Corporate media are helping the DWP shit on unemployed graduates

The right-wing corporate media are giving the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) a hand with trashing young people on benefits. The rags made their play via the Centre for Social Justice, which is pushing a stat that 700,000 graduates are on unemployment benefits.

The Centre for Social Justice today released their Rewiring Education report which found that a “significant” number of university graduates are out of work and claiming benefits.

Right-wing shit rags trashing unemployed kids again via DWP

The rags, of course, had an absolute field day with this.

The Telegraph ran with:

Graduates claiming benefits surge to 700000

Thousands cite health problems for being out of work as post-pandemic trend lingers

While the Daily Mail screamed:

Graduates claiming benefits surge to over 700,000 as one in three claim they are too sick to work

The Express sneered:

UK’s ‘too sick to work’ crisis rockets to new high – 700k graduates on benefits

And our old friend Birmingham Live said:

DWP announces ‘urgent’ action over 700,000 people who claim benefits

The “urgent action” mentioned is of course the Youth Guarantee, which will force kids who toiled away for over three years into low-paid internships in shops.

What’s the truth though?

What’s confusing, though, is that the report doesn’t say that 700,000 graduates are on benefits. It says 400,000. The accompanying press release confusingly mentions both stats. It’s absolutely baffling where the 700,000 figure came from.

But the CSJ attempts to muddy the water even further:

Around 400,000 graduates are currently out of work and claiming Universal Credit, while 110,000 graduates under the age of 30 were found to be claiming at least one benefit and not in work.

Almost 240,000 of the 700,000 jobless graduates claiming benefits said they were off work due to sickness.

What the fuck even are these stats though?

If that’s bamboozled you, don’t worry. It did us too. And, that’s almost definitely the point – as well as a hallmark of the DWP. But let us actually break it down.

There are in total 707,000 graduates not working and claiming ANY type of benefit. Of that group, 400,000 are on Universal Credit (UC). 240k are claiming health UC. 110K under 30 are claiming a benefit and not working.

What’s not included here is how many of the 400,000 on UC still work. As readers will know, many people work and are on UC because their wage isn’t enough to pay all their bills.

What needs to be pointed out here is that these stats form just half a paragraph on page 79 of an 86-page report. Most of the figures being quoted by the CJ and the press aren’t even in the report.

The “stats” also come from their own analysis of a quarterly labour force survey from July to September. However, looking at the survery itself, it’s still not actually clear where they got those figures from. The age ranges of the data also go from 16-24 and 25-34, so their under-30 stat can’t possibly have come from this dataset.

So you wanna help more graduates into work right?

You’d think that the focus of the report would be on what can be done to ensure more graduates can get into work? Oh no, this is Iain Duncan-Smith’s think tank we’re talking about.

What the report actually seems to be about is discouraging kids from going to university. Though, of course, they’re only talking about the poor ones.

Daniel Lilley, Senior Researcher at the Centre for Social Justice, said:

If we are serious about repairing broken Britain, we must give young people the opportunity to succeed and fuel key industries with the domestic skills they need to grow. Both will depend on ending the obsession with university and rewiring education to give technical learning the pride and place it deserves.

An uneducated pleb is an easy to control pleb

It’s more than a little suspect that a think tank created by the architect of Universal Credit is pushing a report that claims to show working-class graduates are living it up on benefits. It’s also convenient that this is happening at the same time that the DWP plans to push poorer young people into underpaid apprenticeships.

This report was designed to discourage young people from working-class backgrounds from going to university. Instead, they want to lure as many as they can into Rachel Reeves’ bullshit Youth Guarantee. Because they’re much more useful to the right-wing overseers if they’re uneducated and ‘happy’ to barely survive on scraps in low-paying jobs.

The ruling class know that the easiest type of pleb to control is an uneducated one, and they want as many of those as possible. After all, one rule for our kids, and another rule for theirs.

Featured image via the Canary