Jobless and jaded, it’s no wonder grads are turning to the extremes for answers
More than a quarter of 18-34 year olds have a positive view of fascism, well over a third view communism positively, and views of rule by “a military strongman with no government or elections” are net positive. Ominous new polling from Onward and Merlin Strategy reveals just how far young people are willing to go to change a political system that is not only broken, but often seems to actively be working against them.
But is it really any surprise that young people are yearning for radical change? They have been let down by consecutive Conservative governments content to tinker at the edges while the system crumbled around them, and are now faced with a feckless Labour government, paralysed by internal divisions, bereft of an ideological spine, and catatonically standing by while its hollow attempts at reform disintegrate on impact with reality.
A desert of opportunity stretches out before Britain’s graduates
While Westminster flounders, real wages have stagnated since 2008, even as rents and house prices continue to soar. Those lucky enough to have found a job must choose between spending half of their income renting a tiny flat with five other people or burning it on long commutes from their parents’ homes in the sticks. But for the unemployed graduate, the situation is even bleaker: there is no mirage of home ownership flickering on the horizon — just darkness, and the suffocating pull of economic and cultural quicksand.
A desert of opportunity stretches out before Britain’s graduates, AI is cannibalising entry-level jobs, close to 100,000 jobs have disappeared in the hospitality sector alone since the NIC hike, and an influx of overseas workers is squeezing them out of both graduate and part-time roles. According to The Telegraph, more than 630,000 of them are now claiming universal credit, twice as many as those who “failed” their GCSEs by getting grades D-G, equivalent to grades 1-3 in the new grading system. Until earlier this year, I was one of them.
I knew landing a graduate job wouldn’t be a walk in the park, but I thought I’d at least be able to find something — even if it was part-time or unpaid. It wasn’t as if my CV was blank — I had a first-class degree from a top ten university, relevant work experience in the field I was looking to go into, and I’d been fairly involved in volunteering both on and off campus. I co-founded and helped lead a non-profit initiative while at university, organising events attended by hundreds of people, securing speakers, and managing relationships with external funders. I naively thought that this would be enough to get me an interview at Tescos.
Many retailers seemed to operate an unofficial no-graduates policy, preferring to hire cheaper 16–20-year-olds, as more often than not I would get an automated rejection soon after applying. Still, at least applying to retail jobs was quicker than graduate schemes and internships, which almost always required painstakingly tailored cover letters, several writing tasks, and weeks of waiting. I had more success with the latter, often reaching the final stages, but pouring hours into the application process and preparing for several rounds of interviews, only to be rejected, — or more often, ghosted entirely — made me feel as if the whole world wanted me to just give up and claim UC or PIP for the rest of my life.
In 2023, half of UK graduates spent over 6 months searching for a job after graduating and this is about how long it took me. In March, after close to 150 applications and weekly trips to the Job Centre, I was overjoyed when I found out I’d been offered what was pretty much my dream job with Onward, although I did have to explain to my job coach what a think tank was. I won’t be paying my student debt off anytime soon, and owning a home still seems like a pipe dream but it’s a huge relief to finally be moving in the right direction.
It’s not just arts degree students, or those at former polytechnics studying so-called “mickey mouse degrees”, that are struggling anymore. I have friends with degrees in Biomedicine, Physics, and Economics from Russell Group Universities that have been job searching for over a year. A friend with a 2:1 in Biomedicine recently applied for a high-street sales assistant position; he was one of over 500 applicants and nearly 50 candidates invited to the group interview. He did not get one of the two available vacancies. Another friend with a Physics degree is stuck on one shift a week at a high-street retailer because they are overstaffed.
It is so bleak in my hometown of Milton Keynes, where there is a surplus of young people, that there are TikTok videos about how job postings for the OneStop, a corner shop chain, are being inundated with applications seconds after being posted. The comments speak volumes: “I’ve tried everything and still nothing, I don’t know who [in] MK is hiring at this point” , “Theres no way, I literally applied for that job” and “very soon you’ll need [an] Oxford degree just to work [in] Tesco”.
Many of my friends now say they wish they hadn’t gone to University at all; they feel like they were sold a lie. And is it any wonder? The average graduate starter salary is now only 30 per cent higher than the national minimum wage; in 1999 it was 115 per cent higher. Many graduates now come home to see those who failed their A-Levels sitting on salaries greater than the entry-level roles they’re applying for, with two or three years of wages already banked. Meanwhile they are left with the crushing burden of student debt looming over them and the fading hope that their degree will eventually pay off — provided AI doesn’t take their job first.
So why did they go? No matter how many pensioners in Telegraph comment sections witter on about the trades, the pressure on young people to go to university remains overwhelming. Teachers and parents still see university as the be-all and end-all of social mobility, the ultimate marker of success, whether that university is Oxford or Wrexham. A teacher I know worked in an inner-city school where fewer than a quarter of pupils received a strong pass in English and Maths, yet many were pushed toward university, regardless of whether they were scraping Cs, Ds, and Es or enrolled on BTEC courses.
These deep-rooted expectations, particularly among the parents of the 38 per cent of secondary school pupils from ethnic minority backgrounds, will not change overnight. And they aren’t the only ones that need convincing. There is a distinct whiff of do as I say, not do as I do among the upper middle-classes demanding others forego university; ask them what their own children or grandchildren are doing and most of them will proudly tell you that they are going to university because they’re “smart cookies”.
The truth is that the UK is producing too many graduates, without enough graduate jobs to go round
Blair’s target of getting 50 per cent of children to go to university has made it the norm rather than the exception, so for many, not going is now seen as a failure. A well-paying graduate job is viewed similarly. Even if you can miraculously convince “Ophelia”, who studied History of Art at Edinburgh, to spend two to four years retraining as an apprentice electrician alongside 18-year-olds on the minimum wage, she’d still be in thousands of pounds of debt, three years older than her fellow apprentices, and convinced she’d failed in life.
The truth is that the UK is producing too many graduates, without enough graduate jobs to go round. Peter Turchin, a historian — who specialises in patterns of civilisational collapse, calls this phenomenon elite overproduction and identifies it as a catalyst behind societal disintegration across history. The Taiping Rebellion, history’s deadliest civil war, ultimately erupted when the number of elite aspirants taking China’s civil service exam massively exceeded the number of official posts. The rebellion’s leader was Hong Xiuquan, a repeatedly unsuccessful exam candidate, and he rallied those like him: young, educated, resentful young scholars who felt the social contract had been broken and only radical action could fix it.
The UK may not yet be on the verge of civil war or rebellion, but Blair has created a powder keg. With no hope of a home, a family, a decent job, or a future, increasing numbers of graduates are seeing red. When polling shows that young people hold net positive views of absolute monarchy, communism, socialism, and military rule then it starts to feel like less of a question of if, and more of a question of when. 60 per cent of 18-30 year olds think that the job market will only get worse. If the state cannot even provide graduates with a part-time job, it shouldn’t be surprised when they start to think about burning it down.
