in Brent, which hosted many Year 10 students from Newman Catholic College. At this event, Labour MPs spoke to the students to see what their future ambitions were, what their career goals are and what help or advice they were getting in order to accomplish them in the future. MP Sadiq Khan spoke about the encouraging statistics of women in apprenticeships and the downslide of Black and Asian youths in employment. “It's good news that unemployment has gone down and for young women joining apprenticeships. The bad news is though for Black/Asian minority ethnic britons, it's going the other way. We've got a real problem where disadvantage communities are going backwards rather than forward and since 2010, things have got worse for the readers of Asian Voice, for their families. And the reason why it's so serious is if somebody is longterm unemployed as a young person, they won't get the training or skills to get a decent job as a young person. But imagine in ten years time; what chance have they got of starting a family and being able to support them and to be able to get a property as well.”
He went on to talk about his disapproval of the lack of work experience available to GCSE students. “The bad news is that the government of this last four years have got rid of a lot of careers teachers; careers advisor is less good, work experience is happening less and less as a result... it [work experience] gets you ready and prepared for work in life; it means your CV looks better and it means you learn life skills. I think we need to reintroduce that, we need to have proper careers advice in schools and a few colleges. We need to have proper role models for young people so that they can fulfil their potential.”
Sadiq Khan was more than encouraging to the students and the youth of Britain. He spoke about the opportunities available in the country and how it is possible to make something of yourself. He inspirited, “Don't give up. Be optimistic, be confident; don't be a pessimist. I accept there are too few examples of successful British role models, but they're out there. Work hard- you can do it. Sometimes opportunities will present itself, sometimes you've got to grab it yourself.”
